If you have a friend group of 10 people, 4 of which regularly work out. You will probably notice that those 4 friends have less body fat and are more toned than the other 6. At that point, if a study came out saying that working out had no impact on body physique, you'd reflexively question the results.
That might sound ridiculous, but lots of people here grew up playing "violent" video games through the 90s-00s, and had large friend groups who did the same. And it's pretty likely that, for most of us, none of our friends ended up with violent or aggressive tendencies.
Anecdotes are not scientifically rigorous, but they aren't completely useless either. If violent video games caused measurable increases in aggressive behavior, people who were around a large cohort of people playing these games would notice this fact in action. Just like they'd notice that friends who eat a lot of cake tend to be larger than the one who don't.
For example, I have a group of 10 friends. All 10 of them (including myself) got covid, and we all agree it is no worse than the flu. I mean, yeah, we couldn't smell or taste for a few days, but we all recovered within a week. Therefore... I should reflexively question covid studies saying how dangerous it is because in my own experience it's not even worth making a fuss over?
Maybe to some degree, but the fallacy I committed by relying on my anecdote to guide my intuition is that me and all my friends are young, fit, healthy people. My group of friends didn't include the elderly or immunocompromised or morbidly obese, etc.
In fact, I would be surprised for there to be zero correlation (even assuming there is no causation), as it is a reasonable assumption that naturally violent people are more likely to play violent video games.
If the effect was even 0.01 with growth by 10000% we would have noticed.
It's also a reasonable assumption that people who naturally want to avoid actual violence play violent video games instead.
This paranoia against violent video games was obviously fake from the start, and such a typically American thing - in line with the American puritan view that blowing up people in films or broadcasting police car chases is a-OK but (female) nipples or saying "fuck" is a big NO NO.
There's a lot of violence in society. There's even more violent media available. From news broadcasts to internet forum posts to books. Perhaps violent video games aren't particularly worse at that than all of the other media that portray violence? The news tends to have stories that are more gruesome than the things that happen in video games. The violence in video games is usually toned down or limited.
In a community like HN there's also kind of a "meta-anecdote" that emerges. If there was a link, you'd expect to see at least someone posting an ancedote about how their friend got into violent games and then became violent themselves; instead it's mainly the opposite.
I'm still not arguing this observation is scientifically rigorous in any way whatsoever, merely that multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one. There could be other reasons such as those that are violent or hang out with those that are don't post on HN - but that also hints there is something more to it then just or even the violent games themselves.
>multiple ancedotes can be more useful than a single one
Sure. But that meta-anecdote based narrative can be highly biased based on the community that forms it.
A forum with an large respresentation of hospital doctors and a forum with a large representation of convenience store owners are going to have completely different meta-anecdote based narratives on whether packing heat is good or bad.
People will trust their anecdotes because in general they are right to. They don't need a double blind study to figure out that placing their hand on a heated element is a bad idea.
The question is whether the Bayesian confidence an individual places on their anecdotal knowledge is appropriate or not. In this case, plenty of people have a ton of personal experience with the subject matter, a ton of friends and colleagues with experience, and little to no evidence to suggest the contra factual is true.
Does that mean they're certainly right? No. But it certainly lowers the bar to evaluating yet further evidence of the position already held; why waste the time? If a study was released that was solid evidence that games did cause a significant uptick in violence, then examination would be warranted.
I know a bunch of people are going to take a contrarian position, but we operate in the real world with the same time complexity restrictions as the machines we work on. You don't need a double blind study to determine how to position your head while tying your shoelaces in the morning.
Should you question them? Yes.
Should you let your own experience and that of a few people around you override what you see to be a rigorous statistical study because you questioned it and looked into it? No. If you look into it and have serious questions about the rigor of the study? Maybe. Is that the case in the Covid studies? Probably not.
Whether this is about Covid or anything else, the important thing is to be able to asses information as it comes in and reassess your position based on the data available to you. Anecdotal data is invaluable and used by everyone every day to make decisions prior to receiving good outside rigorous data, because for many things we don't have good outside rigorous data.
In the case your examples, we already know that the CFR is lower than 10%, so a sample of 10 definitely is nowhere near enough to tell us anything useful. Now if the CFR was 50% and you had 0/10, maybe it'd be worth looking into it.
I'm curious though, have any of your friends had longer term effects? longer term smell/taste loss, brain fog, heart issues, memory issues, breathing issues, etc? The early reports on long term impact are at ~10-20%, so you may have 1 or 2 in your sample, but again your sample is small enough that you very easily could've had 0 too. Again, it depends heavily on what you're trying to disprove and what the rate of it is.
If there was a causation then the reduction in violent crime could be muted by a small factor due to games, while the net decrease is (as before) caused by an even larger independent factor. In other words, the net decrease could have been larger without the presence of games.
What it does instead show is a maximum plausible effect size, and that it likely isn't worse than the activities which it is replacing.
I think that rather than asking ourselves "does this have a negative impact?" we should ask "what can I do that has a positive impact?".
Personally, I would never work on a game with significant violence. From my point of view, there are so many other things a human being can contribute towards the well-being and progress of humanity, and I would not feel happy with myself if I limited my contribution and my creativity to making another shooter.
The published studies (two so far) support their effectiveness. It's not easy to get the word out though without the funds for a publicist, advertising, etc.
That's part of the point of this essay that was on HN last year: "Fortnite and the Good Life," which seems relevant here.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-soc...
they are just games and most (non crazy) people understand that
like hansel and gretel when they push the witch in the oven - its fiction and not intended to be a guide to life
In some situations being able to keep a cool head in a crisis or in an area where something like this might occur could actually prove to be a benefit, as you are less likely to enter a panicked state (such as working in an environment where you may witness excessive amounts of blood/gore, eg paramedic)
I think that the vast majority of people (teenagers included) are more robust than we give them credit for, and can distinguish fantasy from reality.
And yet gamers remain relatively docile on the whole. And while they may get heated their debates about PlayStation vs XBox are about as likely to result in fatalities as the programming community's vim vs emacs or tabs vs spaces debates.
I can think of 2 incidents in the gaming community off the top of my head which led to fatalities. The SWATing of Andrew Finch, and the Jacksonville Landing shooting (that was an NFL game convention though, so it's debatable whether the game was violent). I certainly haven't heard anything like that about text editors or coding styles, but then maybe the number of gamers is higher than the number of programmers.
That said, at the end of the day, the life was lost not because gamers were being violent due to a violent video game. None of the gamers involved so much as ever saw one another. Instead, an entirely innocent third party individual got erroneously targeted by a known type of hoax and, upon moving his hands wrong, was shot by a law enforcement official.
This was intended to be a case of gamer-on-gamer harassment over something that likely was spurred on by events in a violent video game (which is woefully common, though rarely to this degree). But the only violent act committed was by a police officer. And that's an important distinction.
(I assume we can elide the Jacksonville event as that happened during a Madden tournament; unless we want to make the case that football is more like Grand Theft Auto than it is baseball...)
Otherwise, we have to wonder how much Doom was played by Jack the Ripper or Ian Brady.
There is evidence of gamers doxxing, and even worse, swatting.
Does that make those other things toxic? On a purely comparative level, gaming is probably less 'toxic' if you go just by the worst things done by its fans.
