Does hack-n-slashing desensitize us to violence?

[ExploderWizard]

The obvious answer here is yes, of course it does. Back in the good ol pre 20th century days before all these violent forms of media existed, such as rock music, TV, movies, and rpgs people lived very peaceful tranquil lives and wouldn't dream of hurting anyone. War, violence, and even rude behavior are ALL products of our immoral society. Why if we went back to the way things were prior to the industrial revolution then I'm certain world peace and harmony would soon follow.

 

[Mallus]

Do I think there's any realistic risk of D&D turning someone into a genocidalist, a school shooter, a drug dealer, a burglar, or the like? Absurd.

Whew! That's a relief. Our current Savage Worlds pulp sci-fi game features a serial polygamist (a space Valkyrie on a quest for 77 husbands), a tween who cooks up addictive drugs (she's also the ship's engineer), and a genocidal robot (though only if you're a sentient, anthropomorphic weasel).

It's good to know we're not being desensitized to... that stuff.

Playing as a sociopath can be fun without any risk of it seeming like an actually preferable existence.

I think I'll have this made into a little plaque and hang it in my living room during game night.

 

[Havrik Stoneskimmer]

This is an interesting topic, and it's great to see a lot of nuance here.

I can kind of see both sides. I can imagine a group of immature teenagers or young adults using D&D (or other RPGs) as a way of indulging violent or destructive urges. Not in a "release valve" sense, but in a sense that the activity is creating a positive feedback effect on these urges. I don't think those people are necessarily any more likely to be violent, but I don't know that it does any good for their personal character to stoke those kinds of feelings.

But that's one type of gamer, and I've frankly met very few of them in my life.

Now to speak for myself. I'm practically a pacifist. If I was running the country the military budget would be slashed in half, all of our overseas forces would return home to guard our borders and assist in natural disasters, and our all of our nuclear weaponry would be dismantled.

So you might not think I would be a fan of games like D&D. But that's the whole point of fantasy: to be able to pretend to have an exciting adventure that you wouldn't actually want to have in real life. I do narrate combat in D&D, so there is a degree of "your crossbow bolt hits him square in the forehead and he dies instantly", but I try to keep the violence level at a sort of Indiana Jones feel. It's over the top and we don't dwell on the more visceral aspects of it. We generally play a heroic game battling against the forces of unambiguous evil (although even there, if you really deconstruct the genre you can consider that even evil masterminds have families that love them, and the mooks are just doing their job - but that kind of analysis does not make the game more fun for me).

Basically, I don't feel there is any inherent problem with D&D or violence in movies, provided the player/viewer has the maturity to clearly separate real life and fantasy. I wouldn't be inviting children to play D&D until I was confident that they understood the nature of "pretend" at a reasonably sophisticated level (depends on the child, but maybe at 8 or so?).

 

[Elf Witch]

The obvious answer here is yes, of course it does. Back in the good ol pre 20th century days before all these violent forms of media existed, such as rock music, TV, movies, and rpgs people lived very peaceful tranquil lives and wouldn't dream of hurting anyone. War, violence, and even rude behavior are ALL products of our immoral society. Why if we went back to the way things were prior to the industrial revolution then I'm certain world peace and harmony would soon follow.

I often read responses like this when I read articles on the subject of desensitization to violence.

Back in the past people made a fun day of watching people being put to death in some pretty horrible ways. A hanging was a time to get together and bond with your neighbors.

A family outing in Roman days was to the arena where human being often suffered horrible deaths.

It was a much more violent time in a lot of ways then now. Not saying mankind still doesn't engage in violence but a lot of things considered acceptable back then by the majority of people are not anymore.

For example executions of prisoners is a highly debated topic a lot of countries have disallowed it and in most where it is still done there usually is not a party atmosphere around it.

As I said before I do think it is a possibility that being exposed to a lot of fictional violence and real world violence may have the effect to cause some people to become desensitized to violence. Not to become violent themselves but to develop more of tolerance to it being okay.

 

[pawsplay]

Again, and this goes for all your less pleasant examples of what RPGs might inspire as well, someone natrually inclined to be a cellist might first try out being a bard.

why? And is this significant? All that establishes is that real world stuff might influence gaming stuff, not vice versa.

Not that the experience of a DnD bard and RL cellist are that much alike.

D&D anything and real life tend to be dissimilar.

In fact, let me throw this out there. Human beings are not very good at analogies. Research has been done that shows that in order to use an analogy, you usually have to point out that they should do so. Even to the extent stuff in an RPG is analogous to real-life stuff, it's very unlikely pretend actions are going to influence specific kind of real-life actions unless the context is made to appear similar.

 

[pemerton]

It was a much more violent time in a lot of ways then now. Not saying mankind still doesn't engage in violence but a lot of things considered acceptable back then by the majority of people are not anymore.

For example executions of prisoners is a highly debated topic a lot of countries have disallowed it and in most where it is still done their usually is not a party atmosphere around it.

As I said before I do think it is a possibility that being exposed to a lot of fictional violence and real world violence may have the effect to cause some people to become desensitized to violence. Not to become violent themselves but to develop more of tolerance to it being okay.

I wanted to respond to this, while remaining within the constraints of board rules.

I tend to agree with the last paragraph - and also with what Celebrim was saying earlier in the thread. I'm not sure that the relatioship between artistic and cultural materials, and individual and social attitudes, is necessarily a strictly causal one - but some form of signficant correlation seems conceivable to me.

There is a view among some scholars and commentators, for example, that the tendency of the cultural products of certain societies to focus on violence in a distinctively heavy fashion, is not unnrelated to the incidences of violence in which members of those societies engage, either individually or collectively.

Whether or not this view is true, I agree with what Celebrim said upthread - it is not obviously false.

 

[mxyzplk]

I think the basically untenable position people are taking is that engaging in roleplay doesn't affect you to some degree. That effect is the entire point of roleplaying, at least until RPGs were invented!

Outside the scope of RPGs, role playing is primarily a training tool, utilized specifically because of its strengths in that arena, both didactically and discovery-oriented. As a result it is probably a little naive to insist that it certainly can't have *any* effect.

There's some good articles in the newest International Journal of Roleplaying that talk about this, especially "Immersion as a Prerequisite of the Didactical Potential of Role-Playing" and the part on "drift" in "Stereotypes and Individual Differences in Role-playing Games." There are a lot of good references there which can point you to other sources that discuss this effect.

If you roleplay to teach people to negotiate effectively, it works. Those techniques become internalized. What besides wishful thinking is the justification for saying no undesirable modes of thinking can be internalized from it?

 

[pawsplay]

I think the basically untenable position people are taking is that engaging in roleplay doesn't affect you to some degree.

Is anyone defending that position?

 

[Hungry Like The Wolf]

I don't think so. Stylized violence is usually enjoyable or entertaining because its so fake and absurd.

It might desensitise in a way, to stylized violence but put any gamer or movie goer in a real fight and I doubt they'll feel any less distressed by the experience because they played lots of hack-n-slash games.

 

[BenBrown]

If you roleplay to teach people to negotiate effectively, it works. Those techniques become internalized. What besides wishful thinking is the justification for saying no undesirable modes of thinking can be internalized from it?

The thing about this is: if you're role-playing negotiation, while the person you're negotiating with might be a fictional construct and the things you're negotiating about don't actually exist, you're still more-or-less negotiating and the actions you take are very similar to actual negotiations.

If you're role-playing violent acts, the actions you are actually taking are not particularly violent. You're talking (and possibly marking things off on sheets and rolling dice). It's more like writing a violent scene in a screenplay. I don't think I've ever come across a claim that people who write screenplays for violent movies are desensitized to violence.

Yes, role-play can affect you to some degree, but with entirely abstract actions, the influence is pretty small. If RPGs are enough to desensitize you to violence you've obviously got other issues.