trader/warrior
Deity
I don't think desensitizing through entertainment media really works unless there are underlying reasons that aggrivate it.
You get desensitized towards games as you play it, sure, I remember playing GTA3 and going on those rampage missions where you have to get 30 decapitation headshots in a row with squirting blood animations and everything and thinking very little of it, when I saw that again recently I was a bit surprised. You don't really see that level of rewarding crazy violence in so mainstream games nowadays. I get a slightly weird feeling when watching what people do in GTA V now as well, but if I played it for a couple of hours I would probably think nothing of mowing down people in my car as most end up doing when playing it. It's interesting with the newer GTA's that everything is so much more realistic than earlier games that rewarding rampages in such an obvious fashion would probably be too off-putting that even rockstar wouldn't do it.
But in the end I think people can simply distinguish real violence from pretend violence on a basic level. I remember hearing somewhere that on an instinctual level fighting and self-preservation is an important factor in how humans play just like it obviously is in almost all other animals and this is one of the reasons violence is so prevalent in forms of entertainment. Your brain will interprit it purely as play rather than danger or aggression. Actually I think someone who has seen a lot of fake violence will be possibly even more shocked when faced with the real thing.
On the idea that it can highlight suffering in the third world and such, wouldn't that be more like sensitizing?
If you want to see a society desensitized to violence someone like a medieval citydweller would probably be extremely desensitized through regularly seeing helplessly diseased and injured people, public executions, torture and experiencing street violence, compared to a modern person who would flinch from watching the butcher of an animal he is about to eat.
You get desensitized towards games as you play it, sure, I remember playing GTA3 and going on those rampage missions where you have to get 30 decapitation headshots in a row with squirting blood animations and everything and thinking very little of it, when I saw that again recently I was a bit surprised. You don't really see that level of rewarding crazy violence in so mainstream games nowadays. I get a slightly weird feeling when watching what people do in GTA V now as well, but if I played it for a couple of hours I would probably think nothing of mowing down people in my car as most end up doing when playing it. It's interesting with the newer GTA's that everything is so much more realistic than earlier games that rewarding rampages in such an obvious fashion would probably be too off-putting that even rockstar wouldn't do it.
But in the end I think people can simply distinguish real violence from pretend violence on a basic level. I remember hearing somewhere that on an instinctual level fighting and self-preservation is an important factor in how humans play just like it obviously is in almost all other animals and this is one of the reasons violence is so prevalent in forms of entertainment. Your brain will interprit it purely as play rather than danger or aggression. Actually I think someone who has seen a lot of fake violence will be possibly even more shocked when faced with the real thing.
On the idea that it can highlight suffering in the third world and such, wouldn't that be more like sensitizing?
If you want to see a society desensitized to violence someone like a medieval citydweller would probably be extremely desensitized through regularly seeing helplessly diseased and injured people, public executions, torture and experiencing street violence, compared to a modern person who would flinch from watching the butcher of an animal he is about to eat.
