Jake

Idle Thumbs 176: The Classic Alien Form

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I suppose I don't agree that sexism in games normalizes sexism for many. I think it's a problem because it's too prominent, but you have to think of all of the men who grew up with games employing these tropes and aren't sexist.

 

Those men don't exist. Everyone has some degree of internalized sexism, both men and women. This is at least in part because of the cultural representations that taught them about gender roles, not limited to but definitely including games. Some people are just more aware of their internal biases than others.

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I'm not a big gamer but have a son who is, so I try to keep up on things going on in the gaming world. I loved this podcast and love Anita's videos. I have a few thoughts about things discussed in the podcast and here in the forums.

 

I am interested in that Pride & Prejudice card game, it seems to do a good job of making a mockery of high society and courtship of the period. Although I got the feeling that Anita didn't particularly take to that theme, I'm not sure if it was because the concept is gross or it just didn't do it very well.

 

I thought the same thing about the Pride & Prejudice game. Maybe this is too obvious to state but: I think the premise was to give players some idea of what it would be like to be a woman in that society - the things one had to do to try to get ahead and the limits place on women. How even if you do everything "right," much of your fate is completely out of your control.

 

Regarding the issue of profiting from (or merely distributing) racist, sexist and other entertainment products that capitalize on and/or perpetuate harmful stereotypes and behaviors:

Most of the discussion here seemed to focus on who controls and profits from such content. This necessarily brings up issues of copyright and sometimes trademarks. I agree that repackaging and distributing such works by the companies that created and made huge profits from them is wrong. It makes it a little better if the company presents it with a disclaimer regarding the offensive content and if any profits are donated to worthy causes. But it is still asserting control, is probably mostly about managing the company's reputation, and does nothing to address the profits and consumer goodwill acquired through the work's original run. Nor does it address the profits they still make from the theme park rides based on these works. If the law works the way it should, such works are fair game for critiques (like Antia's videos) and other transformational uses. Unfortunately the law is not always clear about what sorts of uses are or are not fair uses.

 

For public domain works, the control issues are largely absent. This is one reason the copyright term should be shorter than it is. With a shorter copyright term, more works would be subject to critical transformations that use large portions of the original, like DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation (a brilliant remix of D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation), without fearing a lawsuit from well-funded rights-holders. In the end, I think that access to such works is important for historical documentation and research as well as for subversive, critical uses that tell the horrible truth about the so-called good old days. This can be tricky when some still see those depictions as the good old days and not horrible at all. But uncritical recycling of such things as entertainment (especially content directed at children) is rightly criticized and there is nothing wrong with shaming, boycotting, etc., any company that does so. If there is no government prohibition, it is not censorship - it is citizen action.

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Those men don't exist. Everyone has some degree of internalized sexism, both men and women. This is at least in part because of the cultural representations that taught them about gender roles, not limited to but definitely including games. Some people are just more aware of their internal biases than others.

 

Yeah, I would also say such women don't actually exist. Everyone's sexist, you combat it by becoming aware and trying not to let it influence you too much.

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You don't "do" sexism in games. In fact, many if not a majority of the examples cited by Anita in her tropes videos are actually totally passive to your experience whether that is through cutscenes or through set dressing.

Not necessarily, while not produced here, there are many games in hentai dating sims available in Japan. Or even worse, Rapelay, should you be so inclined.

 

I don't think that video games cause school shootings or anything, but I believe quite strongly that the ubiquity of violence in video games is central in building a world and a worldview where a protest about a cop shooting a black teenager is met with more cops pointing more guns in people's faces. They help to build a world in which the "correct" response to ISIS is a bombing campaign. People don't see other people on the news or on the streets doing stupid sexist, racist, or violent things and call a spade a spade in a large part because they've played tons of video games and watched tons of movies and read tons of news articles where attitudes of acceptance and quiescence towards such things are depicted as the normal and rational response.

That's the thing, I refuse to believe any of this is more than a product of our culture. The product of war and what you are speaking of dates thousands of years before our centuries old deluge of media we are all used to now. Blackface cartoons are a product of a country in flux after century or so before where the race was thought of as animals and enslaved. War, racism, and sexism are so intertwined in the history of humanity, that I prefer to see the changing of media to be more including and respectful to others as more of a document of our progress as a species. Just changing what the media contains will probably not solve much wrong with the world. I mean if we are saying all of this reinforces the attitude of the Gamer's Gate types, I doubt any availability of the content they desire is going to change who they are.

 

But I think I'm just going to agree to disagree at this point.

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Not necessarily, while not produced here, there are many games in hentai dating sims available in Japan. Or even worse, Rapelay, should you be so inclined.

 

I honestly have far less problem with things that are explicitly transgressive. If the idea is that you're doing terrible things because you want to explore them, that's, to me, a lot less gross than exploring them in a way that tries to make them somehow not terrible. To bring it back around to violence, one of the studies I read when I was researching the effects of violent media observed that the kind of violent portrayal that was most likely to instill violent worldviews in young children was violence that is shown as bloodless, just, and without emotional or physical consequence -- in other words, exactly the kind of 'sanitized' violence we feed them.

 

I have zero qualms about games that own their violence and portray it realistically, but those which try to frame their violence as justice, as the only reasonable course of action, bother me.  The same goes double for rape: If someone wants to play/make a game about rape where it's explicitly transgressive and terrible, I think that's a lot fucking better than a game with 'soft' rape where the girl falls in love with her rapist afterwards because she just needed a little 'pushing'. The fact that, as with the above example, it's the former that tends to outrage people, while I think the latter is just as prevalent and far more offensive in its worldviews, is something that will never stop bothering me.

 

That's the thing, I refuse to believe any of this is more than a product of our culture.

 

it's a chicken and egg kind of thing. I mean, to a fairly large degree the art we produce is our culture: I don't think it's a matter of one influencing the other to be sexist, I think it's both symptom and cause. By addressing sexism in the art we produce, we are fairly directly influencing the opinions of what is and isn't okay in our culture. Did we stop putting racial caricatures in our cartoons because it was no longer acceptable, or did we become less accepting of racial caricatures when they disappeared from our cartoons? I don't think you're wrong that it's primarily the former, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the latter at all. To claim so would be to say that art has no impact on culture, which seems to me to be doing a grave disservice to art.

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But if you use that same argument against violence in games or media, you could say it acclimates everyone to a world where violence and murder exists and is valid. If you take out the factor that violence in media can lead to violence and instead just acclimates them, I think you'd see in general no one in the United States is okay with general violence or murder whatsoever. Especially with the outcry of all of this police brutality lately yet media has been more violent and gruesome than ever in the past decade. I just don't personally see how effects of violence in games is not supposed to correlate with sexism or racism in games just because violence is an action. Just a weird point was glossed over there. Sexism and racism are not just ways of thought, but are also definitely actions that can be carried out via shunning, exclusion, use of abusive language, theft, and violence.

 

To me it seems like we are all talking about a cause and effect issue except we aren't talking about a cause and effect issue. I don't think I can personally compartmentalize that one deviant social behavior can be affected or reinforced by media but another cannnot.

 

The difference here is that there doesn't exist a world outside where it is acceptable to murder people. Not the same can be said of sexism.

Also, they are different in that one is a merely a representation of an action, while the other is a way of presenting things that enforces beliefs. Depictions of violence aren't the problem in the same way that depictions of sexism aren't the problem. It's not about the fact that male heroes are being sexist, it's about the fact the hero is always male.

 

 

e: I'm not saying that depictions of violence in media isn't a problem. It's just that they are contextualized by their message. The message is the problem. Having the main character heroically kill nameless enemies enforces an us vs them world view, but doesn't enforce a worldview where you can just go around killing people.

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That's the thing, I refuse to believe any of this is more than a product of our culture. The product of war and what you are speaking of dates thousands of years before our centuries old deluge of media we are all used to now. Blackface cartoons are a product of a country in flux after century or so before where the race was thought of as animals and enslaved. War, racism, and sexism are so intertwined in the history of humanity, that I prefer to see the changing of media to be more including and respectful to others as more of a document of our progress as a species. Just changing what the media contains will probably not solve much wrong with the world. I mean if we are saying all of this reinforces the attitude of the Gamer's Gate types, I doubt any availability of the content they desire is going to change who they are.

 

But I think I'm just going to agree to disagree at this point.

it's a chicken and egg kind of thing. I mean, to a fairly large degree the art we produce is our culture: I don't think it's a matter of one influencing the other to be sexist, I think it's both symptom and cause. By addressing sexism in the art we produce, we are fairly directly influencing the opinions of what is and isn't okay in our culture. Did we stop putting racial caricatures in our cartoons because it was no longer acceptable, or did we become less accepting of racial caricatures when they disappeared from our cartoons? I don't think you're wrong that it's primarily the former, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the latter at all. To claim so would be to say that art has no impact on culture, which seems to me to be doing a grave disservice to art.

 

Yeah, I tend to agree with Problem Machine. Art in particular and media in general are important vehicles for the expression and transmission of culture, in addition to being products of it. One doesn't trump the other. If they don't have the power to shape people's thinking at all, then I'm not really sure I understand their function as cultural objects. But yeah, agree to disagree.

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Ah okay, sorry one more response. The amount of media one can consume now is ridiculous compared to art in the long past which was often times just religious symbols and books for most of the years. I can't imagine culture will every be trumped by the media in which a culture creates, should they even create media. Some cultures create almost nothing of artistic worth, some create billion dollar industries on it. I just don't think art alone will change anyone unless there are seeds planted in the culture to do so, but then what leads to that type of stylistic change other then a change in culture anyway? And also if media or art is an expression that can change minds, then it should lead that it can create harmful ideas and therefore needs censorship.

 

I suppose I still maintain if I am to agree with what you guys are saying, which is a perfectly logical way of thinking, then I can't possibly separate the motivation for violence that media should have if it also has the same motivation for sexism. Yet studies have shown again and again that violent video games don't lead to violence (apparently, I don't know all of the studies, this is just what people say). Maybe some studies should be done on Japanese game players and the otakus with their hentai games? Seems like a prime place to start if we are to do any measuring. Otherwise to me this is all arguing the abstract.

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Ah okay, sorry one more response. The amount of media one can consume now is ridiculous compared to art in the long past which was often times just religious symbols and books for most of the years. I can't imagine culture will every be trumped by the media in which a culture creates, should they even create media. Some cultures create almost nothing of artistic worth, some create billion dollar industries on it. I just don't think art alone will change anyone unless there are seeds planted in the culture to do so, but then what leads to that type of stylistic change other then a change in culture anyway? And also if media or art is an expression that can change minds, then it should lead that it can create harmful ideas and therefore needs censorship.

 

I suppose I still maintain if I am to agree with what you guys are saying, which is a perfectly logical way of thinking, then I can't possibly separate the motivation for violence that media should have if it also has the same motivation for sexism. Yet studies have shown again and again that violent video games don't lead to violence (apparently, I don't know all of the studies, this is just what people say). Maybe some studies should be done on Japanese game players and the otakus with their hentai games? Seems like a prime place to start if we are to do any measuring. Otherwise to me this is all arguing the abstract.

 

What exactly is culture outside of the attitudes and ideas expressed in various forms? You keep writing as though art and media are byproducts of culture, but in the main they are culture. They're both cause and effect, because culture is self-referential and self-perpetuating. Attempting to intercept and divert the cycle here is as valid as attempting to do the same in some other way.

 

Also, we don't censor people for having harmful ideas, which would be thought crimes, unless those ideas are shown to lead directly to harmful acts against a given group of people, in which case they're hate speech and then are censored currently. Not to mention, it isn't even a given in our culture today that sexism is really that bad, so I doubt this is a useful line of argument for us.

 

Finally, I posted three links to academic articles about sexism and video games, albeit in America, that I found after just ninety seconds of googling. It's more or less proven that there is a strong correlation between consumption of sexist media and expression of sexist attitudes. Of course, you could say that sexist media is entirely self-selected, so only sexist people consume it, but that runs counter to my personal experience of media. It seems much more likely, although not scientifically provable without a massive number of studies and meta-studies, that it's a two-way street, like the cycle mentioned above, in which case the best way to address sexism in culture and society is to have a strong criticism of sexist works and sexist attitudes.

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Because you can have a culture that is disinterested in creating any kind of art, but you can't have art without a culture. But yes, I do believe media is a teaching tool. It's such circular logic though because then how can you easily identify an anime game where you tear people's clothes off as hate speech and not an expression. I'm not really saying what I need to say correctly because I'm just fucking it up by muddying it up with the argument others are making and have made. Now I'm all confused. Sorry.

 

But I saw your links with sexism studies, but the sample size of the first is 175 people and the second two I would have to buy to see. I don't feel like any kind of research has been done on a broad scale as violence in video games. I also just can't see why violence is to be separated from sexism as something to be influenced by media. You made the argument that violence is perpetuated (or at least accepted) by violence in media but others have said the opposite and the studies everyone cites says the opposite. It was consistently argued otherwise last year when all of the Sandy Hook stuff happened. This is still the problem I have with what was brought up on the podcast. Sexism and violence can't be linked as because the latter is an action.  I just can't get behind that because I feel like both are actions.

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Because you can have a culture that is disinterested in creating any kind of art, but you can't have art without a culture.

 

I saw your links with sexism, but the sample size of the first is 175 people and the second two I would have to buy to see. I don't feel like any kind of research has been done on a broad scale as violence in video games. I also just can't see why violence is to be separated from sexism as something to be influenced by media. You made the argument that violence is perpetuated (or at least accepted) by violence in media but others have said the opposite and the studies everyone cites says the opposite. It was consistently argued otherwise last year when all of the Sandy Hook stuff happened.

 

I am not aware of any cultures that do not also create art. Can you point them out to me? I mean, I know about cultures with art that fails to conform to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western theorists' definitions, but the idea of a culture that has no impulse to create any music, literature, images, or objects is so bizarre as to be unbelievable to me. What form of culture could exist without any of these things? What would it even look like?

 

Also, I'm not saying violence is perpetuated by violence in the media. I'm saying acceptance of violence is perpetuated by the media. Like I said before, there is a huge difference between "violent media caused Sandy Hook" and "violent media caused people to accept Sandy Hook as 'just something that happens.'" You can't say the latter isn't true at least in part, because who's still talking about Sandy Hook? Who's still talking about Elliot Rodger, for that matter? We've accepted and subliminated their effects with zero substantive change as a society. How else can violence be normalized and accepted like that in modern society, besides through mass communication creating (a mostly artificial) consensus on its relevance and application?

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I don't know of any, it was a dumb thing to say anyway.

 

On the latter, I still think of both Elliot Rodger and Sandy Hook as major events where media was argued over, but I guess that's just me and not the reporters. I suppose I chalk it up to more of a problem with the news corporations.

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I am not aware of any cultures that do not also create art. Can you point them out to me? I mean, I know about cultures with art that fails to conform to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western theorists' definitions, but the idea of a culture that has no impulse to create any music, literature, images, or objects is so bizarre as to be unbelievable to me. What form of culture could exist without any of these things? What would it even look like?

 

I realize that this is likely a purely rhetorical question, but the Pirahã people of the Amazon fit the bill. They have a rudimentary sense of spirituality that drives them to make necklaces to serve what they perceive as a practical purpose, but otherwise seemingly neither produce nor understand any artistic expression of any kind. At the risk of being hella fuckin' racist, I've hypothesized for a while that their brains might be physiologically differently from ours, because they seem physically incapable of certain forms of abstract thought or imagination. They seem to be of extremely limited understanding of concepts like quantity, colour, tense, and gender. They have no religion, no agriculture, no history beyond immediate oral history, and no social or political hierarchy. They also don't apply skills that they've been taught that would be invaluable to them, like building canoes or preserving meat. Wittgenstein once said "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him," and this is exactly the sort of phenomena he was referring to. This shit is fascinating to me.

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That's amazing!

 

That Wittgenstein quote always makes me think of Thomas Nagel's essay, What Is it Like to Be a Bat?. Though technically I guess it's more concerned with refuting reductionism, I think it's a pretty succinct expression of the progressive inaccessibility of subjective experience; in other words, the more different a being's experience of the world, the less available it is to us.

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I realize that this is likely a purely rhetorical question, but the Pirahã people of the Amazon fit the bill. They have a rudimentary sense of spirituality that drives them to make necklaces to serve what they perceive as a practical purpose, but otherwise seemingly neither produce nor understand any artistic expression of any kind. At the risk of being hella fuckin' racist, I've hypothesized for a while that their brains might be physiologically differently from ours, because they seem physically incapable of certain forms of abstract thought or imagination. They seem to be of extremely limited understanding of concepts like quantity, colour, tense, and gender. They have no religion, no agriculture, no history beyond immediate oral history, and no social or political hierarchy. They also don't apply skills that they've been taught that would be invaluable to them, like building canoes or preserving meat. Wittgenstein once said "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him," and this is exactly the sort of phenomena he was referring to. This shit is fascinating to me.

 

I'm trying to be better about only asking questions when I actually want an answer, not just to call someone out in a particularly embarrassing way, so I'm glad you actually had something to give me.

 

I'm especially glad because this is challenging my concept of what a culture is. According to that Wikipedia article, the Pirahã have very little of what I would consider a culture. They have no history, no religion, no social hierarchy, no art, no interest in economy and technology, and little interest in abstract thought, even extending to "basic" things like numbers or colors. The anthropological linguist who studies them believes that even their pronouns are a recent borrowing from another language. I certainly agree that they probably don't have art, but it almost seems to me that we could say just as certainly that they don't have a culture, beyond a shared ethnic and linguistic identity that seems entirely focused on survival skills. That sounds hella fuckin' racist too, because it's generally accepted that "culture" is a feature of all intelligent creatures, but... I don't know. Maybe it's like Peter Watts' Blindsight and it's only a feature of really self-indulgent ones, which just happen to be intelligent most of the time.

 

I'm not sure how this relates to how culture can or cannot perpetuate sexist or violent attitudes, except to show how deeply our cultural pervades our perceptions and how spare a society looks if it has a noticeably less complex culture.

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I realize that this is likely a purely rhetorical question, but the Pirahã people of the Amazon fit the bill. They have a rudimentary sense of spirituality that drives them to make necklaces to serve what they perceive as a practical purpose, but otherwise seemingly neither produce nor understand any artistic expression of any kind. At the risk of being hella fuckin' racist, I've hypothesized for a while that their brains might be physiologically differently from ours, because they seem physically incapable of certain forms of abstract thought or imagination. They seem to be of extremely limited understanding of concepts like quantity, colour, tense, and gender. They have no religion, no agriculture, no history beyond immediate oral history, and no social or political hierarchy. They also don't apply skills that they've been taught that would be invaluable to them, like building canoes or preserving meat. Wittgenstein once said "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him," and this is exactly the sort of phenomena he was referring to. This shit is fascinating to me.

 

To be fair, most of that can be explained by them really disliking the anthropologist and trying to get rid of him by being extremely terse and/or facetious. "No, we don't have words for different quantities. No, I have no idea what that picture depicts, nor, in fact, what words like "picture" and "depict" mean. Yeah no, please, have some more - we don't even believe in hunger. No, we have no written or oral history that you could take a look into. When did you say they are going to pick you up again? On that spin-ny thing? No, these necklaces symbolize nothing or serve any aesthetic purpose - they are purely practical. Take it, please."

 

In all seriousness, though, Pirahã culture is pretty fascinating.

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Ugh, so this equivalence of violence and sexism in games is really bothering me. The thing about violence in video games is that it is not violence: it's a depiction of violence. It can be realistic, glorifying, gratuitous, trivializing, etc.

The difference with sexism is: sexism in games is sexism; not just a representation of it.

 

Essentially, violence in a game is to violence in real life as sexism in Anita's videos is to sexism in games. A view onto the thing as to the thing itself.

If sexism in games causes more sexism is thus a question akin to does violence cause more violence.

 

Of course, the whole issue is a great way to derail the conversation.

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Oh, shit. I came here to post that exact thing and skimmed through nine pages of this thread to make sure no one had said it. Then I skipped to the end and saw your post. Anyway, that's the simple answer: violence in video games is fake violence while sexism in video games is actual sexism.

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In what way is Leisure Suit Larry, Rapelay, or Senran Kagura real? If you are talking about the depictions by the writers in terms of the attitudes concerning what they are writing and how it's on display in things like the latest video Anita has put out then of course that is real as it is the creative attitudes of real people. Far Cry 3 is written from a completely sexist perspective and Far Cry 4 is probably racist, I agree. But there are so many games where you are commiting acts of sexism like oggling the character in some kind of camera or theatre mode, manipulating women to sleep with you in the case of every Japanese dating sim or Leisure Suit Larry game ever, or clicking on and bouncing boobs and touching thighs in the case of games like Policenauts or Dragon's Crown. In those examples the game is putting that stuff at the forefront as a system or integral part of the game, not just using sexism as window dressing for an open world or an overwhelming attitude in the story.

 

But then to go back to Far Cry 3, considering your final choice depends on you slitting the throat of your girlfriend to continue to tame the native woman by having sex with her, while there is a violent action involved, that overtly speaks of committing an act of gross sexism by just being completely abusive to women in multiple ways.

 

And then what about FPSs that try to be war simulators? Still not real, but they are attempting realism. Is there not a visceral reaction there?

 

If the problem is there are too many games that normalize sexism then you could easily rattle off the amount of games that normalize violence. As I said earlier many critically acclaimed games over the past two decades have you starring at a gun the whole time, yet we are supposed to see Deus Ex, Half Life, and Bioshock as these amazing depictions of story. Almost all of the major AAA games with heralded stories have you killing the shit out of a ton of people and we just accept it as is.

 

Then you compare Grim Fandango and it sticks out in the adventure game space because it is one of the few adventure games where end of the story requires you to intentionally seek out and commit murder to win.

 

I don't have all of the answers and in so many ways I agree with Gorgomongous and I actually sort of think maybe the studies on violence in video games not leading to violence are maybe not so accurate. If a game can teach you positivity and community like some studies have also shown, then why can't it teach negative behaviors as well? I just don't see how it's that simple to compartmentalize the deviant subject matter of choice at all.

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I was a mathematician in college, so I think in the form of equations. For the purposes of these comparisons:

 

Violence (an action) /= sexism (an attitude)

 

Violent attitudes = sexism (also an attitude)

Violence (an action) = sexist actions (such as rape, spousal abuse, and tons of other nasty things.)

 

Just because violence (the action) in video games /= violence in real life does not imply that violence in games /= violent attitudes in real life.

Just because spousal abuse in video games /= spousal abuse in real life does not imply that spousal abuse /= sexist attitudes in real life.

 

Similarly, violent attitudes in games (rare, since these attitudes are usually followed up with video game violence) may cause violent attitudes in real life (just listen to CoD voice chat some time.)

and, sexist attitudes in games may cause sexist attitudes in real life.

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Sometimes the disconnect between the narrative and the depiction or mechanical game play of violence bothers me.  And other times it doesn't.  When it doesn't, I think I see it as more analogous to singing in a musical -- the same way it's not weird in a musical when a person sad from the loss of family member bursts into song, I accept that clicking on people repeatedly is going to be the make up of what happens in an FPS regardless of the narrative.  

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Also, I'm not saying violence is perpetuated by violence in the media. I'm saying acceptance of violence is perpetuated by the media. Like I said before, there is a huge difference between "violent media caused Sandy Hook" and "violent media caused people to accept Sandy Hook as 'just something that happens.'" You can't say the latter isn't true at least in part, because who's still talking about Sandy Hook? Who's still talking about Elliot Rodger, for that matter? We've accepted and subliminated their effects with zero substantive change as a society. How else can violence be normalized and accepted like that in modern society, besides through mass communication creating (a mostly artificial) consensus on its relevance and application?

 

I think this Onion article demonstrates your point pretty effectively.  These horrible violent tragedies happen in the U.S. and we all freak out about them for a bit, but then we just kind of shrug our shoulders and move on, and accept this sort of thing as "normal."  But you only have to look to other parts of the world to see that it isn't normal at all.  And whatever reason people want to point to as why these things are more common in the U.S., whether it's lack of support for people with mental illnesses, or gun control legislation, or people's attitudes towards violence in general, all of these things are a direct result of our culture, and the media that we produce and experience makes up a huge part of what defines our culture.

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