Nerd Rage :
@Iconic
The US Court of Appeals does not agree.

Except he’s still right insofar as his examples extend. Priming is the sort of thing they teach in intro-level psych courses alongside the various forms of conditioning and other basics.

Which isn’t to say that video games will cause premeditated violence. It also isn’t to say that they will cause any level of violence unless your friend attempts to stunlock you in the school cafeteria, in which case you may go apeshit.

There is a reason why chinese gold farmers are prominent in RMT. It’s the same reason why most, if not all, of your electric appliances and your kids toys have “made in PRC” (“made in china” started to be synonimous of “defective product” so they revamped it).

It’s not about race it’s about a huge country with 1+ billion people working for bowls of rice.

The US Court of Appeals does not agree.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a3GUPkag7aDg&refer=us

“None of the research establishes or suggests a causal link between minors playing violent video games and actual psychological or neurological harm,” the court said today.

For what it’s worth, I do not agree either. I won’t argue that exposure to violence can make people more confrontational, I won’t even argue that exposure to violence makes people more inclined to favor a violent solution, those are probably true statements, but to claim it actually makes them more likely to carry out a violent act is a stretch. There’s a pretty significant leap from saying “I’m gonna kick his ass” to actually going over there and kicking his ass.

Unless these studies allowed people to physically assault one another, the verbal response that they’d do something violent to solve a problem is meaningless. Maybe they think they want to, but when it comes time to actually do it they will (most of the time) realize they were wrong. There are other studies that demonstrate the psychological resistance (most) people have to carrying out an act of violence.

Edit – link did not show the first time

Iconic :
@Daniel
The problem is that the few studies done so far do in fact support the “common sense” theory that acting out violence in fantasy correlates to violent behavior in general.

Does this mean, since I play a healer in WoW, I’m more likely to want to aid people in need? If you play a tank, are you more likely to want to protect people? The solution, clearly, is to make Ulduar require 14 healers, 10 tanks, and 1 dps class, preferably the moonkin variety — because really, how dangerous can overgrown owls standing in moonlight and starlight be? Then we can start conditioning our children appropriately!

The problem is that the few studies done so far do in fact support the “common sense” theory that acting out violence in fantasy correlates to violent behavior in general.

It’s a well known fact that the human brain can easily be “primed” through the unsophisticated use of language or images. Show some one pictures of happy people and when you ask them how they feel a short time later they are far more likely to say that they are happy. Show them violent images and when you ask them how they’d react or solve a problem, they are more likely to specify a violent response. The same thing plays out in actual behavior.

It is not a rational behavior– people don’t generally perceive that their behavior is linked to these “priming” images or ideas, as they are not acting on a conscious thought pattern. It’s simply the way the human mind works– the mind easily moves along paths it has recently tread.

This does not mean that Counterstrike causes some kid to shoot up his school. Obviously there are a lot of other things going on when some one makes a conscious decision to plan and execute a homicidal rampage that have little or nothing to do with weak sub conscious thought priming.

Not only is this vaguely racist, it’s also wrong. The Gold Farmers on North American Servers play on said NA Servers run by Blizzard themselves, or they wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. Any actual Chinese Gold farmers operating on North American Servers will not be affected by this, since the accounts they use are from North American servers run by Blizzard, not The9.