You know it could be believable argument except that I don't try to become god after too much RTS, I don't become a master of stealth after splinter cell, and I don't get better at driving after Need for speed.
*Cough*Scapegoat*Cough*

While I find her comments on the far side of 'goofy'. This is some goofy morning show, no different from the other garbage shows like The View or Montel Williams. They're all fluff with no hard news value so why give them any credence? Or should we all put 100% faith in the ramblings in the likes of Rosie ODonnell (who has also negatively commented on video games) and Whoopie Goldberg (who think Vicks practice of dog care comes from his cultural upbringing)? If I hear Shepard Smith talking about it I'll pay some attention. Until then, it's fodder in the same vein of Jerry Springer. IMO, YMMV.

"Rich Says:
October 16th, 2007 at 10:01 am

So is she the New Jack Thompson, since Jack is cruising to irrelevancy?"

Naah, it's just Faux News doing what they always do - spreading falsehoods and sensationalist news for the lulz.

What do you expect from the same "experts" that air drawl like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pyR_90RdOg

Another "expert", another day...

@ Jack Thompson:
"Why is she saying these things? Because the entire American Psychological Association is officially saying exactly the same things."

You accuse people of not heeding the findings of the APA reports. I find it hilarious that you in turn ignore the statements by the people who actually carried out the reports explaining that there is no evidence of any kind of causal link between violent video games and violent behaviour. At best they suggest some kind of correlation, that people who are predisposed to violence might like violent entertainment (who'd have thunk it?).

The APA is not saying the exactly the same things. They are saying nothing like this, yet YOU are attempting to put words in their mouth.
You saying the APA found a causal link is like me telling people "Jack Thompson himself says that violent video games are completely harmless for children". It's a stament that supports my side of the argument, but it's completely untrue, just like all of yours.

Please read the the explanations by Dr. Bushman and others where they CLEARLY explain the findings (or lack thereof) of their studies. NOWHERE in any study will you see the word "causal", unless the sentence reads "There is no evidence of a causal link".

@Black

It's that allowance check from his wife for mowing the lawn, doing dishes, keeping religion out of the bedroom. You kow, usual stuff.

@JT

"And besides that, she’s not a paid whore for the video game industry, like some people we know. Jack Thompson "

Even Christ treated whores with respect, perhaps you should take a lesson from your own teachings.

of course the did xD

Why did she bring the Cleveland subject up? I see no relation to it. Obviously the subject title is at the bottom of the screen in big bold white words "Halo 3 Church Controversy." Maybe the thought of violence is only present when someone is exposed to a lot of it? I don't know. I enjoy Halo and I don't know why someone wants to ruin it. Its like saying Star Wars is violent and can make kids go out and shoot someone....with a blaster rifle...or a light saber...If she tries to mark Halo as wrong or bad, or too violent to be sold, its like saying Star Wars is bad, and its not as violent as Halo. What about schools teaching about the KKK or WW2. Wouldn't it make someone curious to see what it was about? And what if they agree with what happened? I don't know. I want people to stop mixing politics with games. This Halo 3 topic or any video game topic is just some attempt for more viewers. What happened to stories about Gears of War? Did that Thompson guy say anything about it? What about this lady who got some random PhD? If anyone found out about any type of GoW news mixed with politics email me at vincecalhoune@yahoo.com

Check here for JT's latest failure:

http://nationalgaynews.com/content/view/1883/173/

It is sad that this shit-head wastes taxpayer money on this bullshit. What a fucking asshole.

@HurricaneJesus

that link was a great read. Thank you.

For anyone who missed it, thank HJ for this one:

http://nationalgaynews.com/content/view/1883/173/

JT gets pwned in court.

@ Sebasman2

Don't feel bad, I'm 23 but people think I'm 18... or younger.. even with a five o'clock shadow.

You're a good example of what most of here are talking about. People like this "doctor" think "children" can not differentiate right from wrong, or real from fantasy. That is blatantly false. They can. Maybe even better than many adults can. The idea that a kid will play Halo 3 and then try to murder a person for bumping in to them is fear-mongering at its best (or is that worst?). The fact is, EVERYONE of those "children" who have gone off the deep-end and murdered people, all of those school shooters, and all those gang members would do the exact same things without video games. There are other factors at work in those people. To say otherwise is escapism.

And Greek and Roman Mythology is awesome! You should try to enjoy it more.

What the hell?!

Enjoyable rant Dennis, but like I said previously, did you seriosuly expect anything better from Fox?

Why the hell haven't i killed anybody yet?
Is there something wrong with me?

Another anti-game moron spouting her lies. No surprise there.

@ Soldatlouis

Why am I not surprised this doctor(who apparently got her degree in a box of Froot Loops) is a part of a pro-censorship group?

ah, yes, i remember that "brain difference".

the same EXACT change in activity occurs when playing a nonviolent game

seriously, when the original HALO came out like five years ago, then shouldn't all those kids that grew up with it be out and about killing people?

maybe they're just having trouble finding a plasma rifle

"No, it’s negative activity that the child really has to get into the CHARACTER of the person that they’re playing that’s killing all these poeple. So when they walk out of the ROOM and they go out into the streets and someone might bump into them, what are they going to do? "

This is the whole anti-games movement summed up in one brief, dumb statement. I don't have to get into the character of Master Chief to play Halo 3. Same as I don't get into the character of Ryu or Ken with Street Fighter. Games present challenges, and your character has a certain array of tools/abilities which must be used skilfully to negotiate and overcome the challenges, whether it be the range of moves in a fighting game, or the guns in an fps, the items in a Zelda game, etc. Does a carpenter get into the character of a hammer or a chisel? Does a surgeon get into the character of a scalpel?

"Well you know what, when we add violent games to all the other bad things that are happening in the world we can have kids who are aroused to that negative level that they might want to go out and pick up a gun and that’s not okay. That’s criminal."

If you take away the violent games, you are left with "all the other bad things that are happening in the world we can have kids who are aroused to that negative level that they might want to go out and pick up a gun and that’s not okay. That’s criminal." Which is exactly the same situation, except it doesn't have a hobby that might let kids blow of steam once in a while.

Even the way this woman forms her sentences sounds to me like a desperate attempt to grasp straws. Negative activity in the brain? More does not necessarily equal "negative" activity. In fact more would imply to me (granted I'm not a scientist, but still) that the person is having to engage in a higher degree of concentration in one game than they are in another. Besides who was it that said not long ago that interactivity actually distances you from the images on the screen because you are not processing the actual digital killing so much as focusing on the actions you have to take to effect the game? Wouldn't that imply a higher degree of concentration and thus more brain activity?

@ Miang

That would be the British study on violent media. They went around and questioned a bunch of kids about their feelings on different media. Video games had the least amount of effect on the kids.

But onto the article, I could not expect less from a Fox show. But just yesterday I wrote a damning letter to one of my local news stations about the sensationalism in their headlines. So this is not confined to Fox. They just mastered it.

Man... ignorant people who refuse to educate themselves on a topic are annoying as hell...

ye gods, there must be something wrong with me, 8 years of 'negative mental activity' and i haven't tried to emulate any game above and beyond a mock light sabre fight with some friends!

i'm going to mental health ward to check to see why i'm not a murderer.

Ive been playin games since the mid-late 80's alot of them can be classed as violent. Guess that makes me a murdering phsycopath huh.

Ok..I'm calling BS on this one. We just had a pretty good sized LAN party of Halo 3 this weekend, and my six year old was involved in the whole thing. As a parent I made the decision that he was ok with at least the multiplayer part because even at his age he understands that it's a game. We played for literally the entire day..and you know what happened when it was over...NOTHING. Everybody was happy and relaxed after all of the fun. My son didn't do anything different, didn't shoot anybody. At worst he did was a six year old does and jumped around excited about the hillarious stuff that happened. It's people like this that bother me because they live under the whole "they know what is best for my kids" attitude that I find insulting as a parent.

"No, it’s negative activity that the child really has to get into the CHARACTER of the person that they’re playing that’s killing all these people."

Sounds like what happens to most people when they watch an action movie and get too absorbed by it.

Well lets see, between Heavy Metal, D&D, Violent Video Games and Sci-fi/Fantasy books, according to the so called experts and Fox news, I should be a virgin sacrificing, baby raping, devil worshiping, mass murderer with a swastika cut into my forehead.
Funny that isn't it?

Shouldn't she spend more time writing crappy books that prevent girls from being anorexic than going on a biased network and spitting out fake crap like another Halo 3 basher *cough*Jack Thompson*cough*?

Also I do like how people are blaming video games for violence, but you know, they don't try to do anything about the war... Hello? The war where people are killing people and dying? Instead of going and blaming violent tendencies on an unrealistic entertainment source, you could always go after the confirmed violence? You know, just to show that you're really serious about your anti-violence beliefs.

I for one am very anti-violence, but do enjoy gaming quite a bit. Have been since I was going after zombies in Doom when I was 3. Maybe you should reconsider your objectives here and think about what you really want to do, cause it don't make much sense to go after a supposed cause of violence when actual violence is happening?

You know, with the way this is going, I was half expecting her to tell me I can protect myself from those evil games by placing a line of salt around my consul, or chanting this handy spell to keep those gamers at bay. Because she seems to be going in that direction here.

So at the risk of sounding pompous, I feel I must point out how violent video games have affected me during my life...

My earliest memory is of the Christmas when our family got an NES, and I played the NES port of the 1989 TMNT Arcade game. From there, I've been playing video games throughout my entire life, funded initially my my father and his shared love of video games (It may be noted that he was a pilot during Vietnam, a violent background indeed).

Having spent an entire lifetime playing violent games, from Brutal Sports Football on the Jaguar, Doom on the PC, up to GTA, R6: Vegas, and Halo 3, do you know how many violent crimes I've committed? 0, Zero, None, Nada.

But how have video games affected my life in other ways? Obviously my grades in school must have suffered due to this evil phenomenon, right? The Dreamcast and PS2 launching during my high school years? Wrong again. A 4.0+ GPA (weighted) AND I managed to play football, despite being a gamer, and therefore obviously a social outcast who dwells in dark places and plans to reenact video game misdeeds.

But what about college? Playing so many games must have made me homocidal, and I must have gone on a shooting rampage, right? Wrong, despite spending every possible moment between classes beating GTA: VC within 5 days of its release, and playing many other games with friends, I managed not to kill anoyone, and graduated with a 3.47 GPA in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

But now I must be a maniacal shut-in, right? A gamer can't be an important member of adult society, surely. Well, working as an engineer for a leading multinational aerospace manufacturer and advanced technology company, I guess I'll leave that decision up to the "experts". Meanwhile, I'll get back to work helping advance and protect our country, including people like Dr. Susan Bartell, who knows what is best for me and my family.

@Darrell.

There's also two types of fox news: the stuff on the FoxNews CHANNEL, and the news on Fox.

@hayabusa75 :

Thanks for your initiative, I was about to do it. At worst, you won't have any reply. At best, she may come here and clarify her position, like Frank Borelli or Eric Greene did, and it was a success. It's always better when we can discuss (as long as it's a honest and civil discussion).

"No. It's really negative activity"

I'm sorry, but her profession is that of a psychologist, not a neurologist. Also, she did not administer these tests and clearly played "picky choosy" with the details. In other words, she abstracted data and jumped to her own conclusions.

GP was right: she avoided the question by simply spewing her own INTERPRETATION of a scientific finding. I would be less likely to dismiss her as an ill-informed quack had the question/response went something like this: (purely hypothetical, btw)

Interview Conductor: "...couldn't it be the same if you were going to see a Broadway play."

Dr. Bartell: "Well, the increased activity was found around a brain structure called the amygdala, which is responsible for controlling emotions...."

See how the interview could have gone had she actually taken the time to read the findings? I'm trying my best to find a copy of the findings (Help me out GP?), so while I haven't read it yet I'd venture a guess that the study found the following:

-Increased activity involving the amygdala
-Since the amygdala structures play a vital role in emotion control, it can be concluded that aggression would be one response brought for from increased activity.

Aggression is typically divided into two categories: reactive and proactive. Reactive is generally tied into chemical responses, usually associated with bipolar mood disorder, whereas the other is a learned behavioral response. In essence, studying the increased brain activity of an adolescent playing a violent video game could be more useful for diagnosing and treating problems rather than abolishing a product unrelated to the problem.

Aggression: an emotion.
Violence: an action.

You've got to be kidding me. It's bad enough that she invoked the Cleveland school shooting, but she can't even get the day it happened right. Did she bother to do ANY research on this? Did she just wake up that very morning and think "Oh crap, I've got to comment on Halo 3 for The Morning Show, and I only know about eating disorders. I know! I'll just pull some brain scan pictures off the Internet and say a bunch of nonsense while showing them to look smart."

Have the standards for getting a Ph.D in Psychology become that low? Do the people who hand them out ever think "Wow, this person has no damn clue what he/she's talking about, and I'm about to give him/her credibility by awarding this doctorate. Oh well."

I guess I don't have a point to this. It's early, and nothing makes me more angry than a boffin. Maybe TV stations should not be allowing such idiotic people onto their sets. There are other ways to bring viewers in...;)

Honestly, as much as I agree that this is definately news and that Dennis is right to post it, how much discussion can there possibly be? We're all just sitting around nodding at each other at how wrong she is.

This is a similar argument, and it's really a very simple one, and it comes from a simple place. People almost always think that it's "Them" who do bad things and influence people to do horrible things. It's got to be "Them" because "We" don't do that. We're not Them, we're Us. And if They did'nt do it, then one of Us did it. And that's a very uncomfrotable fact for many many people to accept, as we're all Us. That's why they need something to put the blame on that's not one of Us, it's one of Them. Because if one of Us did it, what's to stop you or me from doing it? We're part of Us as well.

if video games make me violent, shouldn't watching Fx make me biased?

Well, according to this expert, it's getting into the character that is bad, right? Well... I'm a stage and voice actor, so I get into character a lot. Characters that murder and kill and are generally immoral. Obviously acting on stage is FAR more interactive than a video game, right? I should be... hmmm... A mage, a nazi, an old scottish guy, a little boy, a crazed scientist, a military member with an annoying voice, Jack the Giant Killer, a detective, a street cop, a singing mailman, a French bartender..
Wow. I should've killed someone a long time ago. While speaking French in a Scottish accent, while making drinks. Or I should've murdered someone in the name of the military while Heiling Hiter and doing odd experiments.
God help us all the moment I get set off! I play games, so I know how to use weaponry better then an entire platoon of the army, I've played a police officier, so I know their tactics, so I can take them down just like in GTA, while singing. Yeah. Go logic.

She keeps saying "arousal" as if this is the similar behavior to what a rapist performs. She's trying to insist that if a kid plays violence depicting games, they'll be like rapists and enjoy dominance over a person by killing or maiming.
I think she's just trying to be an attention whore at the moment. Also, activity in the brain doesn't mean its bad, it means the damn thing works. If the damn thing doesn't have activity, you're brain-dead. -.-
She probably would've had a better chance if she edited it to show holes in the brain by borrowing drug-damaging image of the brain.

When people insist on something, they probably see a self-projected image of what they perceive to be wrong. In other words, she is always aroused when playing Halo3.

Oh yeah, please Dr. Susan, there's a reason why psychologists stick to one field, and you apparently took those classes. If you are done whoring yourself for attention, please retract your statements and go back to your field.
One more thing, if Halo3 is arousing you, seek help, from a psychologist that deals with violence, not bulimia and anorexia.

It looked to me like all the orange activity (is it the color they're worried about?) was more spread out in the non-violent gamer's head. If it's the level of brain activity they're worried about (that's right, folks, they don't want kids to show brain activity!), it seems that Halo is better than games like Katamari. f See? I always knew Katamari would cause problems!

It would be really nice if someone who gets floor time and is anti-gaming actually had a GOOD point.

Like... kids who play games too much have their school work suffer -- you know, something where being in the public eye putting out your message might have some POSITIVE result. At least then there would be a place for actual rational conversation about the problems.

These kinds of 'the sky is falling' arguments don't do anything positive -- they just scare ignorant parents and anger rational gamers.

Excuse me if this has been brought up already, but I have a bone to pick...

I've played various sports in my time, and they all hold one common theme: competition. In the case of some of them, like Wrestling, Rugby and Football, that's *violent* competition. During the game/match I'm in an "emotionally aroused state" and I usually want to rip someone's head off.

Thing is, when the game is over, that goes away. It's a momentary thing brought on by competition. Video games are no different. When I play Halo 3 there are times when all my senses and emotions are heightened, when my heart is pounding and my palms are sweating and my only thought is how to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as I can.

Just as with sports though, when the match is over, it goes away. I don't get into fights with the guys that I play with at the LAN parties, and I don't walk away looking to kill someone. The transient state goes away...but why is it always assumed that it *won't*?

I've seen very little data regarding long term affects hours, or days, after a game is played. My bet is that when you look at data like she was showing, both sets of children will be normalized within 2 hours of quitting.

Double post

Jack, could you provide me a link to the study on these findings? Humor me and allow me my delusions that my unenlightened, gamertard brain is in fact able to process the studies in which violent games have a causal link to violent behavior in real life.

I honestly haven't read these studies before and would like to see them with my own two eyes, but aside from your assertion that they exist and GP's assertion that the context proves otherwise, I've yet to see the evidence with my own eyes.

GP: If Jack doesn't provide, do you know where I can get those studies?

"Why is she saying these things? Because the entire American Psychological Association is officially saying exactly the same things.

And besides that, she’s not a paid whore for the video game industry, like some people we know. Jack Thompson"

I think what makes me angriest is that statements like this are constantly made with no consequence. He really should be held accountable for every malicious lie he puts forth with the express intent of misleading the public.

As should the rest of these incompetents, like Dr. Bartell.

The Indiana study that is mentioned was funded by the Center for Successful Parenting, and a report (in html and Word) can be found on their site :
http://www.sosparents.org/Brain%20Research%20Study.htm
http://www.sosparents.org/brain%20Study.doc

By the way, the "violent game" chose for the study was "Medal of Honor : Frontline", while the "non-violent game" was a "Need for Speed" game.

@Jack Thompson

Pardon me if I don't:

A) Believe a word you say
B) Believe a word the APA says
C) Believe a word that this woman says

Why don't I believe it? Same shit, different day. That and I find all Americans intellect questionable IF they are paid by the US Government.

If it wasn't for the fact that she was so adamant about it, I'd say she was joking. Y'know saying absolutely ridiculous things to be funny. But it seems she's just a crack pot.

I think I know her favorite song, though. "Teenagers" by My Chemical romance.

@ Jack Thompson

Yeah. Sure. That's it, Jack. By the by, I've still seen no conclusive evidence of video games making people violent killers. It would seem to me that IF they did, we'd see far more school shootings and the violent crime rate amongst youth would be sky high.

Why don't you just join "Dr." Susan Bartell in the Chorus of Teenagers. Here it is for you:
"They said all teenagers scare the living shit out of me
They could care less as long as someone'll bleed
So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose
Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me"

@ Everyone

Can't you picture the Dr Susan Bartell and Jack singing that together? Of course, they're meaning would be totally different than ours.