You may not be able to use your shooter skills to level up your real life marksmanship
In 2012, a veritable cannon went off in videogame academia. The paper “Boom, Headshot!“: Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy was written by Brad Bushman and Jodi Whitaker at Ohio State University. The paper directly linked improved real-world firearm proficiency with playing violent games that rewarded accuracy like head shots in Resident Evil 4. Thanks to the paper, anti-videogame activists had their “smoking gun” that tied playing videogames to mass shooter murders. Notably, Anders Behring Breivik claimed he practiced killing using Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 before his 2011 rampage in Norway. Bushman went on to co-write a paper linking increased aggression in subjects with extended periods of violent videogame play, further pushing the narrative that games teach people to kill.
Since its publication, “Boom, Headshot!” has been the subject of numerous discussions, some of them calling into question the methodology used. Patrick Markey, author of Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong and Malte Elson, a behavioral psychologist at Ruhr University, questioned the results of “Boom, Headshot!” based on statistical inconsistencies. After years of investigation and debate, “Boom, Headshot!” is being retracted. Although Professor Bushman claims the retraction is a result of a smear campaign by his rivals, Ohio State University admitted that they could not back up the conclusions in the paper since the original data was missing.
You can all go back to shooting Junkrat in the face now.
It’s like the people behind this study have never played a video game or shot a gun.
I’m pretty good at shooters. Put me on a range and everything is different. Stance, how you’re holding the gun, breathing, trigger pull, eyesight. Everything.
I could totally hit a target at 25 meters with a M16. But that’s because of basic training from nearly 15 years ago. I think I’d need glasses nowadays, though.
There’s a lot more to what playing shooters teaches you than simple aiming mechanics. Aiming mechanics are based in large part on muscle memory, which of course can only really be achieved by having the actual piece of hardware that you are trying to build the memory for. This has to do with not only visual acquisition, but literally the weight and balance of the weapon you are using. If they build an accurate in every detail weapon you held in your hands to play these games, your learning would be almost indistinguishable.
What playing lots of shooters does teach you, is how to clear rooms, how to spot and prioritize targets, how to know where threats are mostly likely going to come from etc. Your tactical awareness, and your reaction time to those decisions, can and does get “trained” by playing shooters, especially the more realistic ones. The other thing it does, is desensitize you to violence. Once again, the more realistic, the more pronounced that process is.
I’ve become very good at spotting cameras for instance.
I think there is a lot of hyperbole on both sides of this argument. Trying to state that violent games have no impact on people that may have violent tendencies to begin with strikes me as pretty foolhardy. I don’t think games can necessarily create killers, but they can most certainly facilitate progression of violent tendencies in people with pre-existing proclivities, if only for the confidence building and tactical awareness they offer. Even if it’s delusional, it can build a belief in the user that you are “getting better”. That’s the dangerous part when you’re dealing with someone that has some sort of psychosis that gets fed.
The discussion here is a bit weird. From the abstract of Boom Headshot:
Video games are excellent training tools. Some writers have called violent video games “murder simulators.” Can violent games “train” a person to shoot a gun? There are theoretical reasons to believe they can. Participants (N = 151) played a violent shooting game with humanoid targets that rewarded headshots, a nonviolent shooting game with bull’s-eye targets, or a nonviolent nonshooting game. Those who played a shooting game used either a pistol-shaped or a standard controller. Next, participants shot a realistic gun at a mannequin. Participants who played a violent shooting game using a pistol-shaped controller had 99% more headshots and 33% more other shots than did other participants. These results remained significant even after controlling for firearm experience, gun attitudes, habitual exposure to violent shooting games, and trait aggressiveness. Habitual exposure to violent shooting games also predicted shooting accuracy. Thus, playing violent shooting video games can improve firing accuracy and can influence players to aim for the head.
I’m not surprised that learning how to aim a hand gun allows you to aim a hand gun better.
(Though I imagine there wasn’t much of a correlation between a 360 controller and a hand-gun)
I imagine they also had a study where they found that people that pointed a gun at a mannequin prior to an experiment out performed those that didn’t point a gun at a mannequin prior to an experiment, when the experiment in question was pointing a gun at a mannequin. (Just like the amazing study that will show that students that practice for an exam out perform those that don’t! Or that random people off the street aren’t world class pianists, only those that actually practice are.)
