 Hi, I'm Scott. I'm Grim. We are the host of Geekmise. It is a podcast. If you like hearing us talk for some reason, instead of listening to good music, you can on your whatever device you have. Listen to us talk. It's totally free. Just like at the Jillian MP3s. You go to our website. There they are. Okay, something going on back there. Today we are going to talk about the real harm of games. Are games harmful? Right? Oh, they're so harmful. Everyone just came to this convention to hurt themselves. Maybe. It just passes the big old spike pit. Everyone jumped on it. All right, real harm of games. So, we're going to talk about some history. All right, so going back even further than Satame Chi's time. All right, many games have been viewed as, you know, like vice, right? They're hurting people. You know, dice and gambling. That's only for Yakuza and other, you know. Well, think about movies. Think about movies. You'll see like the classic trope of like the shady people in the pool hall, like playing pool and someone pulls out at night. Or the shady people rollin' dice in the back of the ship instead of doing what they're supposed to do in the British Navy. Yeah, there's an old musical about River City. But not this River City. This River City, right? And a major plot point of this movie is that in order to swindle the town, right, into giving him a lot of money, right, Professor Hill, he convinces them that this, you know, this pool table, this billiards hall that's being set up in the town that is becoming more popular is going to turn all the young boys into the town until the lazy do nothings who just sit around and play pool all day, right? Another example of society considering games to be a source of ill, right? Not a source of good. Now, it's been very tied to classism and like culture at different times. So some games were seen as elevated. They were the games of the educated classes. They are aristocracy. Other games were seen as played by undesirables. They were associated with the kinds of people you don't want in your town, meaning institutional racism, all that sort of stuff. So this is a long history here. That we're not super experts on, but you've all seen it in pop culture. You know, in Zantouichi's time, you know, playing dice is not okay, or at least viewed is not okay, but playing go is like, oh, we're playing go. Yeah. Professor Harold Hill's time, while he feels real person, playing chess would be like, oh, playing chess, but playing pool, no good, right? So this is history of viewing certain games or some games as being harmful, whether they were or not, right? Especially here, anyone know who this is? Who's in the picture? That's Marilyn Gordia, right? They say, the rumor is, is that he was mad at pinball because he was short and insecure about his stature, and so he couldn't play the pinball games, right? But the excuse that they used for instituting a ban on pinball in New York City up until the early 70s was that pinball was- 1970s. Yeah, 1970s was that it was a scam by the mafia, right? We're setting up pinball machines to trick kids out of their money, right? It was like, oh, they're setting up these machines to take money from the kids and give it to the mob boss. Because those for really needs those dimes. They added up those dimes. Dime was a lot in 1960, 50, whatever, right? Time was big money then. You could buy like a whole ice cream for them. But this even, so we used to live in upstate New York in a town called Beacon, and Beacon made the news because someone made a retro arcade that had old classic arcade games and pinball machines. It was really awesome. It was a crazy place. These are like mechanical machines. This guy was like one of those crazy old collector dudes. He collected all these awesome old games, kept them in like perfect condition that you have a birthday party there, right? It was an awesome place. But because there was still some old kind of pinball noise ordinance- There was a law in Beacon that's over a hundred years old that banned pinball and amusements of its sort in the town. So a nosy neighbor used that law to get this place shut down. But yeah, this is the real thing that happened. This is like some joke image, right? But yeah, pinball was viewed as evil. Now pinball is like really wholesome, right? It's like a family kind of activity, right? Okay, so of course, also, D&D and many other things were viewed as demonic and satanic. It is very easy for all of you to laugh at this because many of you are somewhat young, but I grew up in the 80s and this was still a thing in the 80s. I literally lost a friend in middle school because his mom thought that Dungeons & Dragons would turn that kid into a Satanist and would never let me speak to him again. These aren't fake newspapers. These are real articles from real newspapers. Look, the Daily Trojan, wherever that is. I guess where the Trojan is like college basketball team, so I imagine that's- Dungeons & Dragons just harmless fun or sorcery? If it was legit sorcery, I'd be playing a lot more D&D, right? And of course, in the bottom right is a frame from a Chick Tracks. If you don't know what Chick Tracks are, you can Google that. I don't got time for that right now. You can consider yourselves lucky. Yeah, or not, yeah. They're kind of funny now. But the fact that even in the 80s and 90s, this- it was and to a degree is still a thing. Magic the Gathering was banned in my high school because some of the teachers thought that it was an anti-Christian influence. Right. You know, it's like, you know, this kind of belief has been around for a super long time, right? Rock and Roll was viewed as like the devil, right? You can't show Elvis swinging his hips around because that's the devil, right? And it's not a gone away, right? It hasn't gone away. Harry Potter and Pokemon have both, right? I can find new- I found these three articles for both of these where it's like, yeah, people really believe that these things are going to turn your kids into Satan worshipers and they're super harmful in bed. And the thing is, they were actually totally right. Satan's got awesome. Satan is awesome. Right? Sadly, they were wrong about the sorcery part because if I had sorcery, I wouldn't be here. But I totally think Satan is cool. Or I would be giving a very different panel right now. Totally different panel. Yeah, this is guys. This is how you summon a whole bunch of friends to play D&D with him. Way from their jobs. But on a high level, to get more to our serious talk, what does this mean? We see, like, society in America deciding that a certain thing, some games or some media that kids are playing is going to corrupt them in some way and the corruption they saw was that it will make them Satan worshipers and they also assumed that being a Satan worshiper would be harmful. They were wrong most of those steps but you can see how that cultural perception would lead to this feeling that games will corrupt my children and it uses the fears of the people of the time. Right, so they were right about this one that it will turn you into liking Satan but they were wrong and that it won't really harm you. I don't think I'm harmed by thinking Satan is awesome. Check out that statue. I'll put that in my house. I had room for it. Anyway, all right, so things really got hot. This is in my memory, right? In the early 90s, when Mortal Kombat came out, right? This was like the big deal. It was on every local news station, right? Mortal Kombat. It was like, this was pretty much, you know, there were video games before this that were definitely unacceptable for children like Custer's Revenge or something. But those were not games that people here probably don't even know the game. Don't look it up. But you know, these games are ultra rare. They weren't sold anywhere. They didn't, right? Mortal Kombat was like in every shopping mall and you go to the burger joint. There's a Mortal Kombat. You go to the Super Nintendo. There's a Mortal Kombat, right? It was just all over the TV. There were commercials while you're watching cartoons, right? Mortal Kombat was the measly, the first ultra-modeling game that got the attention of the population and we found a local news clip to watch to prove to you in case you're younger than us. Oh, the national news. How about that? Get over here. Mortal Kombat, the objective is to finish off your opponent. Violent. I remember when that kid in my class ripped out the other kids' heart and ate it. Oh, kids. Including the actual PTA, say such video games contributed to violence in real life. And television captain Kangaroo says parents are not... She really hated video games if you didn't know this. These are not harmless toys that they can indeed put great emotional and other damage to reflect. Yeah, when I lost. We asked to establish a rating system to protect children who were subjugated. We did do that. What happened to you guys? I don't like this game. Bodies? Wait, what? My spine seems to still be in my body. If you had a snag at one point, it's there. I'm not going to try to hide my brother from that. Even so... That's the best dad. That dad's like, what are you talking about? Look at those youngsters. Go back and watch those hearings and have a fun time. They're really depressing. So this was like the first really like wide on the TV. The D&D thing was in the local newspaper. It wasn't really on the national news. Mortal Kombat. This is on the national news, scaring people to video games or any kind of game will harm your children. Watch out. Now when we saw this new stuff, my mom was like, who are we going to get that game? All right. So eventually this led to this guy named Jack Thompson. And then much later, we had the response from Jake McGonagall. So we're going to talk about these two people. Even though these people have no direct relation to each other, I've never seen them talk about each other, even or mention each other or recognize each other's existence. But it's like, these are basically the exact opposite people on this issue, right? Jack Thompson. Possibly on this earth. Yeah. Jack Thompson, he came around not really in the Mortal Kombat days, though he's definitely old enough to have seen those days. He mostly became active more in the Grand Theft Auto Times, which was really only like five, six years after that. It really wasn't that much time. And Gene McGonagall, basically 10 years after that came around, right? So let's talk about Jack Thompson. Everyone knows what Jack Thompson is? No, maybe. Only a few people. I am not a lawyer. And neither is he anymore. So Jack Thompson in the early 2000s, in the video game community, right, was a huge deal. This guy, he was suing video game companies. He was all over the news, all over the CNN, all over pretty much everything, yelling and screaming about how, you know, video games, Grand Theft Auto was going to turn kids into psycho massacre nut jobs who were going to shoot everyone up, right? We need to ban these things. He thought that he legitimately believed, and probably still does, that it was like a serious crisis, right? That like, that playing video games would turn you into a mass murderer the same way that smoking will give you cancer. He really believed that, right? That's who he was. And he was so creative, it wasn't just that he believed that, it was the way he behaved. He was like, some sort of like ambulance chasing lawyer, right? And that he would like, put all kinds of lawsuits, right? He even, the people who run this convention, talk to him, right? Because as you imagine, the topic of many Penny Arcade comics in those days was this guy who was like the biggest story in the video game news community and the video game media, right? So they also made comics saying like, yeah, video games are not going to turn you into a killer, right? We make all these funny comics, we don't kill anyone. There's this whole building full of people. No one's died this weekend, I hope, right? Most of us in this building have seen or played Mortal Kombat and we haven't ripped anyone's spine out of their head. Like Jack Thompson was so aggressive going after video games that we even had a rule on our podcast where he came up with the news so often. Our podcast started in 2005, that's why it was old enough to... We could not talk about him again unless he did something even crazier than the last thing he did and we still talked about him a lot. Yeah, I guess if you listen to early Geek Nights we always say like, Jack Thompson. Jack Thompson. We always say his name in a funny way. Guess who's in the news again? It's Jack Thompson, he's coming for your Mortal Kombat. Alright, so this guy is the epitome of the video games will harm you bad guy historically. But because he was so bad a lawyer I guess he was disbarred. I guess he had to be a pretty bad lawyer to be disbarred. I think he's still in Florida doing something but luckily we have not heard from him in a long time. But he was alarmist and wrong about basically everything he said about video games. No marriage, any argument he made at any point. Right. So now, right, because Penny Arcade dealt with Jack Thompson, right, and they sort of thwarted him I guess somehow. They actually had to deal with another guy who was a local radio show host like in the Seattle area who espoused many of the same Jack Thompson ideas and that battle with that guy directly led to the existence of child's play that you now see all over PAX. They were like, look, games don't turn us gamers into bad people. We are good people. We will prove it. Look at this charity we made. And I guess to date they've raised $44 million in something. I probably just added a whole bunch of this number at this PAX because I took the screenshot before I left the house. Before I bought a lot of cookies. Right. Child's play exists because they wanted to prove people like Jack Thompson wrong. And arguably they did. Like this is a... That radio, Jack Thompson, never apologized for anything but the radio show guy did. He was like, oh, I'm sorry. But no one can disagree. Child's play does good work. It makes the world a better place and it is a direct result of games. I'm just trying to show you these things to show you like the place that we are in now. This PAX East has a strong connection to the story that we are telling you about, you know, going back to Saturiji's time. Right. It's brought us here today. All right. So let's talk about Jane. Jane McGonigal. She gave the keynote at this event in this building in... 2011. 2011. The first PAX East that was in this building. Right. So the second PAX East, the first one in this building, she gave the keynote. Right. Who is she? Well, this is exactly what she says she is. Right. In her own words, she's a PhD. She believes game designers are on a humanitarian mission. She thinks games will make the world a better place that they're a net positive for humanity as a whole. Right. So this is the exact opposite. It's not only the games aren't harmful. Jane McGonigal says games are actually beneficial. Right. Because we all play games, we are not only not turning into bad people or hurting ourselves. We are making ourselves better by playing games. Playing games is like eating health food and doing exercise and all these other things, you know, doing charitable works. Right. Do playing games makes things better for you and for everybody. Now, one of the arguments around this is that we're mammals, right? Mammals intrinsically play with each other. Play is in many ways a form of learning to address consequences and face problems without dying as a result of making poor decisions along the way. I learned how to fight by fighting other puppies. Now I can fight real dogs when I'm bigger. Right. Play is definitely not exclusive to humans. I just saw a Twitter video like this week of like some crows on a snowy windshield like rolling down the windshield having some fun and going back to the top and rolling down again. This wasn't, this is obviously play. There's no other reason the crow would do that other than to have fun. And he was definitely hopping about in a happy kind of way. Okay. So, Jane's work. So what has Jane done? She wrote this book called Reality Is Broken that she was promoting here when she did her work. Right. The book is exactly what it says on the cover. Why games make us better and how they can change the world. I have the book. I didn't read the whole book. It's kind of long. I'm really bad at reading nonfiction. I like to be a wizard story because, you know, I like Satan. I like a wizard story or a sci-fi story better. But, you know, I read most of it. Right. And that's exactly what the book is about. You list all these different ways. Like, oh, this study, this study, right. The games have helped these people do something else. And this is very much more interesting to our talk right here. She made something called Super Better, which is a game that is designed to help you cope with mental issues, with physical issues, with injuries. And there is real evidence that it is therapeutic. Like a drug might be. Right. She herself had concussion problems and made this to help herself and then adapted it to help other people. Right. And in fact, playing Super Better for 30 days improves mood, reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression, results from randomized controlled study controlled by the University of Pennsylvania. This is a true thing. Super Better is proven as much as any other medicine you buy over the counter that's real and isn't fake. So proven to help you. As an aside, I highly recommend if any of you think something like this could help you, go get Super Better and try this game out. It's just an app. What do you got to lose? Might as well try it. Worst case you get bored with it and go back to Mortal Kombat. There is a better chance of this helping you get better than there is of Mortal Kombat doing anything bad to you. Right. Okay. So I got to say, I'm sort of afraid to do this panel a little bit because, you know, we're going to talk about, you know, are there, are there ways in which games could harm you? Right. Are, you know, we showed you that Jack Thompson was wrong and James right. But are there other things about games? Are there harmful games out in the world? Right. And I don't want people to view me as Jack Thompson because it seems that everyone who ever comes along, like Principal Skinny here, and it's like, uh, games are harmful in this other way. No, maybe they're harmful in this way, gets, you know, reacted to in the same way that we reacted to Jack Thompson. Just Thompson was wrong and thus should receive that reaction. But if someone does find a way in which games are harmful and they're right, should they be Jack Thompson? Right. And we see this with, like, nerd culture in general where we as a community get very defensive when people attack our hobbies. Possibly because they've been under attack because they were Satanists and all these other reasons for so long, a lot of people are into nerdy things feel like, oh, this hobby is under assault by the outside world for reasons. They get real defensive. So it's very hard in that climate to have real introspection and real reflection on what our hobbies really do. There are things I like that suck or are bad for me, but I still like them and do them and I hope I understand the harms I'm doing. So standing on a stage of packs and possibly saying that games could be harmful, could be troublesome, especially because look at what we just said, super better is clinically shown to help people, to change people. That means games can change people in a clinical way. Medicine, you're giving me shit. I didn't do that. It's not just that. Anyway, it's everyone else who's wrong. So medicine exists in the same world that poison does. If super better is like medicine, then it is possible there is a video game equivalent of poison. That is a entirely possible. We cannot discount that possibility. So I was, you know, when I came up with this panel and I go, do I really want to give this panel? Well, I'm giving it, so whatever. All right. So which of these people is right? Jack Thompson is obviously wrong, Jane was right, but on the question of violence, making you violent or games helping you, but on the larger question of can games be harmful or games are never harmful? Well, we'll see about that because we're now going to go through all right, starting with the question to be already answered, right? Do violent games make players violent? Now I grew up playing horrifically violent video games, my entire life, also watching horrifically violent movies. I saw Vampire Hunter D, the original, when I was like eight years old because my mom wanted me to and I saw it with my little brother who was two and a half years younger than me. We turned out fine. I have not sliced any vampires in half. So the problem is, you know, no one in this building that I know of horrifically violent acts. Hopefully they would be banned from packs forever. Does anyone raise your hand if you have? Let me just get my phone out. The problem is, is the plural of anecdote is not data. Survivor bias is a thing. If cool kids close their eyes and run across the freeway, everyone who survives that can say, hey, I survived it. What's wrong with your kids? Survivor bias is the thing. I might just be immune to violence in video games. I might turn violent 40 years from now. I'm just a piece of anecdotal data. So I went and I did a slight amount of effort and went together and found some citations from some studies on the internet. And I'm not going to pretend to understand these studies or to have read them in full because that costs money and I'm not a doctor. So I have provided links for you to read them yourself or to maybe find the opinion of a more intelligent person. But the summary that I got from all these studies that I found was most likely not. The AP review, there was an AP review that does confirm a link between playing video games and aggression. It did not provide any sort of link between playing violent video games and committing violent crimes. It just, you know, it was more like, oh, you've played these violent games and now your attitude is more aggressive, right? You are in a more aggressive mood after you play the games. I prefer the term assertive. Yes. But in the same vein, violent video games found not to be associated with adolescent aggression, Oxford, right? Research is the University of York found out evidence to support the theory of video games make players more violent, right? Just playing video games and violent content temporarily increase aggressive inclinations, a pre-registered experimental study, that is a meta study that looked at a whole group of studies all about the same thing, and it lent much more on the side of the, no, it doesn't, right? So again, most likely not, based on non-scientists reading actual scientific papers that you should read yourself. Valid video games will not turn you into a violent person, right? Okay, we answered one. We haven't found any harms yet. Let's see if we can find any harms in any other areas, right? Do games help train you to be violent? This is a different question. Now this game, if anyone's not familiar with this game, Police Quest was this like twinkly adventure, kind of like Dragon Quest, but you're a cop doing real-life cop things. It's really technical and boring and realistic. I like these games, but SWAT was a weird version of this game. It was promoted by Daryl Gates. If you read the history of Daryl Gates, he's problematic, but he's part of the reason why police departments are the way they are today. For good or bad. And this game was a realistic sort of training simulator that was coached as just another Police Quest game that taught you real SWAT team tactics. Like, here is how to sweep a room. Here is how firing drills work. Here are the protocols and procedures for breaching things. This is like an old DOS game. It looks pretty good in the still shots because it's pre-rendered graphics. Oh yeah, this is like 40p if you actually play the video. Yeah, yeah, it's real bad. But yeah, so the question is right. So even though video games didn't make me into a violent person, I'm just a violent person, right? Are there video games that I could go get and use to train myself to be more effective to enact my violent plan? Will PUBG make me more dangerous? I've decided to shoot people because I'm bad, not because video games didn't make me that way, but I don't know how to shoot people. Is there some video game I can go get and learn how to shoot people and then do a horrible thing because of that with the case, we shouldn't be distributing basically these like guides to hurt people, right? To the general public, right? So is this a thing that is true? Yes and no. So, no. If you go and like play Counter-Strike and then I give you a gun, you will be useless with that if that is the only thing you know about guns. You will not know how to load the gun. You will not know how to shoot the gun. You will hurt yourself. You probably will shoot yourself. I just imagined someone trying to rob the bank with a desert eagle. Right. Even though video games might depict weapons and other violent things realistically, the vast majority of the games, even the very realistic ones that you get at home like say ARMA is a super realistic military game, will not actually teach you very much about how to use weapons, how to hurt people or how to do anything like that. And the reason for that, I poked into these studies a little bit, because yes, ARMA is a hyper realistic game where you like twiddle all the different knobs on a rifle and then use it. But you're not gaining the muscle memory of actually doing those with a physical object. So it doesn't really teach you anything more than reading a book would teach you for these kinds of things. Right. So video game violence, the military and game developers can't both be right. Game developers were like, no, no, it's safe. But the military, meanwhile, is using video games to train people. To train drone pilots. To train fighter pilots. Right. Why would they be using games to train people if it didn't work? And the reason is because when you make the game as a simulator that fully simulates the real world, then actually yes. Yes, it can train you. If you fly in a plane simulator, you will learn how to drop bombs on people. And then when you go on the real plane, it will be just like that except for maybe the G-forces, but they even try to simulate that as well. Now this wasn't a problem for a long time because a flight snow no matter how good your DOS computer was, you couldn't get a flight simulator. Go play Microsoft Flight Simulator for Windows 95 and tell me if you can fry it. But a real flight simulator that like, you get actual flight hours towards your pilot's license going in real simulators that cost tens of millions of dollars. So fun fact, I have logged four hours in a legit Army Air Force F-16 Flight Simulator full cockpit for reasons. It's really hard to fly them, but I can almost take off an F-16. So theoretically, if you put me in an F-16 fighter, there's a small chance I will get it into the air. So for now, this isn't really a great concern, but as you can see in the Expo hall, it's full of VR, a lot of VR. So as the VR comes and becomes more of a thing and it's something people have in their houses maybe, I don't believe that's actually going to happen as soon as other people believe it will happen. VR's awesome, I don't know why you're so down on it. I just think it's way behind where people feel it is. Super hot taught me how to be real dangerous. But the point is, you can imagine a VR game that is like Arma, right? And that instead of having those weird VR controllers, we have like a, you know, an M-16 made of plastic or something, but functions exactly like a real M-16 and that could theoretically train you to hurt people and maybe we shouldn't make that. Or here's another easier example. At least not make it available to people in their homes. Here's a game we can make today. A lot of police departments use shoot-don't-shoot simulators. Now, these don't work as well as they should. Hogan's Alley. For reasons mostly related to racism I don't want to get into. But the simulators are like Hogan's Alley VR. They're like VR before VR existed where they play videos and you'd have a fake gun and like a situation happens and you have to decide if you're going to shoot or not shoot. And those are used to train people to shoot guns effectively in those kinds of situations. It would be trivial to make that game in VR and it would make a person more effective in those very narrow situations at engaging in violence. So yeah, it is possible to theoretically make a harmful video game but it is not a concern right now. All right, sports injuries. We always get to do this at a Geek Nights panel to remind all the nerds that sports are games. Sports are games. You can't get her playing sports really, really badly. He was harmed by the game. That's true. Directly, the game hurt him. There's no argument. That is real. It's real. It's the game's fault. If the game did change the rules that the game was played differently, it wouldn't be hurt. Now, Kobe lying on the ground is one thing. He'll hold his ankle probably. Right? But there are very much more serious sports injuries, right? It's like you can play basketball and maybe a whole career without hurting yourself. It's not that dangerous, right? But if you play football, you will be harmed. Yeah. Your brain will be bashed by football. It will most likely... There's tons of research on this now. There is a game. You will probably get CT or get some kind of brain damage if you play a lot of full-contact American football. Nothing about that. It is a harmful game to the players. We have this argument of, oh, video games will hurt people or whatever, but America has a multi-generational game, one of the most popular games on Earth that causes direct harm to the brains of everyone who plays it. And we're all mostly okay with this. No one's being like, oh, we got both. Now they are. Some people are starting to feel like, no, I'm not going to let my kid play football. They will play tennis or golf. But during all those times when they were smashing pinball machines and playing D&D with Satan, football no one thought that they were like, yes, my kids are playing football. Great. Nice and wholesome. Back when they were smashing pinball machines, people played hockey without helmets or masks. So... All right. So sports injuries are real, but obviously we're packed. We're not going to talk about sports too much. We are going to talk about hockey. And people like it. I told you. Okay. People have this sort of, you know, conceptual idea. Like, all right, yeah, if you play a lot of esports, you're going to hurt your wrist. You'll get carpetunnel, right? You'll bust up your arm or you'll hurt your eyes, right? You're staring at a screen all day. You're going to mess up your vision. They have these ideas, but is that really true? Are you really going to mess up your eyes by staring, sitting too close to the TV or staring at it for too long? Do you know anyone who's had that problem because they played too many esports, right? Well, the answer is I did research and I said, yes, absolutely, you will mess up your hand and wrist. There was a dude, right? What's the dude's name again? Hacks. He was a big time Smash Brothers player. Big time, right? And because of the way you hold a game, you control it when you play Smash Brothers. You don't hold like a normal human being. You do something called the claw. Right. This is not a fake thing. This is real. Not a made-up story. Right? Luckily, your eyes won't get messed up. Right? Sitting too close to the screen, staring at the screen all day. Actually, I found a study video games improve vision because you're really good at focusing on things and looking around real fast. There we go. Now the jury is out on certain kinds of screens and very young children whose eyes are still developing. I don't know if you want to put your kids in the VR helmet all day. That might not be the best idea. That would be a good way to make a skinner box, though. A lot of people out there are vaping, acting like it's not hurting them. It's like, yeah, probably not the best idea. It might be better than smoking, but probably don't want to be like, oh, kids, safe to vape. No, it's not too bad. Stay away from that as much as we can. That's bad news. But yeah, there are a lot of people. It's not just hacks. There are a lot of Korean Starcraft players who have just totally messed up their hands and can't reach the APMs they could before and are forced to retire due to injury, just like any sort of basketball player. Luckily, they raised their hand and out their brain so you can still live the rest of your life, but your esports career could end. So they're at harm of games. These games were and it's the game's fault, right? Starcraft could have been designed differently, but it was designed in such a way that if you want to win at that game and be the best, you have to push buttons really, really fast and because they designed the game that way, playing it a lot will hurt you. Smash Brothers was designed in such a way not intended to be an esport, but if you play it to be the best you can I heard my wrist kind of badly snaking in Mario Kart. That's a good example. Mario Kart DS has a snaking mechanic. If you want to win in Mario Kart DS, just keep doing this and you will hurt your hand doing that. And it's a real thing that happens. It's not some joke. Okay, don't think that the tabletop world is immune from the injuries. Right? So Jungle Speed and play Jungle Speed? No? Okay, you should play Jungle Speed. It's at this bunch of copies in the library. The Jungle Speed that they have finally in the United States for the first time I'm aware of, you release Jungle Speed with the wooden totem. If you don't know how Jungle Speed works, in this game you flip over cards one at a time going around the table and it's not a slow game it's called Jungle Speed for a reason because when cards are matching are revealed players must reach out and grab the totem as fast as possible and you can imagine trying to snatch this wooden totem while other people's hands are going at it. Can truly result in injury. Not a joke, totally real. That is, and by the way we found this post we googled we said Jungle Speed broken finger to see if anyone else hurt themselves because one of our friends did. And we found this post and then we noticed after the fact that the post is by famous RPG designer Jason Morningstar. So Jason Morningstar the designer of fiasco who might be at this pack broke his friend's finger. Crazy, he says he's not here but he's still broke his finger playing Jungle Speed. It's a real argument, so if you're making a tabletop dexterity game which is in my opinion a sport you need to make it in such a way sadly without the awesome wooden totem that will hurt people. Now think back to this moment because right before we talked about this we just said oh they brought back the more dangerous one it's more fun you should all play it. You should get the more dangerous one. Alright. So, alright so we're not going to go too much on this because this with every single panel at every tax and other gaming event talks about but it has to be said unequivocally this was nothing more than a harassment hate movement it was a practice run for white supremacy this is some bullshit right here. But the question you want to ask because the panel is about the harm of games so how much of this was the fault of games the game's fault the game developer is fault for making games for making games in a certain way how much of this was their fault so there obviously aren't pretty much any studies on this but we did do a panel at PAX East way back. 2011? Super long time ago and what I know it's just things that I noticed just anecdotes which again the plural of them are not data but what I noticed was that certain games when you look at the design of them and you know it just seems like the one game I looked at was this MOBA called Heroes of New Earth which recently shut down permanently and this game was designed in such a way that like you join a game at random and your success and failure is highly dependent on your teammates right? and the design of the game was such that it would make me really angry to play or really sad to play if my teammates were better than me they would really hate me because I'm dragging them down into the dirt and now they can't win and I was really better than my teammates than I was really angry that they were dragging me down right? so playing that game even though it wasn't really violent it was just like wizards casting spells they were near mortal combat made me a lot more angry than playing mortal combat right? and also the community was so harassing it was so surreal and horrible possibly because of the way the game was designed right? and I looked at other games you know even other Moba's games in the same genre and the communities around those games were a lot more welcoming right? you saw a whole bunch of games in the same genre and you could sort of see design decisions between these different games that caused more or less levels of harassment going on right? you play Hearthstone where you can't chat with your opponent and you know okay obviously when you look at the community in its forums and its other places it seems to be a lot better than the communities of other card games where people are allowed to chat right with each other so no studies we can't have any conclusive statement on whether games cause people to become angry harassers right? but it seems that when you look there is some correlation between the design of games and the behaviors of the community around those games and I want people to look into this which is why there are other harassment brigades that happen very similarly to this in non-video game areas like there's a comics gate thing where they're going after people there's an anime voice actor thing going on it's always the same type of harassment brigade that functions the same way so it's not unique to video games so the best we can say is that this is something that is happening in media among fandoms of anything right now is there something that like the comic book writers could have done in the stories or artwork of their comic books to cause their audiences to behave differently I don't know but you know think about it come on what's wrong with you alright so the harms that video games cause upon the people who make them right is that how much of that right obviously a large part of that is the fault of capitalism right but how much of that is the fault of the game right back in the day the first games arcade games they were designed in such a way to rake in the quarters right and thus people designed games such that they were the kind of game that people would put a lot of quarters in right and that's how the developers were paid then we switched over to where you make a big game and you sell it for a pile of money right and now developers this is where the crunch came from because in order to make more money selling games you had to make bigger and better games that you could sell for a higher price and you had to make lots of them so people were and you had to then lost even more money and took even more people and more work and more time it gets even more late capitalist than that the easiest way to make money is to take something you're already making and just make it cheaper by whatever means necessary and we see the toll in the like the work-life balance if there is even any balance anymore of a lot of people who make games some of you are nodding along in very solemn sad agreement right now right and nowadays we've reached another stage we're actually you know by making these and ways to just keep making more money on the same game that actually makes developers' lives better they make one game and they don't have to crunch they can just keep casually working on a game for a super long time and that game keeps money flowing in as long as people keep playing it the developers' lives are better but maybe the players' lives are worse than if you just bought a game once or of course the developers could make the game fire most of the people involved in the game and have a tiny staff continuing to make money right so there's a lot of cart and horse switching going on here right between the monetization model the design of the game and the results of those combinations have on the lives of the people who are making the game and the lives of the people who are playing the game let's even get back to football the people who play football and are suffering from these injuries they're gamers playing a game but they're also employees of an industry so we can't discount the harm that may be caused to the employees of the game industry as separate of the game industry if such harms exist so yeah addiction so this is like one of the first harms of games that people think of and it's the question of course is video game addiction real and how much of it is the fault of the game versus how much of it is the fault of something else or even if it is real at all so I tried to research this the whole bunch and there's tons and tons of material on it obviously and the problem is that I'm not really qualified to say anything about this addiction is not only really complicated but the current state of the art in psychology and medicine is evolving rapidly we still don't understand addiction very well despite it being researched for a very long time I had to read I actually did read three different like complete super long articles full of I didn't understand all of them which is why I said not qualified to say of psychologists arguing with each other about whether video game addiction counts as addiction the same way addiction to drugs counts as addiction I mean there's a definition of addiction which itself keeps changing there's a lot of different ways to define what addiction is usually they come around is there some demerits for harm to someone's life that they did not anticipate or expect or desire as a result of the activity coupled with compulsions and other things but even that definition keeps changing so I can't even begin to ask the question of isn't the game's fault if I can't even answer the question that doesn't exist what I can tell you is that stories you may have heard about people playing games for so long that they died are absolutely true right there's an article I found 15 people who have died playing video games not all of them died from being addicted to games there were just some of those instances were other weird things that happened but the majority of them were actually people who had just played a game for too long they went to some you know PC cafe place sat down no one checked up on them they were just so into the game they kept playing it and playing it and playing it and they didn't stop to eat they didn't stop to rest they didn't drink enough water whatever it was they had a heart attack they collapsed that was it the end it really happened it is not a joke right so how much of that is the game's fault how much of that is alcohol's a fault how much of that is anything's fault when people what is addiction is a question that is very difficult to answer and understand what causes addiction maybe a combination of environmental factors genetic factors and external factors and the confluence of all three might be what causes the harms of addiction so if some psychologist like Jack Thompson but as a real scientist comes out and they're like they've learned about this more and have something to say on it let's not dismiss them like Jack Thompson right we should probably listen to what they have to say because this could be a real thing that we actually have to worry about right this is a real thing that we do have to worry about so what this is this is a reward schedule so to understand what's happening here right so this is based on like you know a believer and a food comes out right so in the black bar right basically what that is is the mouse every time the mouse pushes the lever a food comes out how often does the mouse push the lever well the mouse pushes it when they're hungry basically because they know a food is going to come out pretty much every time they pull the lever or at least a fixed number of times push it 10 times get it food push it 10 times get it food minimum wage pellets yep the red one will come out it is a food slot machine right and when you have the food slot machine the mouse pushes the lever like crazy the slope of time whether they're hungry or not the slope of those lines is how often arguably how compulsively the mouse will keep or the rat will keep pushing the lever variable reward schedules to demonstrably cause a behavior to be done more often in almost all cases this is a real thing in humans too if I make a slot machine where you put in a dollar and a dollar comes out you'll do it whenever you want what the thing is that's in there that's just the laundry machine change thing I put the dollar and the dollar comes out if you make a slot machine like in a casino I've played that all night before PAX if you make a real slot machine like in a Vegas casino like these ones people will compulsively use these it's just that's that's that's how it's been to a casino like actually gone to one like Atlantic City okay good keep those numbers low keep those numbers low so this is actually the original idea I wanted to do this panel but I wanted to do a panel all about the fact that gaming these days seems to be going more and more in the direction of just being gambling but not looking like this right this is gambling how is this not gambling the only difference between this and a slot machine is that when you put money in you're guaranteed to get a minimum sorry you go to a real slot machine you could get zero that's possible you buy a pack of magic cards the only difference is this a minimum you know you're getting that much it's probably less than what is the pack of magic cards cost these days $3, $4 something I don't know I have no idea I quit when fallen empires came out you can get all worthless cards but it's like one rare per pack no matter what but it could be a bad one right they're not all great right so it's like there's a minimum payout does that make it somehow different than this because it has a minimum payout but you can still lose you can still hit the jackpot in fact at least with this one at least with this casino slot machine real money comes out right here no matter what happens okay oh you're gonna get this cardboard every time I do have some valuable cardboard because at least I can resell that cardboard I always I see these pile of chiffon dragons I'm your man I always see these stories these days I'm like how much the black lotus is worth when I was a kid the black lotus was like $300 flat and I saw a kid who literally hits a binder full of them in those days like literally pages and pages of black lotuses and I'm pretty sure those were all sold off individually over time right this has been around since I was a kid in the early 90s kids were doing it and no one cared that it was gambling baseball cards sort of gambling-ish not quite almost like magic cards or magic cards are kind of worse right well magic cards also there was the early rules talked a lot about anti as well there were even cards in magic when it first came out about anti you were expected to play magic and anti up cards from your own deck and whoever won the game won those cards permanently there were cards that would manipulate anti think about that the game that was kind of banned from all tournaments now that's been pulled back quite a bit but that was there from day one yep so yeah it's like I was really concerned about this thing like whatever you personally feel about gambling whether it's good or bad acceptable or not whether it's something adults should be allowed to do I think that most reasonable people in this country feel these children should not be gambling right but meanwhile we have children buying Pokemon cards and no one cares right no one even thinks about gambling why not just send them to Vegas at least they can get real money most of the parents who think this is better than buying Pokemon cards most of the parents who are mad about Pokemon cards think it's Satan not gambling I know right anyway this is gambling too and here right you get nothing no matter what even if you got all what's the highest level like legendary skins I guess I don't know so I play Overwatch a lot and if any of you watch me streaming Overwatch I don't open loot boxes just because I have like 500 and people get really mad they see that number like it bothers people it doesn't buy loot boxes but all the free ones he just doesn't open they're just sitting there I'll hover over him sometimes like oh I could open one it'd be like if I had some free magic cards that I got and I won a bunch of magic tournaments and the prizes were magic cards and they never opened those I just kept winning turn-ins with my free magic cards that I got for free but yeah this is gambling but when you do this right at least if you send your kid here they could come home with cash if you send your kid here unless they join the Overwatch League right you don't need skins to win the Overwatch League either you just need skills right yeah there's no odd job skin you buy those 50 loot boxes right only the old people left at that if all of those 50 loot boxes have the best possible legendary costumes and skins in them you'd still lost 40 dollars and those 40 dollars are never coming back because the deal is you may get joy out of those skins but they're not transferable I can sell my magic card I can't do anything with this except look at it myself and make other people look at it right usually while I'm doing this you can resell your skins on steam but that seems even more shady now you actually are gambling just like this when I've got a counter strike skin that's worth a thousand dollars sell it on steam now I have it I can buy a thousand dollars worth of games now this gets into another issue of this is how a lot of video games are monetized this is how gaming as an industry is growing and it's weird because with magic the gathering and this you could buy the booster packs and get the random draws or you can just go to a store and buy individual magic cards in the video games here you can't just go buy a skin you have to use the economy of the game to get the coins to do that there are some games that are designed where there's no loot boxes where you just buy the things directly like buying a DLC but here's the thing if the video game industry in particular is growing in revenues partly because they've been focusing on this gambling model in addition to direct sales that means that there are people who are buying games who would not have paid money if they had to monetize it the other way there are people who are paying money gambling who would not otherwise have interacted with that game so we expanded in two different monetization streams that are doing different things and people are spending more money as a whole and there might be ethical concerns around that so alright this is gambling anyone seen this in the expo hall? this has been around to packs making me pretty mad so the way these things work if you own a store you don't sell everything that you stock on your shelves you buy a bunch of stuff to put on your shelves in your store and you can't sell all of it because sometimes you buy a thousand Funko Pops and they just sit on your shelf and everyone who comes in just sees them there every week and doesn't buy any of them and you say man I paid for these Funko Pops at wholesale prices I gotta get rid of them I could just throw them out and put some games on my shelf that will actually sell or if I stuff them in a box some room will pay for them right? this isn't new going back to anime conventions in like the early 2000s you'd see dealers selling these big paper bags that were like grab bag and if you open it it was just the one manga no one wanted that here I've seen people it was Geo Breeders I remember it I've seen people buy these things look at them and say oh right and then people defend this people are like oh this is great I was happy with what I purchased right I bought this box and I'm happy with what was in there I think it was it was a good deal right and it's like you just you're getting ripped off right whether you know you're being harmed or not right I don't need to study to show the financial harm you just got ripped off you paid more than a thing was worth and got less you could have just bought that same junk those funko pops off the shelf for what they were charging in the discount rack and you would have paid less money for the same stuff right but it's you're seeing loot boxes literally coming into the real world and these are being sold and odd sheets and all the same stuff right these are being sold to children and no one cares that it's gambling right but if the same kid went to a slot machine right I don't need some scientific study to show the harm of this it's just inherent but maybe the argument is just got to treat in both the same way yeah I mean if you look the real casinos that have the real gambling have all these things in place right if you tell a casino I'm a gambling addict don't let me in they are required by law to not let you in they have signs everywhere saying you know if you're a gambling addict call these numbers right not at not with casinos but at your bar if you drink too much the bartender has to be like right there's no one at the gaming store required to tell a kid kid you've had enough magic cards right but what's the difference why shouldn't there be there needs to be right okay so yeah okay so the question I really want to ask right and this is the thing that happens to me when I argue on the internet is does fun justify harm right that person who bought that booster box they say to me it's fun therefore it's okay if I go online I say they should change it to be this way so it's not gambling with children they should say well it's fun so it's okay I'll use an example I'm an adult over the age of 21 I drink alcohol I enjoy alcohol I do it because I choose to and it does harm me I can't pretend it doesn't harm me it harms me in a pretty small way I choose to accept that harm I choose not to accept more harm I'm not going to drink more alcohol but as an adult shouldn't I have this harm because of the fun I get from this alcohol I mean there were a lot of people I've been having these arguments of people even back since like the World of Warcraft days where I was worried the people who I knew were playing it too much there was a guy Asheron's Call Guy Oh Asheron's Call Guy So I don't do hope he's okay so in college freshman year one of my friends their roommate who I never talked to because it was Asheron's Call Guy Asheron's Call Guy was an MMO owned by Microsoft in the early 2000s they had made a sequel but they're both dead now anyway literally every time I went into my friend's dorm room Asheron's Call Guy was playing Asheron's Call all the time he played so much Asheron's Call but guess what he did not make it through school as far as I am aware like he'd have a plate where he had a peanut butter sandwich he was eating and he was playing the game we come back later in the day and the plate is like just covered in crumbs but it's still sitting on his lap like eight hours later whether or not addiction is real right we already discussed that I still saw with my eyes as someone who was 18-19 years old this person who looked to me like they were harming themselves or being harmed by this addictive game right and their justification was it's fun I'm 18 I can do what I want to do it's fun therefore it's okay and I'm like you're gonna be you're gonna kick that at school it's not okay right so does fun justify harm how much fun justifies how much harm right and that's the number one defense anytime I bring up you know any kind of thing where you know these games are harming someone it's fun so it's okay I mean I just defended it I drink some alcohol it harms me but I'm down with this down with the harm right well I think we can all agree that there is some sort of order of magnitude line we can draw where the fun justifies the harm right I've never done heroin I will not do heroin ever do not do it right drugs are bad it says it on your badge I am confident that if I take heroin it will feel fucking amazing that from everything I've heard I'm confident that that is it will feel incredible right but the harm that it will cause to me that I believe it will cause to me that we know it will cause to me it's not worth the fun right the fun of doing this does not justify the harm it will probably ruin my whole life because it will be so fun right so where do you draw the line it's like how much fun per harm it makes it okay right let's get rid of the scary slide yeah to do a different slide this is a much more like this one we're really talking about it's not necessarily just harm it's risk so like rim loves to go skiing and every time he goes skiing I say don't die he always sends me an Oregon trail tombstone that just says r.i.p. rim he skied or r.i.p. rim don't ski I mean there are people who are professional you see other things and it's like people hurt themselves I don't know ice skating but professional ice skaters don't hurt themselves too often right professional skiers hurt themselves a lot but Lindsay Vaughn she broke every bone in her body or something right and that makes it scary because it's like if the professionals are hurting themselves that much I'm not doing this because I'm just I've never even also it's cold and wet it wants to be cold and wet now I made my choice like I chose to ski I accept that risk I believe I've assumed that risk and I'm a very very good skier I chose to mostly give up on mountain biking because the risk was higher for the same reward you still mountain bike occasionally yeah but I have to ski like every weekend the last time I went mountain biking I got a bruise the size of a basketball because I flipped over and landed on a tree stump at least skiing it's there's snow I can slide on that snow as long as I don't hold for the tree and then I found a snowman I did hit a tree at Killington a few weekends ago but not too hard okay that's very assured how am I going to get a PAX panel which is me can I come to see just me I don't know anyway how much fun I can't deny though the fun of shushing down the mountain that obviously I like a roller coaster I like going fast it's a roller coaster you control that idea I can't deny sounds fun and does appeal to me let's say the same way it's a roller coaster you control for me it is not worth the potential risk for rim it apparently is that's the difference between people but if it comes to real harms in real life there is there must be some sort of line we have to draw where we say no that's not okay heroin is clearly on the no side right skiing probably on the yes side I guess maybe sometimes let's back up a little bit what about the industry if I make a game that is fun and there's a risk of that game being harmful in an addictive way risky for people who have addictive behaviors how addictive am I allowed to make that game before my game is the problem right is it not that we should draw a line saying gambling or no gambling or should you just say maybe you know the reward schedule on the slot machine just needs to be less evil right it needs to pay out more often it needs to be pay out more kindly right and then it would be okay right what's the stat on alcohol like 17% of people who drink alcohol are likely to become addicted to it what if you have a game where 10% of the people who play it will get addicted like Asheron's call guy and ruin their lives are likely to be able to release that game right maybe you just have to change your game design so it's like okay this game is a way less addictive right it's more just like I don't know cake okay and that's the main message we want to come through with here today right if anyone who's making games right try to make games they don't harm people we're not saying make games and do good not everyone's going to make super better not everyone's going to make a game that literally makes people's lives better and changes the world at least try to make a game that doesn't hurt that many people that much right when people make games I don't think that they're thinking about they're just thinking you know we want more sales we want people to play the game longer we want people to have more fun well more fun could mean more addiction depending on how you're measuring the fun if you're measuring the fun based on hours played number of people buying it how good your reviews are right are you right you're measuring fun that is at the expense of harm and you're not counting the harm and your evaluation of your game well think about that you make a game and your goal is you're having fun if they if the game is that red line that variable reward schedule if I end up designing a game based on play testing that is hyper addictive is that any different than if I designed the game to be hyper addictive on purpose for evil reasons versus if I just made a game that I see people playing a lot and not just the gambling right the other potential harms and perhaps unforeseen future harms try not to make a game that makes people hurt their arm while they play it right don't make people push buttons too fast or hold the controller in a weird way right making people uncomfortable for people to play right make it maybe so that you know you don't have to push it super fast right so old men like me can play with our slow hands yeah the problem is being in your 30s doesn't count as a sports injury right I can't do DDR that fast anymore right you know and there's other ways you know I didn't even want to bring up I almost brought up I don't know if anyone saw this story people made some like games that got banned from Steam because they had some really horrific imagery really horrible right don't make those alright are we done I think we're done I think we're about done I hope this was interesting and enjoyable and a little bit of real talk and I hope that all of you go away from this just be introspective when you play a game think about what it's doing to you and make sure you understand what it's doing and are okay with that right when you're having fun think okay this is really fun I love this is this hurting me is there some other game that's maybe just as fun right bring that how much I'm hurting myself how much money I'm spending how much money I'm losing into your equation when you're evaluating how fun a game is and more importantly to decide if that's something how you want to spend your time even if the answer is yes like yes I'm having fun yes I accept this harm yes everything's fine if all your friends are saying no try to reevaluate a little bit right and maybe you decided this game is as harmful as alcohol which I will drink anyway moderate right don't spend the little boxes but maybe ten dollars in the little box and then you stop whatever the game developer deserves ten dollars okay we're good go enjoy packs enjoy the rest of your pack have a good game