Should violent video games be banned?

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iMisterH

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Hey everyone!

Figured I'd start a debate here. The topic of this debate is in the title: Should violent video games be banned? This is a very popular topic and I'd like to hear what you all have to say about it.

In my opinion, I think violent video games should not be banned. They are given a mature rating for a reason and they are a legitimate means of entertainment for mature people. There are violent movies and books out there, therefore it would be illogical to ban violent video games.

What are your thoughts?
 
Bans are the final form of censorship, and most often Politicians that look to ban games, are really only doing it to make a point. You also have self serving research into the effects of "Video Game Violence", in which they only look for biased facts, instead of giving something an open mind. an example of censorship to make a point; when Frank Zappa spoke against that political group led by Al Gore's wife, Tipper Gore, on banning certain songs from radio play, from stores, etc. His latest album in that period was given a "Warning: Explicit Content" label despite the album being entirely instrumental.

I believe banning violent video games is pointless, since you'd have to look at violent movies and violent books. You really can't be biased towards violence in one form of media over the other.

if I might add, I'm not bloodthirsty and want to "keep mah gaems bludfursty and violunt lol" because of the sake of violence, no. Personally, I believe that if a developer goes "Wait..this is too violent, lets tone it back" They have all the right to do so, and not by someone else's command.
 
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I absolutely do not believe that violent video games should be banned. Yes, I do think that sometimes they may cause some teenagers to feel they are invincible (but what teenager doesn't think that), or may prompt them to make bad choices. But if you look at any school shootings, the things that most of them had in common are: mental illness, possible bad home lives, and bullying. Drugs, alcohol, and violent video games play a bad combination with the three things mentioned above. Too much blame is put on violent video games, since video games don't tell people to pick up a gun and kill people. Video games are inanimate objects and possess to actual ability to do so. Besides, most teenagers below age 17 should not be playing such games anyway. They are mature for some reason or another, and like alcohol, people have to mature enough to be able to handle violent video games and what they mean. If parents are surprised that their kid was bullied, had a mental illness of some sort, and was involved in a lot of adult things, they really need to have a better eye on their child so that they don't end up hurting themselves or others.
 
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If violent video games should be banned, then logically speaking EVERYTHING violent should be banned. In the end we won't have anything violent anywhere except for in the real world (and on a black market for video games and entertainment) o.O Entertainment will be boring and the real world will be as messed up as usual, so what would that help? D:

Seriously though, I'm against pretty much any kind of censoring when it comes to fiction where no real people are harmed. Thus video games, movies and books can be as violent and cruel as the creator wishes them to be. Everyone should have the freedom to watch or not to watch, to play or not to play, to do or not to do (except for criminal acts), whatever they want. And censoring and banning doesn't really help. People will do it anyways, they will just be more sneaky about it. So it's better to just let it be in the open.

Plus, how the heck will I be able to play as wolverine and slice peoples heads off if they would ban violent video games? LET ME KILL PEOPLE LEGALLY DAMN IT!
 
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Liking the arguments so far! I always say to those who are offended by violent video games: If you don't like it, then don't play it. Simple as that.

Some people need to realise that video games, no matter how violent, are works of fiction. They're not real. It would be a real shame to ban a legitimate means of entertainment just to please a minority of people. As a video gamer, I enjoy violent video games. However, that doesn't mean I'm a violent person in real life.
 
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Obviously Violent video games should be banned, they promote sex drugs and- oh wait television does that too...
No, no! Slander Video games because it's changing, growing, at a faster pace than what we all thought 30 years ago, when it was restricted to what used to be known as geeks.

It's a dumb topic, It's like the whole "All video games over-sexualize women", or the "video games are the devil" argument. Some people just don't seem to like video games because it's not television, and you are actually controlling something and thinking for yourself rather than having it all be fed to you and almost literally rotting your brain most of the time. (Unless it actually teaches you, or uses complex but hilarious puns.) No, video games shouldn't be banned, but they'll always be someone that will think otherwise.
 
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A new study into the links between video games and violence has suggested that it is the difficulty of the game and not its content that leads to aggression.

Example: Flappy Bird.
The developer's brother was stabbed/murdered after he beat his friend's high score.

Do I think violent video games should be banned?
No.

My own opinion: I am a violent person given the right environment and circumstances.
But I don't go around beating people up and stabbing them.

Because I can just do that in a video game.

Dragon Age/GTA/Fallout/Saints Row/Far Cry/Outlast/Mortal Kombat = Stress reliever.
 
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Video games give an unrealistic sense of power, coupled with emotional distance. These two things are a poisonous combination that engenders anti-social behaviour of the worst kind. Free from real-life consequences, the gamer gets to repeatedly play out their sexualized murder fantasies, while continually reinforcing the notion that such perversities are within their means and beyond reproach.

Violent video games should be banned.
 
Nope. It's not the media's responsibility to do your parenting for you. If your kid's playing a game that's not appropriate for their age group, then maybe you shouldn't have gotten them the game, or if they borrowed it, allow them to play it. Of course, there's always going to be exceptions to the rule, and some kids have no problem handling mature rated games. When I was a wee kid (I think I was like 7 or 8), I got an N64 for Christmas with Super Mario 64 and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. Despite having (for it's time) quite a bit of graphic content, Turok failed to turn me into a miniature psychopath with behavioral problems and I still maintained good grades at school and rarely, if ever, got in shit.

I mean, if I were a dad now, I'd probably be more okay with my 12 year old kid playing Skyrim than say Mortal Kombat, because for the most part, the former is much more tame and not really super graphic. It's up to you, as a parent, to judge if your kid is capable of being mature enough to play a game or not. Anyone who blames society for the fact their kid turned out being a little shit because you caved and bought Little Timmy Gears of War and now he's hacking apart your living room with a chainsaw is shirking their own responsibility because they're fucking entitled assholes who can do no wrong.
 
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Nope. There is such a thing as a rating system. There is such a thing as reviews. A parent have all the tools possible to make a educated decision as to what to buy. I support a retailers right to take something off the shells however, becouse its up to them what they want associated to their brand. But that's SELF-REGULATION.
 
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violent-crime-vs-video-game-sales.png


Illogical. The only people who still argue to ban violent video games are the same kinds of people that want to ban vaccines. Simply put, there is utterly no coherent, rational reason, to ban violent video games. It would be more logical to institute an Australia-type gun control system, since they haven't had a single school shooting or guns-related mass murder since they instituted their gun control I would say it works.

Wait, right, America, gun control, dirty dirty communist logic. All hail America, the country of willfully ignorant xenophobes who hate prostitution but love pornography, hate violent video games but think it's okay for teenagers to use licensed firearms. Ahh... Land of the twelfth place in economic freedom...
 
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Of course not. The only viable arguments for banning violent video games are that they cause some kind of harm to society. As Brovo already pointed out with that graph, violence rates have actually been declining as video game popularity (including the violent ones, like the ultimately popular FPS genre) rises. Now, to be fair, correlation doesn't prove anything. What does prove things, however, is the mountain of psychological studies done on violent video games and how they affect aggression. The general consensus of those studies that have been peer reviewed and held up as not shoddy and biased garbage (and to be fair again, there have been biased garbage studies on both sides of the fence) is that there is no causal link between playing violent video games and increased aggression.

Violent video games have simply become a scapegoat, something people point at to blame violence on to remove their own culpability. The big thing to blame for youth violence before video games was metal music. Same exact thing there. The media and people in general refuse to acknowledge the massive mental illness problems that plague our society; this is not to say that the mentally ill are a plague, rather I'm saying that our horrendous treatment and portrayal of mental illness causes problems of a plague-like proportion. The common factor between those who commit premeditated acts of mass murder is not violent media, it's mental illness that was either poorly treated or not at all treated.

Unfortunately, the scapegoating will probably continue forever. It's much easier to point the finger and say "there, this thing is at fault!" than to have a real discussion about mental illness and how we deal with it as a society. The scapegoating also makes for better entertainment, and news media nowadays is more about attention whoring for views than about informing the public of what is really going on in the world. It's a fucking travesty.
 
Yes, we should ban videogames. We should also ban the act of breathing, since it was confirmed that all the murderers breath. It was also proven that 100% of the murderers come from the planet Earth, so we should blow it up.

But seriously, come on. Banning videogames? I don't know about the people who say this, but I don't really know any violent gamers, except so people who are really "fired up" by nature, not because he said "shit, that head blowing up in the game was so cool I have to try it in real life". After all the studies about the subject showing how much of a stress reliever videogames can be, I don't even know why this is so discussed anymore. Oh, wait. I do know! It's because people who say it don't give a shit to read/care about the studies and are always pointing a finger at something to say "that's what's causing all this violence".
 
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Brovo said:
violent-crime-vs-video-game-sales.png


Illogical. The only people who still argue to ban violent video games are the same kinds of people that want to ban vaccines. Simply put, there is utterly no coherent, rational reason, to ban violent video games. It would be more logical to institute an Australia-type gun control system, since they haven't had a single school shooting or guns-related mass murder since they instituted their gun control I would say it works.

Wait, right, America, gun control, dirty dirty communist logic. All hail America, the country of willfully ignorant xenophobes who hate prostitution but love pornography, hate violent video games but think it's okay for teenagers to use licensed firearms. Ahh... Land of the twelfth place in economic freedom...
Click to expand...
Expanding on this, they've found that the more violent video games are becoming a popular entertainment option, the overall crime rate has been on a steady decline, like Brovo's graph shows. The theory is that the games are, in essence, scratching an itch people have. People can satisfy deviant behaviour in a game, and since they're inside playing a game instead of being bored and in the wrong place at the wrong time where the temptation might arise.

Also, I can't find a non-biased source (lots of crazy ones, however!), but I seem to recall hearing from somewhere reputable a while back that violent crime rates in Australia had been higher after the gun ban, which I believe was 1996 to 1997 when it was implemented. Could be wrong. Might be worth looking into, because I'm inclined to think that violent crime rates don't really dip after a gun ban, and not because of the right-wing "IF WE ALL HAD GUNS, WE COULD PROTECT OURSELVES FROM THE BAD GUYS!" mentality that makes me face palm uber hard as a firearm owner who is more concerned about property rights than the idea of defending myself against harm. I just think that if somebody's violent, they're going to find another method to kill people in the absence of guns, like those Chinese knife rampages that were big in the news over the past year. Vast majority of law abiding gun owners won't ever see their weapons used negligently, and it's still gang members who are responsible for most shooting crime. Despite the number of mass shootings over the last 10 years, shooting crimes on the whole have been on the decline. It's just when awful shit happens, the media likes to make it sound like the sky is falling.

Anyways, not really meaning for this to be a thing about gun control or anything like that (I'm certainly not a zealot and I HATE most of the arguments the pro-gun lobby tends to use), I just wanted to point out that Australia's gun ban hasn't really been popular and their murder rates post ban are comparable to Canada's (save the Territories, which have all kinds of problems that would take eons to resolve), which is a pretty firearm-friendly nation.
 
I don't really think they should be banned ^ ^ ;;

Though my reasons will only have been restated~ (People have pretty much the same reasons I do )
 
Dervish said:
Also, I can't find a non-biased source (lots of crazy ones, however!), but I seem to recall hearing from somewhere reputable a while back that violent crime rates in Australia had been higher after the gun ban, which I believe was 1996 to 1997 when it was implemented.
Click to expand...
Watch and learn. Three parts. You'll see the madness of it pretty quick with John Oliver--he does it far better and funnier than I could. For instance, the guys who wrote the gun legislation in Australia... Were Conservatives themselves. (I think.) It wasn't some "crazah liburrall agendurrr~". Australia simply figured out "hey! When people don't have easy access to guns, they generally don't end up in the hands of people who will go on psychotic rampages with them! GEEZ!"
 
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Games with excessive graphic violence are great for blowing off steam when you have been pissed off by a game that is inherently frustrating. I have a few games in my Steam library that are seriously frustrating, and I always feel much more prone to punching someone's face after playing those rather than 'violent' games.
 
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