Is video game violence memetic?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Not so much. Dawkins is a poor mathematician, and he doesn't use "unit" as nicely as I'd like. I recall (but can't immediately find) a passage of his in which he is discussing the question "what is a gene" and makes it clear that he doesn't mean "base pair" nor even anything as strict as "codon", but any stretch of DNA that is reproduced reliably enough to be significantly subject to selective pressures (and, implicitly, to approach equilibrium).

What "gene" means in biology (and what Dawkins seems to be consistent with) is the information needed to transcribe a single functional polypeptide protein or RNA strand. It is stored as DNA, and for polypetide instructions consists of a series of three-base pair groups (called codons) which correspond to either an amino acid or serve as the start or stop instructions for transcription. A gene is a discrete unit in the sense that it's the smallest part of the instructions that can build a functional structure.

Here is where the analogy has to hold for memetics to be valid. As genes are to biological heredity memes must be to cultural imitation.

Originally Posted by RevBob

Plus, "meme = gene" is an analogy, and an imperfect one. If you're discussing memes and get to the "genes don't work like that" level, you've gone too far with the analogy and it's time to back away

The analogy has to hold somewhat for memetics to be valid. Specifically the following must be true:

• Memes are discrete replicators.
• Memes are the only way that cultural information is imitable. Therefore all imitable culture is memetic.

If you have a model of socio-cultural evolution in which these aren't true, then you don't have memetics. You have some different competing model (of which there are now several that have been proposed as alternatives).

Personally, if I were making the analogy in biological terms, I'd liken memes to viruses, not individual genes or even strands of DNA.

Yes, the Laurie Anderson metaphor.

They get transmitted from person to person, where they either replicate (sometimes mutating in the process) or get rejected (ie. destroyed by antibodies). They carry "genetic payloads" of various sizes - the message(s) - and some are more "contagious" than others.

That can be valid, and the rest be too.

Originally Posted by RevBob

Probably so, but since we're discussing the game concept... <shrug>

What LOGOS discovers in 2078 isn't apparently just a model of socio-cultural evolution, or a model of persuasion and marketing. It apparently proves memetics as the theoretical model for socio-cultural imitation and evolution. It didn't prove some other different model, and it didn't just give some sort of mere phenomenological study of marketing, it developed a "revolutionary", "profound" theory of "the way that ideas propagated through individuals and society".

Originally Posted by TS14

2078: The sapient artificial intelligence LOGOS publishes its revolutionary study of memetic theory, The Propagation of Human Ideas.

Originally Posted by TS22

A new, profound understanding of the way that ideas propagated through individuals and society – memetic theory –

Originally Posted by TS86

In 2100, memetics is a subfield of psychology, focusing on the semantic content of ideas and the means by which they can be most efficiently spread through human populations. Memetics is related to such early disciplines as advertising, education, and religious proselytism, but made rigorous by a thorough understanding of how the human brain stores and handles information.

Originally Posted by TS87

In 2100, memetics is to psychology and sociology as genetics is to biology and ecology.

Originally Posted by TS204

meme: The cultural analog of a gene. An idea, behavior, story, advertisement, or other concept that propagates from one person to another.