YouTube and Reddit are sued for allegedly enabling the racist mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 dead::The complementary lawsuits claim that the massacre in 2022 was made possible by tech giants, a local gun shop, and the gunman’s parents.

  • jampacked@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    30
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Why are video games immune to neuroplasticity? Or any form of entertainment really.

    • SCB@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      1 year ago

      Neuroplasticity is not really relevant here - it’s just the ability of the brain to form new connections. You’d need a casual effect of video games/entertainment toward radicalization inherently and science does not support that position.

      Even meta studies are not showing any causal link between gaming/entertainment and aggression

    • Redditiscancer789@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Anecdotally I play a genocidal maniac in every game I can. I love playing total war and killing every single thing I come across, razing pillaging their villages and enslaving the survivors. I’ve done it since I was a young child playing RTS games like age of empires. Adding up all my video game kills would probably be literally in the billions. Can you guess how many people I’ve killed in real life?

      • jampacked@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        25
        ·
        1 year ago

        Basically when you do something over and over your brain rewires to do it more efficiently but nobody seems to think hours of video games or perceived negativity/positivity has any effect when it comes to certain entertainment.

        • Suru@mander.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          15
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I mean… if you play video games for hours and hours, your brain will likely learn to play videogames better? Sure. I hardly see a correlation to mass murder here.

          If you believe that action repetition is to blame for rewiring people’s brains to be more efficient at mass murder, why not blame the military, or hell, why not just start picketing outside your local airsoft or paintball places?

          edit: he’ll into hell. I blame autocorrect.

        • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          1 year ago

          Because clicking a mouse to go pew pew at fictional characters is drastically different than pointing and shooting a gun at a human being.

          Even the most realistic military shooters, you don’t just get a red tint over your eyes if you get shot, you can’t wait it out or use a medkit to immediately be fully recovered, and people don’t respawn the next match after they are killed. They don’t show how gruesome and nerve-wracking real violence it is. They can’t show the lasting consequences of that. People who play video games might not even know how heavy a real gun is.

          And then there are things like Fortnite and Overwatch, which are just silly cartoons. No comparison.

        • Anonymousllama@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Is there any actual scientific studies that back up that summation? Because video games have been under intense scrutiny for decades and every time it’s bright up the consensus seems to be that there’s no direct link

        • Gork@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Video games are not the causal reason for mass shootings. Do other countries have gun violence like America does? No. But they play video games just at much as we do.

          It’s not video games that are the problem, it’s the easy access to lightly regulated guns.