'The Demise of Guys'
 

Someone on my facebook posted the article and let's just say it pissed me off.

'The Demise of Guys': How video games and porn are ruining a generation - CNN.com

I know this isn't anything new, someone saying video games have something to do with people acting violently. As a gamer, it just irritates me. Not to mention they are using research that is 58 years old.

Anywho, just wanted to hear your thoughts.

Edit: Sorry, I should of put this in the Pub.

Re: 'The Demise of Guys'
 

I'll keep it here unless one of the other moderators or supers decides otherwise. If you don't want the vultures to descend, you post in GD. :lulz:

Anywho, while the article makes sense in some areas, I don't agree with most of it. Pr0nz/gaming affects any single individual in different ways. For instance, myself. I game a lot, but I like to think that I'm still capable of having and sustaining a relationship. I also vehemently disagree with the fact that games with violence inherently make people aggressive/violent. If anything it's great stress relief. People try and pull that crap with music, too. I've listened to plenty of music spanning many genres and I've never once had the urge to do anything more than I'd do normally, if that makes sense. Music doesn't affect my urges. Video games do not affect my urges. Porn does, but temporarily...*ifyouknowwhatimean.jpg

Re: 'The Demise of Guys'
 

Wonder when they'll find researchers who have actually watched porn, or actually played video games. It's always gotta be something synthetic to prove that it's wrong.

I agree with what Totes says to a degree. But in my opinion, addiction in general affects people differently. If you can get addicted to one thing, there is a pretty good chance you could get addicted to something else entirely. I don't think it's fair to blame video games or porn. I play video games, yet I have healthy relationships with friends and families, and games don't affect me at all. I actually would like to think they've made me smarter, more open to different ideas.

Research doesn't mean a thing anymore. There aren't any effective trials, so people just do one thing and call it case closed.

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This kind of sciencing makes me sad. This generation has different ideals and ways of interacting, the "scientists" and sociologists just want something(s) to blame.

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That Elvis Presley with all his hip gyrating is going to turn our daughters into whores!

Re: 'The Demise of Guys'
 

CNN. What do you expect? They always put the most negative spin on everything that doesn't translate into hatred or murder.

You could equally tell the story from the other direction:

Of course, people are going to prefer video games to sitting in a class listening to some teacher read power-point slides for an hour (that they could have read themselves in five minutes.) Of course people are going to prefer the momentary chemical rush of jacking off to mass-memorising packs of flash cards with dates and names on them so they can write it up in an exam and then forget about it. This is news? People tend not to do those things because those things suck.

If you want people to live life your way - there's got to be something in it for them from the off. You've got to make learning the things you want them to learn fun and creative. Not the least of which is showing that you enjoy those things, that you want to share them with them. You can't pinky-promise that in twenty years, when they've finished their education, they might get to be happy in some a job that you'd like them to have; that they'll just have to put up with the shit in the short-term. Why would they believe following your orders will make them happy at the end when it hasn't made them happy any step of the way there and when it doesn't even seem to make you happy?

You know they did a study that looked at how creative people were. It tested how many different uses for a thing you can think of. Kids who hadn't been to school yet scored incredibly well. Kids who'd been in school a year or so - it was all gone. The way you score highly on the test is by being curious, asking questions like - well what if the item was a hundred feet tall and made of jelly? School had killed that interest in the world; that passion to take what they knew and play around with it and make something of it, that interest to ask the questions in the first place.

Blaming video games is just a way to avoid dealing with the real problems: An education system that threw people overboard thirty years ago in search of ever higher standardised test results. (Repeat after me: if the majority of my paper is quotations or descriptions, I've done nothing more than pigeon-fashion learning.) And a society that largely lacks the freedom and cultural settings for people to develop, at a young age, interpersonal skills as a leisure activity in the first place.

But you know, my bad, it must be the video games that are responsible. Not the fact people have made childhood shitter than it used to be, and there was a small span of years where nothing better was floating around than doing as you were told.

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But hell, like I said, CNN. What do you expect? Let's just stick the label of addiction on the area of high local utility and pretend that it's the happy thing's fault for existing – not the terrible thing's fault for being shit.

Re: 'The Demise of Guys'
 

I found this gem of truth in the comments section.

Why would a man forgo video games and porn for any serious relationship or marriage when over %50 of all marriages end in divorce? For men the risk/reward ratio has tipped against a serious relationship with a woman. Any smart investor knows not to invest in things that have more than a %50 chance of screwing them over.

Don't blame the school, blame the need for countries to compete with each other over stupid things like test scores. The cultures are not the same. The US exports culture and cutting edge technology. The US does well in both of these because creativity is necessary, and the culture allows for people to be creative. Other countries with different cultures don't value creativity the same way, but are still successful.

Re: 'The Demise of Guys'
 

This paragraph is really hard to follow. I'm guessing you mean that the US is abnormally creative, has a culture set up to support creativity, and that the export of cultural artefacts is evidence of this.

However, America seems to command a great cultural influence only in the areas where there is a large, relatively contiguous market, and where centralising things with high static costs makes a difference.

American authors, for instance, don't have a great deal of cultural influence even in Western Europe. Because writing and printing books has comparatively low static costs, the market is more competitive and consequently American produce loses out. It's hard to find exact figures, however, 'in 2002 the total output of new titles and editions in the United States grew to 150,000. Comparitively, in 2002, Spain published more than 62,000 titles, the third-highest total in Europe after Britain and Germany, which published 125,390 and 78,896 respectively (Associated Press).' Statistics in Book Editorial and Marketing

Old figures, but if we just take titles published per capita as our measure of creativity, then America's lagging far behind on account of its much higher population. Whether you're inclined to accept that approach or not, the numbers would certainly suggest that American cultural dominance in that area – especially when you pause to consider that that's publishing total rather than translated and exported total – is not nearly as pronounced as it is for film, (where American exports frequently compose 70% of the market in Western Europe.)

Even in the area of film though, as the ideals of more conservative forms of democracy become increasingly cliché, the market value of the 'American Dream' is decaying in light of the ideals of more social democracies (into whose attractor Europe falls.) American products are being obliged to draw from non-American talents and to make use of non-American scenes and cultural iconography to remain competitive. What are the interesting films going to be this year? I can think of two that I've any interest in: The new Bond movie and The Hobbit. Both English creative works. What's good on TV this season? Primarily what I've an interest in are Japanese cartoons.

In much the manner that Japan imports technologies and management processes and refines them, America seems, increasingly, to be importing culture and repackaging it. It's questionable for how long, and how profitably, that can continue to be done. It's something that, as the static costs come down, almost anyone will be able to do.

You used to get anime – first through smuggling of fan-translated video tapes (and then through online piracy) and then American companies, like Funimation, came along; licensing things and dubbing them for English audiences.... But, now, companies are directly licensing the things, getting fans to subtitle them, and then publishing them directly through the internet. You can do that yourself without the bother of going through a third-party distributor. There's no need to sell stuff to Funimation (or similar companies.)

Instead you'll get companies like Viki.com: licensing stuff, crowd sourcing the localisations, and then licensing it on to streaming media companies like Hulu. Which is essentially just a monetised form of what pirates have been doing for decades without spending much money on it at all....

And there are many upcoming, economically powerful, areas that American culture just doesn't seem to have much penetration to begin with; such as India and China.

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If exceptional creativity, entrenched in a culture that allowed such things to flourish, lay at the root of America's export success in this regard, then you wouldn't expect American cultural dominance to vary across media types, and you wouldn't expect that American culture would have more trouble penetrating India and China than it did penetrating Western Europe.

If, on the other tentacle, American culture had primarily been the hook, rather than the lure. If other countries just hadn't had the same sort of investment base and market/localisation access associated with their primary language to provide something similarly tasty, until technology lowered the initial costs, then that's exactly what you'd expect to find.

As a quick and dirty breakdown of cultural dominance, I'd say that the biggest problem facing Europe as a cultural power is the lack of a single common language. The biggest problem facing India and China – the other upcoming powers – is that they don't have a dream that people can buy into to export. The biggest problem facing America is whether it can adapt to provide something new – whether it actually does have a creative culture or whether it was just the only horse in town for a while that was selling cultural artefacts in line with broadly democratic values.

But it's hard to say which country is more creative. All that is immediately apparent to me is that regimented schooling - which much of the West uses - tends to crush that particular virtue.

Re: 'The Demise of Guys'
 

... and how do you figure that? What vultures? The users that disagree with you? God forbid that.

Anyways with respect to the article, we periodically get these things bemoaning the destruction of the current generation due to some recent technology or perceived materialism of the group. I usually see these more as blanket statements of the youth than a specific gender though.

While this is not gender specific, you pretty much see this all over history when some one complains about the way things are going. You get this as far back as Plato:

"The youth of today love luxury; they have bad manners and contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Youth are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up food at the table, and tyrannize their teachers."

And let's go further back to someone who probably would've thought Plato was spoiled and entitled, the poet Hesiod:

"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for they are reckless beyond words. When I was young, we were taught to be discreet, respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient."

So I see the OP article much in the same way really. If it wasn't online gaming, it was rock music, TV shows, sports, radio shows, it was something.

It's a shame too because I see that one of the opinion piece's authors is Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who the article says was one of those psychologists involved in the Standford Prison Experiment. Everyone who has been through a psychology and/or sociology class or reading a general overview of it, this one comes up a lot about authority figures.