Learning war no more

 It used to be the case that the psychological studies seemed to indicate that video games didn't cause violence. I guess that they were mainly showing that there was not a direct causal link. But I had always thought that it wouldn't be a direct link, rather it would be creating dispositions and habits of thought -a 'mentality' as I expressed it, more likely to result in violent attitudes and in turn attitudes would be more likely to foster behaviours. The obverse side to that would be that by funding our imaginations so heavily with responses of violence and aggression, we are failing to develop a repertoire of reactions and attitudes that could lead to non-violent outcomes, defusing tension, reconciliation etc.


So, yet more research has been added to the more recent discoveries in research that indeed the intuition I (and others) had is broadly correct. So:

Children who repeatedly play violent video games are learning thought patterns that will stick with them and influence behaviors as they grow older, according to a new study. The effect is the same regardless of age, gender or culture. The lead researcher says it is really no different than learning math or to play the piano.

Life lessons: Children learn aggressive ways of thinking and behaving from violent video games, study finds -- ScienceDaily:

 Of course, we now have a problem: the earlier directly causal research now inhabits a broad public perception of the matter so there's a culturally significant attitude that we don't have to worry about violence in computer games or on television because it doesn't cause violence and it might even be cathartic. So we have a challenge to reverse that now that we know better: we have to try to get the attitude changed to one of 'garbage in, garbage out: violence in gaming trains us in violent reactions and attitudes'.



Then, what we've got to do is find ways to develop games that are engaging, 'fun' and credible but which 'train' us in conflict resolution and fund imaginations for non-violent reacting. I wonder if anyone is trying to do that?