Judge blocks California video game law

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...yeah, like paintings and books!: You're right: Some people can be pulled into the situation so completely that they forget about reality entirely and are, for all pscyhological intents and purposes, the character performing the action. It happens to me all the time in books, music, and video games. I am an escapist, and actually actively seek opportunities to lose myself in some other fantasies. Oftentimes I don't even need alternative media, my own imagination is perfectly capable of expressing where I want to go and what I want to do, that I can't do in reality. Fight dragons? Fence contraband? Even get shot down in the skies of World War I and be forced to sneak my way back to friendly lines, only to be shot and captured within sight of friendly forces (or shot by friendly forces in a terrible case of mistaken identity)? Been there, done that. A wise man can travel further in his own mind than most do in their entire lives.

Psychological research says that simply imagining a task stimulates all the same areas of the brain as actually doing the task. This is not limited to video games, but encompasses books, paintings, radio... I'm sure you get the "picture", no pun intended.

Psychological research shows that murderers and rapists almost always imagined doing exactly what they were incarcerated for many, many times before actually committing the crime. Further, research shows that there are several things which must be undermined or undeveloped before an individual acts out on their ill desires.

Frankly, even if we make the assumption that video games are fundamentally different from movies, what we're seeing now can very easily be compared to the movie/television industry (which is widely considered to be at least a close cousin to the video games industry by art and ludology Ph.D.s). The desire to villify video games is almost exactly like the villification of anime in early-80s Japan, a reaction that began when a couple of guys went on a brutul campaign of rape and murder, and afterwards it was shown that they were obsessed with anime, hentai in particular. But the consequences nearly ended the relatively nascent industry.

Obviously, the anime industry survived, else there would be no Pokemon.

I won't claim to know whether the media comes before the psychological issues; I don't think we have any definitive research which shows that one causes the other, though they do tend to attract each other. Problems arise when people start dragging those issues into reality, no matter what the media is that expresses their disorders, and unless you want to declare something that the most advanced psychological research can't answer, it is wrong (and possibly hurtful to society) to simply declare that something should be completely banned, or that something is completely responsible for an entire class of phenomenon that far predates the art.

Of course people can be totally pulled into an imaginary situation, but there are deeper issues when a person goes "Hey, killing fictional demons in Doom was fun, now let's shoot PEOPLE in REAL LIFE!"; Posted by: IndigoDarkwolf Posted on: 12/22/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use