science
- There are lots of reasons for anything and no single thing can ever fix another without causing issues elsewhere.
- Video games don't make kids psychotic. Chance does.
- Animation isn't an art form strictly limited to juvenile fare. It's just a visual storytelling medium.
- Video games do not create people. People make people. Therefore, video games do not create psychoses.
- Leaving bullying and all forms of abuse uncorrected creates an enormous hole into which people can fall.
- A strong support net that educates kids without coddling them is critical to the development of a well-rounded person.
- We don't learn by being shielded from everything.
- Biology cannot be stopped.
- The cause of a behavior is almost never the most obvious thing.
- Society can change to make things better, but we must be willing to make those changes, no matter how hard.
- I'm a huge nerd.
Anime and video games don't make people psychotic
Western societal ideals have always been broken when it comes to animated content. First, there is the core element that states when you are no longer a child you leave childish things behind and grow up. Adults aren't supposed to like the same things when they were children. Kids drink juice boxes. Adults drink coffee. Kids watch cartoons. Adults watch TV dramas. It's not okay to retain your childhood because that means you aren't responsible. This infects the entire scope of western animation production because it is a core principle that we perpetuate. If you liked Toy Story when you were a kid, it's only valid to look back on it with nostalgia as an adult or share it with your kids. Watching it alone, however, is deviant. Cartoons, after all, are for kids.
Adult animation is an alien concept to much of Western Society.
Of course, that all ignores the reality that is the human animal. First, and most critical, we are not static samples of a human being. We shift and change and grow, but a lot gets locked in by 30. That's not to say we don't add new likes and dislikes, but the range of categories/genre/ideas we accept are generally solidified. As an example, I'm turning 50 on the 14th. I play video games and watch loads of animated content. I've been doing those things since I was a kid and nobody told me to stop doing that and grow up. Do I play the same games and watch the same things I did when I was 10? Of course not. My tastes in animation have grown to seek out the beauty of traditional animation and more complex storytelling.
Now, watch this...
If you can't tell, Doki Doki Literature Club, or DDLC, is a dating sim style game. This is a common form of game in Japanese society, where 13 is the age you are considered old enough to take on real responsibilities by yourself. This idea pervades Japanese media and storytelling, where young protagonists feature everywhere.
But, I digress...
DDLC is a dating sim where you play as a character and interact with other characters. Yet, DDLC is also not like other dating sims because it subverts that genre by introducing psychological horror. The makers of the game clearly state that this is what they are doing and aren't trying to fool anyone. The concept behind the game is the experience, not a Sixth Sense grade twist. When I started playing it, I was already filled with a sense of dread because I was caught up in looking for signs that my mind was getting screwed with. That's one hell of a trick to play on a gamer, and it's effective.
But it is also not a game for kids, and the definition of kid in Japan is 12 and under, so the makers of the game clearly state that this game is for people 13 years of age and older. Period.
That's because the adults are expected to actually parent their children, teach them right from wrong, teach them real from fantasy, teach them how to learn, and foster their growth as individuals. Not only that, but 13 makes a great delineation for adulthood because that's when puberty happens and we become physiological adults, too. Around 13 is when everything changes, and there's nothing stopping it, so many societies say "why bother" and prepare their kids for the inevitable adulthood that comes whether they like it or not.
We look at it differently. Because of our puritanical roots, we don't like what puberty brings, so we construct arbitrary boundaries for adulthood, like the age of 18. It's no surprise that most developed societies apply age limits to a range of things like driving and smoking and drinking and buying guns, but these are things we use and do, they aren't what adulthood is all about. We don't turn 21 to drink beer legally. We turn 21 because that's going to happen no matter what, and having 15 year olds running around drunk driving and smoking while shooting guns out the window seems like a terrible idea.
But applying that arbitrary delimiter to a biological eventuality is just crazy. It only make sense to plan in advance for said eventuality. Treating puberty as if it can be delayed simply adds several layers of complexity to the process of growing up, and that brings the potential for divergence from a neurologically stable place. This is, I propose, one of the key reasons why so many kids get in trouble for fooling around, getting caught drinking illegally, delve into drug use, and many other things westerners see as the problems they are trying to solve with the aforementioned limits.
You go through puberty at 13, but you can't do anything with it until your 18. That should go well.
But, I digress.... again...
The point I am trying to make is two-fold:
You can't blame video games for your kid committing suicide just as the world can't directly blame the parents of the suicidal kid for following through. It is, however, important to note that these two factors are not on the same scale. The video game is a static, external object. The parents, on the other hand, interact with their child daily (I would hope) and their choices go much further in influencing their child's choices and actions, but they didn't murder their child. At the very least, they could be held responsible for not noticing the signs of depression that lead to suicide attempts.
We don't know the recipe of life that leads to suicide in kids, but we do know some of them. Bullying, sexual/physical/verbal/psychological abuse, neglect and abandonment are all serious issues young people face, and how they deal with them depends almost entirely on the foundational development they receive from their parent/parents, friends and family, and other caregivers/educators. If there are too many holes in a kids support net, there is more and more room for bad ideas to pervade.
But even those numerous elements aren't the root/root/root cause. What it really comes down to is the fault of nobody; genetics and environment. Abuse is, without minimizing it, just the operational component. There must also be a structural component upon which the operational crap builds on. It's the same random chance generator that life is that produces kids with Autism or Down's Syndrome or Bipolarity or developmental issues. Psychoses are not, as a rule, created out of whole cloth by a few random interactions. They come from a complex, interwoven, impossibly entangled set of physiological and psychological factors that we just don't understand.
If we all just mimicked what we see in video games, we'd all be dead and the Earth would be a smoking husk. So, clearly, it isn't the fault of video games, and cute stuff isn't specifically marketed to kids, just as vaping juice that tastes like breakfast cereal isn't designed to attract kids. We like the things we like, and some of those things are the same things we liked when we were 9. It's not rocket science. Do you still pick your nose? Did you stop automatically when you turned 18? I do, at least until I found out that I wasn't taking care of my nose properly, and ever since I started using a Neti pot, I don't have to pick any more because I don't produce boogers any more.
Yes, it's gross, but it illustrates my point rather tidily.
So, some of the takeaways:
Amateur Egghead - Why is psychology a science?
In this series, Amateur Egghead, I examine a range of different subjects on which I have no formal education or expertise of any kind. The opinions and thoughts within are my own and will likely piss a bunch of people off, mostly the ones who benefit from the things I talk about. -Ed.
It's difficult to start this without getting directly to the point; why is psychology still a science when the only thing we're learning about the human mind is all about the mechanics of the brain? The brain is the medium in which the "mind" resides, but it is not the mind itself without the person attached to it and the experiences that person has had. Science, as defined by Oxford, is:
"the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment..."
The world, as we know it, is already astonishingly complex, so much so that we don't know more than a fraction of what constitutes knowledge, and we've been hammering away at this ever since we became sentient. Hell, we don't even really know when that happened (though there are some really good guesses out there). Our universe, that which we can perceive and surmise from observation, is immensely enormous and, from our perspective, has no end. How do we even fathom that concept?
There's a bit in Douglas Adams' wonderful Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy trilogy where protagonist Arthur Dent ends up in a cave on Frogstar World B. There he meets Gargravarr, the custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex, a device so hideous that it can destroy your mind.When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there's a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."The device works by extrapolating the existence of everything by scanning a piece of fairy cake (smaller cupcakes made by Brits using sponge cake). Even fictionalizing the entirety of the cosmos as a way of getting back at your nagging wife who complains that you lack perspective is just too big to grok (and I use this term on purpose, as you'll see if you click the link). Existence itself is simply too vast to completely understand beyond our less-than-subatomic little sphere of influence, perched on a tiny speck, floating in a dust cloud billions of times our size, which in turn is a speck that is one trillionth of another larger dust cloud.
It's no wonder people believe in gods.
Even on Earth, life is extraordinarily complex without even discussing the human factor. There are countless billions of all manner of life above and below the water. We discover new species almost every year. This planet, this tiny ball of rock and lava spinning in space, is literally teeming with life. Then there's us. Humans. People.
We, unlike any other species, have evolved the most, at least within terms we can understand (or grok, if you desire a deeper meaning). We alone have progressed beyond the mere simple acts of survival that differently evolved forms of life engage in. Thanks to our opposable thumbs, soft skin, and lack of significant offensive or defensive qualities, we came to develop a range of cognitive defenses that have proven formidable, especially when used against our own kind. Over millions of years and through several different iterations, we became sentient.
Once that happened, all hell broke loose. As soon as people started to understand that they were a "they", we began to develop everything we are today. We look at things and make decisions about them based on prior experience, whether that be where we were born and raised, who are parents were, who are friends were, the good and bad things that happened to us, education, food, sex, trauma, pain, love, everything. All of these have a basis in instinctual behaviors, but are mostly, significantly shaped by our experiences in life. We barely understand our place on Earth, much less in our galaxy in the even more incomprehensibly immense universe, to the point where we still believe in myths like Santa Claus and gods.