Does hack-n-slashing desensitize us to violence?

[Celebrim]

In other words, the salient point was that hack-n-slash gaming engenders prejudicial thinking, which makes it easier to hold such prejudices in real life.

Of course, I still think that's a load of bunk, myself.

I'm going to guess without looking that the guys politics are very far removed from my own so I'd normally be disinclined to provide him any support. On the other hand, everyone here seems to be providing an echo chamber so I'll go ahead and pitch my tent in his direction.

I think the answer to this question is it depends.

I tend to find that fantasy games tend to reflect the existing biases and beliefs of their creators and often have plot lines and themes which - usually unintentionally - are designed to help inculcate those beliefs in themselves and others. But very rarely are those beliefs and biasees literally something obvious like racism, and since the game reflects a wholly different set of beliefs and biases it would be surprising if a wholly unrelated belief arose from it. I would find it even more surprising if a belief that the game creator was highly unsympathetic to arose unwilling in response to playing a game.

However, I think there is some merit to the argument that how you RP can effect how you view the world. Role Playing is and was after all, long before the term was associated with gaming, a form of pyschotheraphy and a form of training which was very much designed to alter the way people behave in real life. I know that on occasion I've played characters where my emersion into the character and use of method acting techniques ended up subtly altering my out of game behavior.

So while I would be surprised if RPing ended up altering or basic beliefs, I would not at all be surprised if RPing could be used to reinforce more strongly something we were initially sympathetic to. I wouldn't be too surprised if people began to use the evidence of a fantasy game as additional evidence in favor of what they already believed.

You see this sort of argument being advanced by opponents and detractors of the D&D alignment system in virtually every thread where we argue alignment. And I've seen a lot of people who seemed to make the argument that this sort of behavior in the game which could be translated into real world behavior was 'good' on the basis of the evidence that their character was 'good'.

Moreover, while every violent imagining need not necessarily be practice for committing real violent deeds, violently imagining things can in fact be mental practice for committing real deeds of violence. I don't think it is very common in gaming first because I rarely see groups that are comfortable with lingering over vile and violent details, and because ultimately PnP games are far less viceral aids to violent imaginings than much of the media that is available, but I do think it can happen. In fact, I think the fact that most groups implicitly or explicitly discourage dwelling on certain details of the game world, and in fact get very uncomfortable when these unspoken rules are breached, indicates that there is very widespread acceptance at the unconscious level that there are some topics which are unhealthy to dwell too much on. Maybe they won't explain themselves in the same terms, but typically when they do explain themselves, I find the terms ("I just don't feel comfortable...") amount to much the same thing.

I think it is very much possible to have a sociopathic game table that encourages sociopathic violence in its participants. But, I seriously doubt that any table is going to be comfortable with the resulting game unless a bit of that prediliction is already present in the participants.

Nonetheless, I wouldn't allow my children to game with a group unless I was very familiar with the people involved and the sort of game they were running. The odds of a conversion to a set of beliefs different than your existing ones increases with the impressionablity of the person involved and with the number of peers you have that are accepting of the environment (this latter is not something that adults are immune to).

 

[Quickleaf]

All you eastern United States people, so serious... What?

[MENTION=8461]Alzrius[/MENTION] Do you have a link to the blog you read?

 

[S'mon]

Looking over the responses that this thread has gotten so far, I think that I did a bad job of explaining in my original post what the blog I read was positing.

The author wasn't saying that fictional violence caused real-life violence. He was suggesting that it made gamers less sensitive to it.

More specifically, he was suggesting that getting into the mindset that certain types of creatures deserved death - or at least, less consideration - led to people adopting that same attitude towards typifying groups of people in real life.

As an example, according to that author's logic, thinking "Oh, it's just a goblin. Should we even bother talking to it or just kill it and move on?" teaches that same player to think along the lines of "Oh, that person's a [ethnicity/nationality/political party member/etc.]. Do I even want to talk to them, or just move on and hope that they get killed somehow?"

In other words, the salient point was that hack-n-slash gaming engenders prejudicial thinking, which makes it easier to hold such prejudices in real life.

Of course, I still think that's a load of bunk, myself.

IME it's more common for players & DMs to bring real-world morality into the fantasy world - "We should talk to the Orcs and try to reach a mutual understanding".

Also, in D&D etc Humans, including all RW ethnicities, get classed as a 'Good' race, who you don't Genocide. So RPGs may make players *less* likely to go out and commit genocide!

Edit: I think this goes back to Tolkien, and applies even to bad-guy humans - "Kill the Orcs, they're Evil, but let the Easterlings & Southrons go, they're just misguided" seems to be the standard attitude of the Good Guys.

 

[Zhaleskra]

S'mon's response may explain why "races you can kill with impunity" breaks my suspension of disbelief. Perhaps we are bringing modern, real world morality into the games, and in my case I'm tired of the "people who are okay to kill" mode. I'm sure that's not an answer Alzrius was looking for. As early as 3.0 D&D, "Always <insert Evil Alignment here>" didn't really mean "always".

I have a friend who stated one of his reasons for playing RPGs as "it's illegal to kill people in real life", and yet I would not classify his play style as hack and slash, in either player or GM role.

 

[Alzrius]

[MENTION=8461]Alzrius[/MENTION] Do you have a link to the blog you read?

I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to post a link, since I didn't want to make it seem like I was saying "hey, this guy's wrong! Everybody, let's tell him how wrong he is!"

 

[mach1.9pants]

No, a ridiculous assertion.

And I would happily eviscerate and strangle with their own intestines anybody who said that to my face!

 

[Relique du Madde]

Um no.


Saying "I'm rolling to hit the orc with my club" is not like watching someone beat a person with a baseball bat or actually doing that yourself.

Also, its why geeks who play bard fail at seducing women unless they you know actually have seduced a woman before.

In other words, don’t confuse fantasy with reality.

 

[Quickleaf]

I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to post a link, since I didn't want to make it seem like I was saying "hey, this guy's wrong! Everybody, let's tell him how wrong he is!"

I guess common courtesy would be to ask the blog owner?

My " spider sense" was telling me there is more to the picture than meets the eye (i.e. than your translation of the blog) which is why I ask. "All orcs are evil encourages prejudice against minority ethnicities and religions" seems pretty far fetched. However, "Some orcs are good made a player confront and question his real life prejudices" no longer seems quite so bizarre.

Its all about context and perspective. Such seemingly ridiculous assertions often have a certain logic of their own, so I try not to dismiss them out of hand.

 

[Celebrim]

Um no.

Saying "I'm rolling to hit the orc with my club" is not like watching someone beat a person with a baseball bat or actually doing that yourself.

No, I don't think it is. But that's not the argument is it? The argument is that playing a game where most problems are resolved with violence will lead you to be more likely to see real world problems as having a violent solution. Or alternately, the argument is that playing a game were their is no need to interact with the 'the other' except through violence (and no profit in doing otherwise) can lead one to classifying real world groups as 'the other' in the same manner.

I'm not saying I agree with the argument necessarily, at least in that simple form, but even if the argument is wrong it is not trivially wrong. You can't dismiss that argument by saying its self-evidently wrong, then throwing around a few strawmen, and expect to convince anyone.

Also, its why geeks who play bard fail at seducing women unless they you know actually have seduced a woman before.

Speaking of strawmen, here's a second one in as many sentenses. One of these things is not like the other. It's fairly obvious that imagining violence won't make you good at violence because there is some sort of skill that needs to be practiced. But its not obvious that imagining violence has no relationship at all to desiring violent things. Equally so, it's fairly obvious that actually seducing a woman has nothing in common with saying, "I make a seduction check, and add my +14 bonus." It should be fairly obvious that there might be a relationship between the act of imagining seducing a woman and desiring to seduce a woman.

In other words, don’t confuse fantasy with reality.

This is good advice. But it's especially good advice if there is any possibility that if you did confuse fantasy with reality, that it would result in you being desensitized to violence.

 

[S'mon]

Um no.


Saying "I'm rolling to hit the orc with my club" is not like watching someone beat a person with a baseball bat or actually doing that yourself.

Also, its why geeks who play bard fail at seducing women unless they you know actually have seduced a woman before.

Although IME the guy who's embarrassingly bad at seducing women is also embarrassingly bad at playing a Bard, *sigh* - I know a lot of people disagree with me strongly, but personally I really don't like playing with players (or DMs) who cannot roleplay their characters, when it comes to basic verbal interaction. It just sucks out all the fun from the game, for me. I cut DMs a bit of slack, as they have tons of NPCs - the occasional cool NPC makes up for a lot of cardboard.