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Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Summary and Lessons from "On Combat" - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'd like to see a meta study of this to compare the exact results. Actually you may both be right. Grossman doesn't claim that FPS ''causes'' violence. He claims that it facilities it.
He does claim that TV causes violence (and cites large studies to that effect).
He also claims that FPS does train marksmanship and I'd be very surprised if this doesn't play out. Most military do use FPS training (OK, they might even if it didn't, but he cites a curious case of a syrian (?) city where the only electricity was used to power a PC running FPS to train guerillia or some such).
The human brain has a uncanny ability to transfer skills from one domain into another and from FPS to real life shooting it is apparently not that far. How would you explain the ability of teenagers to kill lots of people with headshots after only one day of experience with a real weapon but hundreds of hours of FPS?
Also: How do you explain that the highschool killers didn't stop after killing their intended targer but kept going? Grossman repeatedly explains how behavior that is trained in comes out under stress like auto-pilot. Behavior that is intended for fighters. Why would that be different for children?
It's psy-sociology, so not quite science and studies tend to be pretty bad. But the point is that there was a lot of desire to find such a connection and it just stubbornly refuses to be found.
However what I called bullshit was the claim that playing FPSes makes you a good real-life marksman.
Yes, for things like tactical awareness, unit cohesion, etc. I am not aware of anyone who uses FPSes to train marksmanship.
What is this "ability of teenagers"? Sources, please.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Do note, however, that to support your point you need to show that such behaviour was absent or less frequent before FPSes became widely played.
This also claims that Grossman misrepresented the facts:
http://www.grandtheftchildhood.com/GTC/Excerpts/Entries/2008/1/28_Can_video_games_train_snipers.html
I tend to update toward him being intentionally misleading in at least some of his points.
Disappointed.
Yeah, well, politics is not the only topic one can get mindkilled on. Arguments are soldiers, y'know...
Ruminating a bit about this. If I just assume he bends arguments everywhere I have to discount all his arguments as soldiers (kind of a pun isn't it). But isn't that just a negative halo effect?
One other interpretation is that he over-extends the probably well-founded results for solders to children playing FPS. He might even look away from contradicting evidence. Yes such is the argument of someone looking to defend him. But one could also call it steelmaning.
Also: If I assume that children do not acquire routine killing pattern in FPS then I also have to assume that soldiers do so neither. But then how do you explain the much increased shooting percentage in wars after routine killing training (with fotorealistic targets) was introduced after WW2?
Not quite -- you now know that he is not above bending to truth to support his point. That does not mean all his arguments suffer from this, but I think it's correct to update towards requiring more third-party confirmations.
That sentence makes no sense to me. Compare: "he over-extends the probably well-founded results for solders to children playing cowboys and indians".
I don't doubt that it's possible to teach people to kill (better, easier, more efficiently). It's also possible to teach kids to kill (see African child soldiers). But I still don't see what FPSes have to do with this.
I meant the well-founded results that solders can be trained to automatically act in certain patterns even when under stress via authentic simulations. Simulations which involve FPS, Paintball, fotorealistic target on shooting ranges...
He over-extends these to children playing only the FPS part of this training by assuming that the FPS part is enough to anchor the behavior.
FPS are a way to train behavioral patterns. Action sequences that are likely to get executed without conscious thought when under stress - same as intended for soldiers.
The behavioral pattern that FPSes train is to slightly move the mouse and click with your index finger.
I (or for that matter Grossman) don't mean fine motor skills. I mean higher abstractions like scan environment, search next target, shoot, move on, stop on game-over.
"Stop on game-over" as a behavioral pattern is, I think, pure fiction. Note that it's different from "stop on command" which is trained in a lot of situations.
So, let's take, say, wildlife photography. It teaches one to "scan environment, search next target, shoot, move on". OMG, wildlife photography trains killers!
In the more general sense, the loop "scan -- locate -- act" is very common -- look e.g. at a football match or a traffic cop or a driver fighting through traffic or... etc. etc. It's by no means unique to FPSes.
Quite apropos, since his book is about how soldiers (or "warriors") get mindkilled in a sense.
1) I can't show that it was absent before FPS became good enought because it wasn't:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/17/why-timely-reliable-data-on-mass-killings-is-hard-to-find/
So Grossman is probably wrong on this:
http://www.killology.com/school_notes_preventing_violence.htm