Violence as entertainment... why?

[ThatDaveDude1]

From a perspective concerned with promoting peace:

Unreal Violence > Real Violence

 

[timeadept]

The way i explain it is that i love a challenge. I want to test my self and my skills against other people and that requires some sort of conflict, real or imaginary. It could easily have been sports (the conflict being that both teams are trying to achieve the goal of more points than the other) but it ended up being video games. The easiest way to create conflict in games is to say that these guys are trying to kill you and you're trying to kill them. I think the reason that violence is most common is that when your life is on the line, you would do anything you could to save your self (statement not to be taken to literally). When you kill someone, you know that they were holding nothing back, and so you have just indisputably proven your superiority.

Obviously if we want to become a peaceful society we can't exactly be holding gladiator matches in our backyards, and death is a bit more permanent IRL. So we end up playing games that simulate conflict instead. Oh and this guy said it well so i'll just quote him.

Certain types of violence, like martial arts or chivalric, medieval fantasy, or even soldiers in our armed forces have a sense of idealised honour, glory and heroism attached to them. We don't have any desire to go and do these things in real life, but we're brought up to idolise people who do fight and engage in violence in certain circumstances. Superheroes, for example, or Power Rangers. I don't think of these shows as particularly violent, but I can't say there isn't a huge part of me that just geeks out when I get to play some kind of ancient warrior or ninja or superhero. Completely separate from real life, but still something that's kind of ingrained in our culture.

One more thing though, I think it's part of human nature to be violent. Up until very recent human history we always had to kill for our food and fight with each other over resources. Aggression was advantageous back then but not so much now. Now violence is largely unnecessary, but we still have violent tendencies. Simulated violence could help to satisfy those tendencies, keeping them from being bottled up until we can't contain them any more.

Also with the recent feminist movement there is no longer any need to fight amongst ourselves over women. Girls now often make it very clear if they're interested in you or not, and if not then you really don't have much of a chance against that guy she is interested in. So basically there are very few things left to fight over but we're still left with these violent tendencies.

 

[lozfoe444]

The reason violence is used so often is violence is an easy way to create conflict, and conflict is essencial to a story.
It's also and easy way to resolve conflict. Bad guy shoots guns, good guy shoots more guns, good guy wins.
There are other ways of creating and resolving conflict, but writing is hard, so whatever works to the writers advantage.

 

[moretimethansense]

Because we are predators, we have evolved in such a way that out first response is to be violent, media allow us to indulge these impulses in a safe guilt free environment.

EDIT:

One more thing though, I think it's part of human nature to be violent. Up until very recent human history we always had to kill for our food and fight with each other over resources. Aggression was advantageous back then but not so much now. Now violence is largely unnecessary, but we still have violent tendencies. Simulated violence could help to satisfy those tendencies, keeping them from being bottled up until we can't contain them any more.

Also with the recent feminist movement there is no longer any need to fight amongst ourselves over women. Girls now often make it very clear if they're interested in you or not, and if not then you really don't have much of a chance against that guy she is interested in. So basically there are very few things left to fight over but we're still left with these violent tendencies.

Said better than I can.

 

[Dr Snakeman]

Our natural blood-lust is taking form in tame ways, why insist there is a problem?

We're the exact same creatures that were screaming for blood in Roman arenas a mere blink-of-an-eye ago. We're never going to live in utopian society where violence simply doesn't exist, such idealism is absurd and only afforded by our sheltered lives.

We're not born sick, with a struggle towards wellness. It's the expectations that we have created for ourselves that are warped, and we live our lives in internal conflict because of it. Accept the human experience for what it is, you could be pragmatic about making changes for an arguably objective "better", but talk about how things "should be" is worthless...and frankly unsubstantiated in every case.

Thank you, sir, for voicing my opinion for me. People are violent. Always have been, always will be. To think that we are somehow "better" than those who came before is naive.

 

[timeadept]

Violence is only frowned upon if your the loser.

Or maybe this topic is just stupid or misinformed, misunderstood or pointless, whatever... just tell me what you think?

yeah, that and this threads brought up too much and always replied with the simple answer "You no like violence?"

Violence is frowned upon because it doesn't decide who is right, just who is left. I'm paraphrasing a quote there but i can't remember from whom. But it means that if we want to advance as a society then we need to leave violence behind. We need to learn to come to decisions through discussion so that we can find the best solution to the problem rather than the person with the bigger stick always getting to decide.

It's a good question actually, and you're selling your self short if you settle on a simple answer.

*EDIT* Found it!
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
Bertrand Russell

 

[Hader]

I'll never understand anyone's entertainment by real violence. Especially when it results in such pain and death to another human. I blame the Romans.

 

[timeadept]

Violence is only frowned upon if your the loser.

Or maybe this topic is just stupid or misinformed, misunderstood or pointless, whatever... just tell me what you think?

yeah, that and this threads brought up too much and always replied with the simple answer "You no like violence?"

Violence is frowned upon because it doesn't decide who is right, just who is left. I'm paraphrasing a quote there but i can't remember from whom. But it means that if we want to advance as a society then we need to leave violence behind. We need to learn to come to decisions through discussion so that we can find the best solution to the problem rather than the person with the bigger stick always getting to decide.

It's a good question actually, and you're selling your self short if you settle on a simple answer.

*EDIT* Found it!
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
Bertrand Russell

and like I said, who is left can dictate what is right, whether it was right or wrong.

That may be true but it's not the kind of world i want to live in. Besides, you said that only the loser dislikes violence. I don't care if I win, not everything is worth fighting over. Or rather, few things are worth killing for.

 

[GrizzlerBorno]

Spoiler: A Quote from The Matrix

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization." -Agent Smith, The Matrix (1999)

.....And I agree.
People don't want Peace. They want the Illusion of Peace.

People want Death and destruction; but they also want to do no harm to themselves or to the ones they love. Hence they draw Wall paintings of Hunting Giant Mammoths. Read Books about felling entire Cities. Watch Movies about deranged Serial killers. Play games about shooting virtual people in the face......... and ONLY when the Illusion no longer cuts it, they find a justification for shooting REAL people in the face....

 

[Gigano]

All kinds of reasons for that; primitive instincts and alpha male fighter mentality, working off frustrations, wanting to "rebel" in a harmless way, experience something you'd never see in real life etc.

Running down a pedestrian, breaking the side window, dropping a grenade beside him and speeding away as the explosion sends him soaring is simply good fun.

...In a game. In real life it would be horribly traumatic to even just witness.

The norms of fiction and reality don't match up, since there's no actual persons in the fictional world to direct real ethics and empathy at, and since the chain of cause and effect - unbreakable in the real world - is suspended entirely in the fictional world; Different worlds, different rules.

So "murder simulators" like GTA - or even something with much less mainstream acceptance like Rapelay - really have little bearing on or relation to the values and actions going on in the real world. At least for the immense majority of relatively normal stable people for whom the lines of fantasy/reality are instinctively quite clear.

 

[veloper]

Let people blow of steam and maybe break a game controller, instead of doing real harm.

Humans are primates, so violence is a given. We like it, aslong as were not the victim.