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I don't see a problem with this if there is demand. If anything, this is schools catching up with reality. Kids share their gaming experience with one another.

I don't see a problem with this if there is demand. If anything, this is schools catching up with reality. Kids share their gaming experience with one another. It is a social thing, and they've been using Twitch and Youtube to create alternative media choices for some time. Kids even stage up Roblox and Minecraft videos to tell stories and present shows. Still, I do think it's sad that the bro culture has completely erased every other kind of competitive video games. Most of our top competitive games (particularly those made in the US and Europe) replicate some of the worst aspects of human society. Lethal conflict, industrialized warfare, conflict over scarcity, imperialism simulators, and a view of science as a tech tree with resource unlockables. It's a fairly toxic view of the world and it taints a lot of kid's viewpoint of the world.

chrisco255 7y ago
Violence is entertaining on some level. Even cutesy games like Mario have him stomping on mushrooms and turtles and avoiding deadly obstacles. I've also heard it said that all good stories involve conflict. It's a part of human psychology for better or worse. It's why we watch sports. It's why we play video games. It's why dogs play fight. It's deeply embedded in our chemistry.
- learc83 7y ago
  Conflict doesn't require violence though. It's just that physical conflict is the easiest kind of conflict to represent.
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    It's also the easiest to fund, what with several western governments funding games that train basic tactical skills that mimic modern urban small-scale warfare.
    - learc83 7y ago
      The games you're talking about aren't particularly useful for training, their only real use if for recruiting. And the number of games being funded by militaries is so small compared to the size of the market, that it basically has no impact as far as ease of funding goes. That's not to say that violent games aren't easier to fund. As I said, they are certainly easier to make, easier to market etc...
- KirinDave 7y ago
  > Violence is entertaining on some level. Even cutesy games like Mario have him stomping on mushrooms and turtles and avoiding deadly obstacles. Sure, but so are lots of things. It's just a cultural artifact of the west's love and expectation of violent solutions to conflict that we glorify this activity over others. For example, a game of Go is surely a conflict between two people, but unlike a game of Overwatch or the like it involves a lot fewer guns, bombs, and patchy plots about world governments authorizing unilateral violence. > I've also heard it said that all good stories involve conflict. This is a cultural lens. Lots of stories don't have an external conflict and they can be great. You know what's a great example of this? The Moive Jacob's Ladder. It was about someone reflecting on their life with pride and regret, not actual conflict. People frame this, unsurprisingly, as "Man vs Nature". But we might as well also define it as "Human Overcomes Hardship." And that line seems much more natural. Surely much of our hardship is inflicted by our peers, but is it a deliberate "versus" scenario? I suspect not.
  - learc83 7y ago
    >Sure, but so are lots of things. It's just a cultural artifact of the west's love and expectation of violent solutions to conflict that we glorify this activity over others. For example, a game of Go is surely a conflict between two people, but unlike a game of Overwatch or the like it involves a lot fewer guns, bombs, and patchy plots about world governments authorizing unilateral violence. I don't think this really has anything to do with the west. Non western cultures have been producing violent art before the west even existed, and if you look at modern non-western movies and games, they aren't less likely to involve violence. As for Go, people in countries that play Go also play plenty of games that are violent, and plenty of people in the west play Checkers.
    - KirinDave 7y ago
      I can't work out what this post is saying. What do you mean? My point about Go was that Go is still a game of conflict, but it's not a game where we murder one another or try to anthropomorphize the pieces to make it more like actual killing.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >Violence is entertaining on some level... a part of human psychology So is sex, but I'd wager there are people who would be against schoolkids playing video games simulating it. I think that's the same sort of argument that HN user 'kirindave' is making with respect to violence. I make video games. Violent ones. But it's fair for people to question whether we, as an industry, can come up with something other than death as a metaphor for success. Particularly as we try to grow the tent and move games from being just video games to more, sort of, cultural artifacts.
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    > I think that's the same sort of argument that HN user 'kirindave' is making with respect to violence. Not quite, but it is an interesting one. Folks are very comfortable with games depicting repeated fatal violence. Would they feel the same way about a game involving repeated rape? Surely not, at least in the US, surely?! But then again, Pick Up Artist games that evaluate your ability to emotionally manipulate people into sex are popular enough that they've broken into the world of big youtubers and The reason these are different is because of the way our culture normalizes conflict and normalizes different kinds of dominance. We've seen games that challenge this (even when they're by people who clearly aren't). Night in the Woods, Slenderman, Minecraft & Roblox, every racing game, Kerbal Space Program and Untitled Goose Game? All of these games are famous and made a major impact on the gaming social structure and they don't focus on pulling triggers or capturing points.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      Minecraft involves hiding from things trying to kill you at night. Roblox has guns and violence, it's just not bloody or realistically depicted. It's cartoonist violence. Slenderman is a survival horror game so by definition it's violent. Mario Kart takes the fun of racing games to a higher level by enabling you to attack other racers with weapons. Kerbal Space Program is a good counter example. It's a sim game. I think sim games are fun. But if I'm with a large group of friends I'd pick Smash Bros. over Kerbal.
      - 7y ago
- asdfman123 7y ago
  > Violence is entertaining on some level Maybe more generally, I learned through improv training that changes in relative status are entertaining to humans. It's interesting when a peasant pulls one over on a king. Maybe we are inherently interested in things that threaten to change social hierarchy. Observing changes in it is important!
  - arrosenberg 7y ago
    Psychologically, I think this boils down to the fact that our brains like novelty and surprise. A King punching down on a subject isn't novel, but a subject punching up on the King (and living to tell about it!) is.
me_me_me 7y ago
> Most of our top competitive games ... replicate some of the worst aspects of human society. I dunno if it true in every case, current 2 times Dota champions literally built their team upon friendship and support for each other. So its not all doom and gloom yet. But I can see this type of behaviour fade away as more money and celebrity start pouring in.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  > I dunno if it true in every case, current 2 times Dota champions literally built their team upon friendship and support for each other. Dota is a game where folks play avatars that come together to contest a pointless battlefield, murdering each other over and over while also murdering useless "creeps" that have the trappings of anthropomorphism but are explicitly considered value-less by the Heros. It's not a boring or bad game, but the fundamental principle is "me and my friends murder your face with our amazing tactical teamwork for no special reason while our grunts carry on fighting like robots." > So its not all doom and gloom yet. But I can see this type of behaviour fade away as more money and celebrity start pouring in. You're kinda behind on this. It depends a lot on the initial community. An example of a bad community is the Overwatch community. It's toxic even in the competitive place. An example of a community that is struggling to make a nicer and more civil gaming environment is Smash Ultimate, which has kicked people out for excess behavior and started to make outreach for kids and women who are typically excluded from the spaces. Unsurprisingly, the Overwatch community models a convincingly fatal combat scenario much more convincingly than Smash, where you're explicitly pretending cartoony action figures are fighting in a magical arena where the worst that happens is you get bounced off into the distance.
  - me_me_me 7y ago
    > Dota is a game where folks play avatars that come together to contest a pointless battlefield, murdering each other over and over while also murdering useless "creeps" that have the trappings of anthropomorphism but are explicitly considered value-less by the Heros. It's not a boring or bad game, but the fundamental principle is "me and my friends murder your face with our amazing tactical teamwork for no special reason while our grunts carry on fighting like robots." I am not sure what you want to convey. Simulated violence is base of any game really. Heck, chess is literally a battlefield where soldiers are scarified to acheive victory. Playing chess doesn't make you violent or toxic.
pm90 7y ago
Video games provide an escape hatch to reality. You may have a personality that is attracted to violent mechs and gunslingers, or you may like the whimsy of being a warrior in a MMORPG. This doesn’t mean that you want to bring that into your real life... it’s important to remember that. I hold the opposite view to yours on this subject. By allowing an escape hatch, video games are allowing kids to live out their wild fantasies in the digital world. And doing this socially makes it a more socially acceptable activity and a way to bond with other kids who are attracted to similar things.
- smhost 7y ago
  maybe, maybe not. other animal species use play as a way to simulate potentially dangerous scenarios in order to learn certain behaviors. i think it's naive to assume that there's nothing instructive happening within core video game experiences.
  - learc83 7y ago
    Those simulations are almost entirely about developing muscle memory. If you're talking driving or flying games with appropriate controllers, then they might provide some useful instruction. But first person shooters played with a controller or a keyboard and mouse are so disconnected from the reality of combat, that I can't imagine any kind of instruction that is applicable to the real world could possibly apply (actual training sims do exist and they work nothing like popular video games). Militaries around the world learned decades ago that the only way to desensitize troops to shooting to actually kill another human (as opposed to just firing in the general direction) was by developing the muscle memory through repeated exercises of actually firing a rifle at a man shaped target. I've seen no evidence of increased propensity to violence, or increased skill at violence over the last 30 years. If anything violent crime rates have dropped drastically, and recruits are worse performing because they are more likely to be out of shape, and less likely to have actually fired a gun.
    - smhost 7y ago
      you're mostly arguing against a straw man, so i won't address those points, but there are still some interesting things you're wrong about. so even if you take away the controllers completely, decades of marketing industry research teaches us that you can train certain behaviors among media consumers. for example, chomsky talks about how the marketing industry targeted children's nagging behavior so that they will pester their parents to buy them products. and we all know about how bernays coopted feminist symbolism to sell cigarettes to women. video games are a lot more dynamic than traditional media, and it's harder to control and harder to analyze, so i would never say something so stupid as "video games cause gun violence," but a video game is not some kind of a magical medium that's exempt from the basic geometries of human psychology. part of the frustration is that we have no idea what the hell new media is doing to us.
crooked-v 7y ago
The mention of Minecraft makes me think that it could be used for artistic competition purposes (not explicitly framed that way, to go easy on the nerves of the kids who are 'bad at art'). Have teams compete to make the most interesting or coolest map, and have teachers sneak in tips on perspective (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr0USak_IB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr0USak_IB4) or on historical architecture styles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPxcldEDHts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPxcldEDHts).
- KirinDave 7y ago
  There are actuall 0 direct conflict Minecraft games. Tons of them. One of the more interested and open designs is the "Race For The Wool" concept where elaborately constructed obstacle courses are replicated in parallel in a void world and teams navigate their own miniature world using any means necessary to recover several colored wool blocks hidden on the map. Sometimes there even is direct player conflict when the two courses are open, allowing arrow and TNT cannon fire across the gap at one another.
strictnein 7y ago
No idea what "bro culture" has to do with what you're listing. All of those game types existed 25+ years ago. One of the first big competitive video games, with large prizes (Carmack's Ferrari), was Quake, which came out in 1996.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  Video game culture before FPSs and an anti-woman sentiment in the industry was very different. That's what I grew up in and I miss that generation of games very much. Even the war games were rich stories with detailed systems. While I respect the tech aspects of what came after, it's well-accepted that game design contracted in on itself as the majority of the money in PC gaming went to FPS games.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
And yet, violence in the US started declining right around the same time more realistically violent video games started becoming a thing, like Mortal Kombat. It then continued declining even as we got Doom, and Quake, and Call of Duty. > it taints a lot of kid's viewpoint of the world. Is there any actual evidence of this? Because so far based on your comments elsewhere, it sounds like you just have on some rose-tinted glasses about retro games, and harbor some personal antipathy to modern popular competitive PC games.

chrisco255 7y ago

Violence is entertaining on some level. Even cutesy games like Mario have him stomping on mushrooms and turtles and avoiding deadly obstacles. I've also heard it said that all good stories involve conflict. It's a part of human psychology for better or worse. It's why we watch sports. It's why we play video games. It's why dogs play fight. It's deeply embedded in our chemistry.

learc83 7y ago
Conflict doesn't require violence though. It's just that physical conflict is the easiest kind of conflict to represent.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  It's also the easiest to fund, what with several western governments funding games that train basic tactical skills that mimic modern urban small-scale warfare.
  - learc83 7y ago
    The games you're talking about aren't particularly useful for training, their only real use if for recruiting. And the number of games being funded by militaries is so small compared to the size of the market, that it basically has no impact as far as ease of funding goes. That's not to say that violent games aren't easier to fund. As I said, they are certainly easier to make, easier to market etc...
KirinDave 7y ago
> Violence is entertaining on some level. Even cutesy games like Mario have him stomping on mushrooms and turtles and avoiding deadly obstacles. Sure, but so are lots of things. It's just a cultural artifact of the west's love and expectation of violent solutions to conflict that we glorify this activity over others. For example, a game of Go is surely a conflict between two people, but unlike a game of Overwatch or the like it involves a lot fewer guns, bombs, and patchy plots about world governments authorizing unilateral violence. > I've also heard it said that all good stories involve conflict. This is a cultural lens. Lots of stories don't have an external conflict and they can be great. You know what's a great example of this? The Moive Jacob's Ladder. It was about someone reflecting on their life with pride and regret, not actual conflict. People frame this, unsurprisingly, as "Man vs Nature". But we might as well also define it as "Human Overcomes Hardship." And that line seems much more natural. Surely much of our hardship is inflicted by our peers, but is it a deliberate "versus" scenario? I suspect not.
- learc83 7y ago
  >Sure, but so are lots of things. It's just a cultural artifact of the west's love and expectation of violent solutions to conflict that we glorify this activity over others. For example, a game of Go is surely a conflict between two people, but unlike a game of Overwatch or the like it involves a lot fewer guns, bombs, and patchy plots about world governments authorizing unilateral violence. I don't think this really has anything to do with the west. Non western cultures have been producing violent art before the west even existed, and if you look at modern non-western movies and games, they aren't less likely to involve violence. As for Go, people in countries that play Go also play plenty of games that are violent, and plenty of people in the west play Checkers.
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    I can't work out what this post is saying. What do you mean? My point about Go was that Go is still a game of conflict, but it's not a game where we murder one another or try to anthropomorphize the pieces to make it more like actual killing.
bilbo0s 7y ago
>Violence is entertaining on some level... a part of human psychology So is sex, but I'd wager there are people who would be against schoolkids playing video games simulating it. I think that's the same sort of argument that HN user 'kirindave' is making with respect to violence. I make video games. Violent ones. But it's fair for people to question whether we, as an industry, can come up with something other than death as a metaphor for success. Particularly as we try to grow the tent and move games from being just video games to more, sort of, cultural artifacts.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  > I think that's the same sort of argument that HN user 'kirindave' is making with respect to violence. Not quite, but it is an interesting one. Folks are very comfortable with games depicting repeated fatal violence. Would they feel the same way about a game involving repeated rape? Surely not, at least in the US, surely?! But then again, Pick Up Artist games that evaluate your ability to emotionally manipulate people into sex are popular enough that they've broken into the world of big youtubers and The reason these are different is because of the way our culture normalizes conflict and normalizes different kinds of dominance. We've seen games that challenge this (even when they're by people who clearly aren't). Night in the Woods, Slenderman, Minecraft & Roblox, every racing game, Kerbal Space Program and Untitled Goose Game? All of these games are famous and made a major impact on the gaming social structure and they don't focus on pulling triggers or capturing points.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Minecraft involves hiding from things trying to kill you at night. Roblox has guns and violence, it's just not bloody or realistically depicted. It's cartoonist violence. Slenderman is a survival horror game so by definition it's violent. Mario Kart takes the fun of racing games to a higher level by enabling you to attack other racers with weapons. Kerbal Space Program is a good counter example. It's a sim game. I think sim games are fun. But if I'm with a large group of friends I'd pick Smash Bros. over Kerbal.
    - 7y ago
asdfman123 7y ago
> Violence is entertaining on some level Maybe more generally, I learned through improv training that changes in relative status are entertaining to humans. It's interesting when a peasant pulls one over on a king. Maybe we are inherently interested in things that threaten to change social hierarchy. Observing changes in it is important!
- arrosenberg 7y ago
  Psychologically, I think this boils down to the fact that our brains like novelty and surprise. A King punching down on a subject isn't novel, but a subject punching up on the King (and living to tell about it!) is.

me_me_me 7y ago

> Most of our top competitive games ... replicate some of the worst aspects of human society. I dunno if it true in every case, current 2 times Dota champions literally built their team upon friendship and support for each other. So its not all doom and gloom yet. But I can see this type of behaviour fade away as more money and celebrity start pouring in.

KirinDave 7y ago
> I dunno if it true in every case, current 2 times Dota champions literally built their team upon friendship and support for each other. Dota is a game where folks play avatars that come together to contest a pointless battlefield, murdering each other over and over while also murdering useless "creeps" that have the trappings of anthropomorphism but are explicitly considered value-less by the Heros. It's not a boring or bad game, but the fundamental principle is "me and my friends murder your face with our amazing tactical teamwork for no special reason while our grunts carry on fighting like robots." > So its not all doom and gloom yet. But I can see this type of behaviour fade away as more money and celebrity start pouring in. You're kinda behind on this. It depends a lot on the initial community. An example of a bad community is the Overwatch community. It's toxic even in the competitive place. An example of a community that is struggling to make a nicer and more civil gaming environment is Smash Ultimate, which has kicked people out for excess behavior and started to make outreach for kids and women who are typically excluded from the spaces. Unsurprisingly, the Overwatch community models a convincingly fatal combat scenario much more convincingly than Smash, where you're explicitly pretending cartoony action figures are fighting in a magical arena where the worst that happens is you get bounced off into the distance.
- me_me_me 7y ago
  > Dota is a game where folks play avatars that come together to contest a pointless battlefield, murdering each other over and over while also murdering useless "creeps" that have the trappings of anthropomorphism but are explicitly considered value-less by the Heros. It's not a boring or bad game, but the fundamental principle is "me and my friends murder your face with our amazing tactical teamwork for no special reason while our grunts carry on fighting like robots." I am not sure what you want to convey. Simulated violence is base of any game really. Heck, chess is literally a battlefield where soldiers are scarified to acheive victory. Playing chess doesn't make you violent or toxic.

pm90 7y ago

Video games provide an escape hatch to reality. You may have a personality that is attracted to violent mechs and gunslingers, or you may like the whimsy of being a warrior in a MMORPG. This doesn’t mean that you want to bring that into your real life... it’s important to remember that. I hold the opposite view to yours on this subject. By allowing an escape hatch, video games are allowing kids to live out their wild fantasies in the digital world. And doing this socially makes it a more socially acceptable activity and a way to bond with other kids who are attracted to similar things.

smhost 7y ago
maybe, maybe not. other animal species use play as a way to simulate potentially dangerous scenarios in order to learn certain behaviors. i think it's naive to assume that there's nothing instructive happening within core video game experiences.
- learc83 7y ago
  Those simulations are almost entirely about developing muscle memory. If you're talking driving or flying games with appropriate controllers, then they might provide some useful instruction. But first person shooters played with a controller or a keyboard and mouse are so disconnected from the reality of combat, that I can't imagine any kind of instruction that is applicable to the real world could possibly apply (actual training sims do exist and they work nothing like popular video games). Militaries around the world learned decades ago that the only way to desensitize troops to shooting to actually kill another human (as opposed to just firing in the general direction) was by developing the muscle memory through repeated exercises of actually firing a rifle at a man shaped target. I've seen no evidence of increased propensity to violence, or increased skill at violence over the last 30 years. If anything violent crime rates have dropped drastically, and recruits are worse performing because they are more likely to be out of shape, and less likely to have actually fired a gun.
  - smhost 7y ago
    you're mostly arguing against a straw man, so i won't address those points, but there are still some interesting things you're wrong about. so even if you take away the controllers completely, decades of marketing industry research teaches us that you can train certain behaviors among media consumers. for example, chomsky talks about how the marketing industry targeted children's nagging behavior so that they will pester their parents to buy them products. and we all know about how bernays coopted feminist symbolism to sell cigarettes to women. video games are a lot more dynamic than traditional media, and it's harder to control and harder to analyze, so i would never say something so stupid as "video games cause gun violence," but a video game is not some kind of a magical medium that's exempt from the basic geometries of human psychology. part of the frustration is that we have no idea what the hell new media is doing to us.

crooked-v 7y ago

The mention of Minecraft makes me think that it could be used for artistic competition purposes (not explicitly framed that way, to go easy on the nerves of the kids who are 'bad at art'). Have teams compete to make the most interesting or coolest map, and have teachers sneak in tips on perspective (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr0USak_IB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr0USak_IB4) or on historical architecture styles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPxcldEDHts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPxcldEDHts).

KirinDave 7y ago
There are actuall 0 direct conflict Minecraft games. Tons of them. One of the more interested and open designs is the "Race For The Wool" concept where elaborately constructed obstacle courses are replicated in parallel in a void world and teams navigate their own miniature world using any means necessary to recover several colored wool blocks hidden on the map. Sometimes there even is direct player conflict when the two courses are open, allowing arrow and TNT cannon fire across the gap at one another.

strictnein 7y ago

No idea what "bro culture" has to do with what you're listing. All of those game types existed 25+ years ago. One of the first big competitive video games, with large prizes (Carmack's Ferrari), was Quake, which came out in 1996.

KirinDave 7y ago
Video game culture before FPSs and an anti-woman sentiment in the industry was very different. That's what I grew up in and I miss that generation of games very much. Even the war games were rich stories with detailed systems. While I respect the tech aspects of what came after, it's well-accepted that game design contracted in on itself as the majority of the money in PC gaming went to FPS games.

TulliusCicero 7y ago

And yet, violence in the US started declining right around the same time more realistically violent video games started becoming a thing, like Mortal Kombat. It then continued declining even as we got Doom, and Quake, and Call of Duty. > it taints a lot of kid's viewpoint of the world. Is there any actual evidence of this? Because so far based on your comments elsewhere, it sounds like you just have on some rose-tinted glasses about retro games, and harbor some personal antipathy to modern popular competitive PC games.