Japanese Government Researches Game Effects

Thanks to GamePro for their article discussing the Japanese Government's announcement that they plan to conduct a 10-year research study on the effects of video games upon children. According to the article, "The study will record their basic lifestyle patterns, including how much TV they watch and how many games they play, and the ministry will gauge their mental health and emotional personality through neural scans and questionnaires sent to their parents." Games in Japan are being implicated in "reduced brain-wave activity" and as a possible trigger in a Nagasaki kidnap/murder, so careful analysis is planned to see if game players really end up "...shunning social activity and losing one's temper easily."

Comments

serious doubts

[miruku]

there are serious flaws in experiments like this, mainly the fact that its not done in a controled envoronment (not that any tests like this would be done in a controled envoronment, because its not really that good for kids to lock them away for ten years). the fact that all of the kids would still have access to everyday culture and society would very much skew the results

"shunning social activity and losing one's temper easily"

if that happens, maybe thats a sign that the kids are fed up with the consumerist society they live in (esp. in a contry like japan), and are making use of the only good release they have access to; gaming?

Re:serious doubts

[Daetrin]

Theoretically if a statistically large enough number of the 1000 kids don't play video games much they can be used as a control group to account for the effect of everday culture and society.

Of course if they were feeling evil they could get another 1000 families to sign up and agree to not allow their kids to play video games at all, and compare the kids who were forced not to play games, the kids who choose not to play games, and the kids who played lots of games.

I'd also like to hope that along with recording how _much_ tv they watch and video games they play, they also record _which_ tv they watch and video games they play.

ill effects of video games??

[Song for the Deaf]

video games bad for you?

nonsense, they haven't been bad for me or my friends growing up. i'm still the pasty white single guy i was when i started playing video games. no adverse effects here.

Don't argue, change the trend

[Rares Marian]

Already the game-violence hysteria has died in areas which were first to take up the issue.

This too shall pass. As long as we don't make idiots of ourselves which would add credibility to the idea.

And if you want to argue here's a few routes you can try:

1. Television is much worse than video games.
2. Brain-activity is non-existent while watching TV.
3. Brain-activity is a measure of the quality of the game not the content. If that is confusing, think Video BINGO vs a flash card game.
4. Video games are as good for the thinking process as outside sports are good for the physical health.
5. Video games can put people in dramatic situations that are as important as reading a quality novel. Harlan Ellison's video game adaptation of "I have no mouth but I must speak" comes to mind. Black and White as well.
6. Video games are just one form of multimedia. There's a CD called Starry Night which makes some bold statements about Van Gogh (he was so scared about his ear-cutting episode, HE put HIMSELF in the hospital. A little more rational than most would believe, no?) Video games can enhance this, especially in the puzzle/research genres.
7. Video games can expose biases and be a forum for discussion probably even better than that CD was. Instead of some voice telling you how to think you can observe what biases do in an RPG.

I'm sure we can come up w/ more.

So...

[a_peckover]

...the Japanese want to "prove" that games cause "reduced brain wave activity". Haven't there been other recent studies that contradict this assumption ?

This might, however, be indicative of the sort of games Japanese gamers play. I'm not sure how popular the more cerebral games like Civilisation are in Japan but it seems to me that strange moth-simulations and horse racing games are not going to have the same effect as Unreal Tournament 2003. You can't just say that "videogames" have this or that effect.

The new Tomb Raider game has been known to cause gamers to lose their temper, but that's because the controls are awful and it's frustrating and not because it's an especially violent game.

Pointless?

[evilhayama]

These sort of studies and comparisons come out every week or so it seems. I wonder if role playing games are happier now that the blame is all being taken by evil video games?

And in a similar vein, I think games don't have enough satan-worshipping. We've got violence and sex, so why not a bit of Devil worship?

Anecdotal Evidence

[Von75]

I've played video games for 15 years and have a truly horrible temper - ask my co-workers, must be true.

Psuedoscience Sniffer

[robbway]

reduced brain-wave activity in people playing games, which can be linked to shunning social activity and losing one's temper easily.

I know psychobabble when I hear it. If there are legitimate studies that link brain-wave activity to shunning social activity and losing one's temper, you would state: which are shown in studies to be directly correlated to antisocial and short-tempered behavior.

When the article used the modifier can, it must be interpreted that the studies do not currently exist. If you're going to support a hypothesis, you'd use the strongest possible evidence to justify your experiment.

Re:Psuedoscience Sniffer

[grimani]

Your mastery of English is astounding. Now please use it to read the article.

Don't string together two separate phrases from different contexts.

There are two points here:

1) games are being implicated in reduced brain wave activity.

2) research wants to investigate whether shunning social activity is a result of gaming.

These are two separate claims that will be investigated. There is no cause/effect being claimed.

The KEY word here is "VIDEO GAMES".

[tibike77]

Quoting from the "reduced brainwave" article:

The study monitored brain-wave activity in 240 Japanese men and women, ranging from six to 29 years old, as they played games for differing amounts of time. The test subjects that spent the least amount of time on video games exhibited large amounts of beta waves, indicating strong prefrontal cortex activity. People that played games from one to three hours a day three or four days a week had beta levels about on par with alpha levels, indicating reduced activity in the cortex, while those that played every day for over two hours at a time had nearly zero cortex activity at all.

[...]hypothesized that most games only exercise players' reflexive and perceptive abilities, leaving the rest of the brain idle in the process. "Many games strive to instigate feelings of nervousness or terror, leading to fears that they could affect the autonomous behavior of players," cautioned Mori in the report. "[Parents] should pay close attention to the type of games they let their children play and how much time they spend playing them."

Well, what they're NOT saying yet is WHAT kind of video games have been used when they made this test... playing something like "space invaders" or "tetris" can cause that reflex-response only... whereas increasingly complex games often make you think a lot more than react...(yeah, not always... Dungeon Siege, Diablo and other "real-time-RPGs" are the perfect examples of complex games inducing highly repetitive behaviour) I would really love to see that "tester" using some of the games I enjoyed playing while growing up to "test" his assumptions... for instance the X-Wing/TIE-fighter series (for the level of strategy and positioning involved, besides the actual shooting), several (actually... almost) all quest-type-games that were made before the mid-90's, single-player no-economy real-time-strategy game type missions (some missions in Warcraft 1 are the first that come to my mind)... and I bet all readers here *do* have some *really old* games they can relate with in this aspect...

And how about the "main article" quote:

The governmental ministry's study plans to study the development of one thousand children over the next ten years, as they mature from newborns to toddlers and grammar-school students. The study will record their basic lifestyle patterns, including how much TV they watch and how many games they play, and the ministry will gauge their mental health and emotional personality through neural scans and questionnaires sent to their parents. Using the information from the study, the ministry hopes to gain insight into the effects of entertainment choices on a young child's brain development. The results could also be used to improve educational methodology in Japan's public schools.

Games have also been implicated in the case of Shun Tanemoto, a four-year-old boy who was kidnapped and thrown off a multistory parking garage July 1 in the city of Nagasaki. The alleged assailant, a 12-year-old student whose name has been withheld by police, was reportedly an avid gamer who repeatedly abused the victim over the past few months. "This is a crime carried out by a child who played with nothing but video games, never with other people"

Well, yeah, can't blame them for doing that. Actually, quite a GOOD ideea.
What they left out though is the fact that they should ALSO record exactly WHAT games a kid plays... not only the kind, but how much time (s)he spends playing a certain game, and with whom, what they do and say, etc.
Myeah, "The Big Brother" syndrome at work...

I just hope they don't butcher the results of this test to please the people in power at the moment...

"...shunning social activity and losing one's temp

[Anonymous Coward]

"...shunning social activity and losing one's temper easily."

Video games didn't do that to me, driving did.

Control Group?

[HunterZ]

Are they going to randomly select the children surveyed? If not (i.e. if they hone in on video-game-playing kids), are they going to also have a control group of "normal" kids? If so, how do they decide what is "normal"? Randomly selecting the group and reducing video games to a factor seems to me to be the only remotely-valid way to conduct such a study.

On another note, this sounds exactly like the studies done on kida that watch TV a generation ago.

Why do the study at all?

[I Like Swords!!!]

Hasn't there already been MORE than ten years of video game exposure on children? Why waste another ten years and money, just observe the end results of the passed ten plus years. ;)

Interested in seeing the results...

[TalMaximus]

All in all I'm pretty interested to hear about the results of this experiment. I believe there is a strong need to analyze the effect some games of today have on children.

One thing I'd like looked at is the effect video games have on pre-existing characteristic flaws. I don't think that a video game can create a characteristic that doesn't already exist in some form or another. A bad or violent temper, for example, is a fault that many of us have and something as non-violent as MLB 2003 could bring that out. If we're not taught to control our temper then it won't matter what game we're playing.

It's fairly safe to say that video games don't cause negative behavior but some certainly don't help. Just like a lot of other things people can grow up around. The question I have is whether or not game developers want to be part of the solution or part of the problem. I also would like to see just how active parents are in observing the kinds of games their kids are playing. Parents have the responsibility to filter the content their children are exposed to as best they can. I wonder if that will be factored into the experiment as well.