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The original classic book "Psycho-Cybernetics" -Dr. Maxwell Maltz is based on the theory that our brains can't tell the difference between reality and a vivid i

The original classic book "Psycho-Cybernetics" -Dr. Maxwell Maltz is based on the theory that our brains can't tell the difference between reality and a vivid imagining of an event. So true. I urge you to buy and read the original--not the Dan Kennedy version.

1337biz 7y ago
I like the idea. But I always wondered to what extend this holds up. Rigorously followed wouldn't that imply the old argument that playing brutal games makes people more brutal in real life?
- spinach 7y ago
  Watching movies makes people want to be like what they see, why isn't it true for video games? Because it is. Obviously not everyone is going to become violent just because they play realistic violent games but it certainly inspires a subset of people to do so. It puts the idea in their head and they begin to imagine doing it. From thoughts, to words, to action.
  - reificator 7y ago
    > Watching movies makes people want to be like what they see, why isn't it true for video games? Because it is. Shouldn't we be banning slasher flicks then? When I was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street as a kid, I never once thought "I wish I could murder people in their dreams with a glove full of knives." Study after study refutes your unsubstantiated claim, so the burden of proof is on you here.
- otakucode 7y ago
  Not necessarily. There is always a balancing act done when looking at something like a game. How much of the game are you going to accept as "they are processing this as reality" and how much of it are you going to throw away and assume the player is not processing as reality? In most cases, those who want to see games as dangerous assume, with zero justification, that the player identifies all digital characters as full human beings - but every single aspect in which those characters differ from human beings is totally ignored. Why some aspects, like mortality, ability to feel pain, desire to retain property, would be assumed by the player to be identical to reality, yet the ability to respawn, the lack of friends, family, society, ability to speak, etc should be completely ignored is never explained. It seems entirely self-serving. Ignore the obvious profound flaws and disproofs of any actual claim in the argument, and simply rely on a dumb vague emotional association between concepts to trick people. It's a grossly unethical and intellectually bankrupt discussion in most cases. If the player entirely buys into the reality of the game, then every character not killed was brought to life by the player. Creation of life must be given equal weight to ending of life, shouldn't it? And what lives are these? Mindless drones typically walking eternally in a loop. No family. No friends. No change. It is a desperate hell if considered reality. And the polygonal structure, the low resolution textures, all of those technical limitations, those have to be being processed as reality too, right? (If not, why not?) What consequences does that have? How about the altered physics of the game world? Shouldn't players have great difficulty simply getting around if they accept the physics in games and attempt to act in the real world in accordance with them? Games draw an awful lot from film. Film is an artform that laces together absurd lies and unreality into an experience that the audience can accept as 'real.' It's a very fascinating subject. If you take a camera, and you point it at two people having a fightfight, do you know what the response of the audience will be? 'Meh. Doesn't seem real.' But instead add a musical track that didn't exist in reality, add cuts in perspective that are impossible for any body/brain/eyes combo to accomplish, take out the meat-slapping sounds of landing hits and substitute in recordings of snapping celery and carrots, and blammo, the audience is on the edge of their seat saying "now that was a REAL fight." Except, of course, no, it wasn't. It is precisely because it bore so little resemblance to actual reality that it worked and the audience were able to maintain their willful suspension of disbelief. The audience is engaging conceptually, but not viscerally. Games crank that up even further. And they do such a good job of it that is causes us language problems. When people talk about games, they talk about the concepts as if they are real. It is primarily the analysts of games that are least capable of dealing with them in any capacity aside from accepting the concepts as real, while ignoring the real material facts of them. It's like they're so totally un-real and there is so obviously no question at all of their unreality that people just ignore it and proceed on a level of "but what if their CONCEPTS were real and people couldn't tell the difference? Not people like me, of course, but maybe worse people, like young people!"
- RaceWon 7y ago
  > playing brutal games makes people more brutal in real life? After a fashion. I mean you would have to imagine that game as though it was IRL and it was actually you who were in it. Now add in what you saw, thought, smelled and tasted, mix in with that actual hatred of the enemy and the euphoria of victory... than yeah, that shit would work.
  - reificator 7y ago
    > > playing brutal games makes people more brutal in real life? > After a fashion. I mean you would have to imagine that game as though it was IRL and it was actually you who were in it. Now add in what you saw, thought, smelled and tasted, mix in with that actual hatred of the enemy and the euphoria of victory... than yeah, that shit would work. Or it self selects for people willing to "play" those games. I just picked up the Hotline Miami collection for Switch and started playing for the first time. It's an ultra-violent top-down game that tries to have you question your own motivations. It's a fun game with good mechanics, so I've been enjoying it. If it were 2060 level VR in first person with Smell-o-Vision and hyper-realistic graphics, I wouldn't be playing it at all.
    - RaceWon 7y ago
      > I just picked up the Hotline Miami collection for Switch I just want to turn this 180 degrees for a second. Imagine yourself having created The App of 2020. It's a social site that has had so many downloads and signups that the web version went down in the third week. You've been front page on HN 4 times since your launch and techcrunch and Wired have been hounding the shit out of you for an interview. You actually had to buy a burner phone because your regular number is currently under siege. Wall Street is already talking about the IPO and Sequoia Capital has actually Sent People to You because they are dying to write you a 9 figure check.... Imagine that. Are your palms sweating? ...because mine are as I type this.
      - reificator 7y ago
        I can confirm that in that case I would not pick up the phone and murder everyone at the address given. Hypotheticals like this are always hard. An honest answer is that I don't believe I would, no. But until you're in that situation, you don't know for sure.
- chillacy 7y ago
  We train pilots in flight simulators, with advancement in VR could we train soldiers in war simulators?
em-bee 7y ago
this also plays into memory and why we can have false memory about events that never happened. because we can't tell the difference.

1337biz 7y ago

I like the idea. But I always wondered to what extend this holds up. Rigorously followed wouldn't that imply the old argument that playing brutal games makes people more brutal in real life?

spinach 7y ago
Watching movies makes people want to be like what they see, why isn't it true for video games? Because it is. Obviously not everyone is going to become violent just because they play realistic violent games but it certainly inspires a subset of people to do so. It puts the idea in their head and they begin to imagine doing it. From thoughts, to words, to action.
- reificator 7y ago
  > Watching movies makes people want to be like what they see, why isn't it true for video games? Because it is. Shouldn't we be banning slasher flicks then? When I was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street as a kid, I never once thought "I wish I could murder people in their dreams with a glove full of knives." Study after study refutes your unsubstantiated claim, so the burden of proof is on you here.
otakucode 7y ago
Not necessarily. There is always a balancing act done when looking at something like a game. How much of the game are you going to accept as "they are processing this as reality" and how much of it are you going to throw away and assume the player is not processing as reality? In most cases, those who want to see games as dangerous assume, with zero justification, that the player identifies all digital characters as full human beings - but every single aspect in which those characters differ from human beings is totally ignored. Why some aspects, like mortality, ability to feel pain, desire to retain property, would be assumed by the player to be identical to reality, yet the ability to respawn, the lack of friends, family, society, ability to speak, etc should be completely ignored is never explained. It seems entirely self-serving. Ignore the obvious profound flaws and disproofs of any actual claim in the argument, and simply rely on a dumb vague emotional association between concepts to trick people. It's a grossly unethical and intellectually bankrupt discussion in most cases. If the player entirely buys into the reality of the game, then every character not killed was brought to life by the player. Creation of life must be given equal weight to ending of life, shouldn't it? And what lives are these? Mindless drones typically walking eternally in a loop. No family. No friends. No change. It is a desperate hell if considered reality. And the polygonal structure, the low resolution textures, all of those technical limitations, those have to be being processed as reality too, right? (If not, why not?) What consequences does that have? How about the altered physics of the game world? Shouldn't players have great difficulty simply getting around if they accept the physics in games and attempt to act in the real world in accordance with them? Games draw an awful lot from film. Film is an artform that laces together absurd lies and unreality into an experience that the audience can accept as 'real.' It's a very fascinating subject. If you take a camera, and you point it at two people having a fightfight, do you know what the response of the audience will be? 'Meh. Doesn't seem real.' But instead add a musical track that didn't exist in reality, add cuts in perspective that are impossible for any body/brain/eyes combo to accomplish, take out the meat-slapping sounds of landing hits and substitute in recordings of snapping celery and carrots, and blammo, the audience is on the edge of their seat saying "now that was a REAL fight." Except, of course, no, it wasn't. It is precisely because it bore so little resemblance to actual reality that it worked and the audience were able to maintain their willful suspension of disbelief. The audience is engaging conceptually, but not viscerally. Games crank that up even further. And they do such a good job of it that is causes us language problems. When people talk about games, they talk about the concepts as if they are real. It is primarily the analysts of games that are least capable of dealing with them in any capacity aside from accepting the concepts as real, while ignoring the real material facts of them. It's like they're so totally un-real and there is so obviously no question at all of their unreality that people just ignore it and proceed on a level of "but what if their CONCEPTS were real and people couldn't tell the difference? Not people like me, of course, but maybe worse people, like young people!"
RaceWon 7y ago
> playing brutal games makes people more brutal in real life? After a fashion. I mean you would have to imagine that game as though it was IRL and it was actually you who were in it. Now add in what you saw, thought, smelled and tasted, mix in with that actual hatred of the enemy and the euphoria of victory... than yeah, that shit would work.
- reificator 7y ago
  > > playing brutal games makes people more brutal in real life? > After a fashion. I mean you would have to imagine that game as though it was IRL and it was actually you who were in it. Now add in what you saw, thought, smelled and tasted, mix in with that actual hatred of the enemy and the euphoria of victory... than yeah, that shit would work. Or it self selects for people willing to "play" those games. I just picked up the Hotline Miami collection for Switch and started playing for the first time. It's an ultra-violent top-down game that tries to have you question your own motivations. It's a fun game with good mechanics, so I've been enjoying it. If it were 2060 level VR in first person with Smell-o-Vision and hyper-realistic graphics, I wouldn't be playing it at all.
  - RaceWon 7y ago
    > I just picked up the Hotline Miami collection for Switch I just want to turn this 180 degrees for a second. Imagine yourself having created The App of 2020. It's a social site that has had so many downloads and signups that the web version went down in the third week. You've been front page on HN 4 times since your launch and techcrunch and Wired have been hounding the shit out of you for an interview. You actually had to buy a burner phone because your regular number is currently under siege. Wall Street is already talking about the IPO and Sequoia Capital has actually Sent People to You because they are dying to write you a 9 figure check.... Imagine that. Are your palms sweating? ...because mine are as I type this.
    - reificator 7y ago
      I can confirm that in that case I would not pick up the phone and murder everyone at the address given. Hypotheticals like this are always hard. An honest answer is that I don't believe I would, no. But until you're in that situation, you don't know for sure.
chillacy 7y ago
We train pilots in flight simulators, with advancement in VR could we train soldiers in war simulators?

em-bee 7y ago

this also plays into memory and why we can have false memory about events that never happened. because we can't tell the difference.