Few people are going to link this story about the Norwegian terrorist responsible for killing 77 people at a youth summer camp, with this story about how video games affect men's minds.
So I'll link them for you because it's relevant. Sure, they're separate seemingly unrelated items but they are worth examining together to understand our times, the Internet, and the Wired State.
The game industry and the geek universe in general fight vigorously and viciously to disclaim any research indicating that violent video games have any negative effects on people, or that they can cause people to become violent in real life.
If you claim they do, you will be accused of advocating censorship and the Net-Nanny State or worse, get pizza delivered to your home unasked or your web site hacked. There is nothing more violent and ferocious than young male geek gamers insisting on their right to play violent video games, while claiming your moral or psychiatric or legal concerns are irrelevant.
Oh, wait, yes there is: the game company and their geek developers who make a profit and a living from video games who hate anything that might undermine their bottom line. This is an industry with billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of customers and they lobby really hard for their interests so you will not win. For example, if there is a scholarly conference on gaming, the companies will make sure to donate to it or sponsor speakers or cover costs or supply panels of experts or loyal professors in order to prevent anyone from taking too harsh and critical view of what video games are and what they do.
So, first, the Norwegian killer -- we went through weeks of frenzy while all the lefty pundits declared his atrocity and crime against humanity to be caused by...right-wing bloggers in the United States. Or creepy nationalist groups in England or Germany. Or Christianity and its history of the crusades. There was an ENORMOUS amount of stuff in this light and I recall making some notes to try to counter some of it but didn't find the time, and I felt that some kind of period of mourning should pass.
I remember a colleague wrote a rather pious blog with a title like "An Ordinary Terrorist" to imply that hate movements, right-wing belief systems, fundamentalist Christianity, etc. in combination with the Internet were producing this new sort of monster like the Norwegian fanatic. I was going to write a blog titled "An Extraordinary Terrorist" to illustrate how there were other factors at play in bringing this person to commit such a horrendous crime and that his obsessive writings in fact didn't even contain the references to American bloggers or even Jesus Christ such as to find some credible linkage between these figures and terror against other human beings, and that in fact there isn't the correlary that you might think. And among the points I wanted to mention was his war-gaming and desensitization to human suffering in this fashion.
Oh, I'm a very big believer in the idea that online affects offline, and that simulations don't end at the log-off. I've seen far too much of it around Second Life. But I do think you have to examine the correlations closely and concede that it's a percentage, not a blanket situation. Funny how so many people were willing to believe that Breivik could get insensed and kill people because he read...Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs, a stridently anti-Islam conservative blog. Yet they couldn't wrap their mind around the idea that maybe he shot people because he had been practicing to shoot people virtually for thousands of hours and had killed thousands of virtual people.
Interestingly, the furor died down about the Norwegian. The atrocity, as awful as it was, fell out of the news, to be replaced by the conflicts in Libya and Syria and whatever other issues attract people of conscience. After the memorial services in Norway, people stopped speculating and just let the investigation continue quietly
Now the preliminary examination is concluded and after 36 hours and 13 meetings, two psychiatrists have pronounced Breivik not fit to stand trial by reason of insanity and recommended that he be incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
This finding still has to be reviewed by a court and there may be opposition opinions.
But despite having said earlier that Breivik might be sane because he seemed to plan his murders so methodically, the psychiatrists are now saying he is delusional.
And, given that he thinks he is a commander with an avenging mission against Muslims and leftwing parties in Norway, in a movement consisting evidently of just one person, himself, and maybe a few sketchy links to some networks of haters, he does seem delusional.
The question is how somehow who can make preparations for murder, i.e. buy fertilizer and various chemicals over the Internet, study maps and approaches and timing, etc. and then coldly execute murders of so many people, could be out of touch with reality. Usally people who are crazy can't do things like drive a car.
I can only submit that maybe we don't know everything that can be known about the modern forms of crazy, and maybe one of those variables is the new ways in which video games affect brains.
Breivik was an active player of online and offline war games and this can be seen on his Facebook page and from other evidence. In these games, you endlessly kill other humans or beings remorselessly, and if you yourself are killed, you just respawn eventually or take a potion and get back in the game.
Dr. Yang Wang, a radiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, and colleagues divided healthy men who were 18 to 29 years old and not frequent players of violent games randomly into two groups. One group was asked to play a shooter video game for 10 hours over the course of a week and to refrain from playing the game for a second week. The second group was instructed not to play any violent video games at all over the two-week period.
All of the study subjects had functional magnetic resonance imaging tests at the beginning of the study, after one week and at the end of the study. The analyses showed that at one week, the game players had less activation in parts of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control than they had at baseline, and than the control group. Activation increased again after the second week, when the men didn't play the game.
Yeah, I'm sure the Giga Om and Massively and Reddit lolbertarians and others are all fiercely disputing this like they often dispute the connection between online child pornography or simulation of child pornography in a world like Second Life and offline crimes against children. No matter. Law-enforcers and psychiatrists find the connections in practice and work toward remedies.
Just because your brain changes doesn't mean it changed for the worse, but if the areas affected are things related to "emotional control," maybe you can start to wonder about creating generations of people without remorse, who don't feel empathy for another's suffering.
I remember reading years ago in all the child development books popular in the 1990s that there was a window for establishing empathy. There was a certain time period in a toddler's life, say, 18 months or 32 months, when they realized that the green peas that they were rapturous about, for example, were not something that other people liked, even if they squished some right on their face. Or that they didn't like getting sand thrown in their eyes or a bop on the head from a shovel anymore than the toddler himself did. The lightbulb goes off during this phase and people develop empathy -- or it doesn't. Maybe it never has a chance to go off when a child is constantly plunked down by TVs or now even ipads or videos or distracted babysitters and never has an adult interacting with him in real time and shaping his impressions and providing feedback.
Apropos of early infant brain development: The other day I saw Laura Rozen, a columnist who used to be at Foreign Policy and is now on Politico write something awful on Twitter. I thought about responding to her because it really bothered me, but then got busy with something else. Today, I see she's deleted the tweet from her feed. It was a late-night parental frustration tweet that she was trying to deliver as something satirical and funny.
It went something like this: "Violated the number one rule for getting a toddler to go to bed, made eye contact." I can't find it even in Google cache now, it was 2 days ago or so.
I remember thinking, Good Lord, Laura. I realize you're an uber-important politico blogger and all, but geez, you can't nurture your child at night? You can't spend 30 minutes putting him to bed and reading him a story and *making eye contact*? You'd rather tweet than do that?
And if he gets up even at 11 pm because something's bothering him, you can't make eye contact and hold him and sing to him? Really? You really think that *not* making contact and leaving him to cry in his room is going to work?
These early years don't repeat. Can't you just invest in them now so society doesn't have to deal with a psychopath down the road?
No doubt as a professional upper class woman she does all the right things with her kid and maybe even stays at home and makes cookies. But I found that "don't make eye contact" tweet just...chilling. It wasn't funny to me.
As for the Norwegian killer, maybe what video games do for people already predisposed to looniness is make them develop skills. Enable them in fact to exercise executive function and have routine memes like "shooting" become mechanical expertise that kicks in even when they are so crazy they might not be able to drive a car somewhere. Maybe that's how it works?
I can only keep asking these questions. I think there's a link. I don't pretend there's an easy one to establish, or that all players of violent videos then go out and commit crimes against humanity. But some do, and even one such monster is one t0o many.
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