Slashdot Mirror
Gaming Violence Study Guinea-Pig Speaks Out
ViRGE writes "HomeLAN Fed has an interesting article up about the experiences of one of their writers being involved in a gaming violence study. What did they find? 'With the set-up of these games, whether the researchers did it intentionally or not, the violent games that I played anyway were set up to be frustrating to play.' Maybe games aren't as destructive as we once thought, and it's the lab techs that are?" Clearly, an incompetent mouselook technician doesn't mean an unfair rap for all violent games, although the piece does make some good points about creating a fair context for these studies.
...but what do i know? i blasted a way to a PB in UT yesterday, just saw today Kill Bill and want to frag some plebs with my sword.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
"Eeepp eep eep eep eep eeeep"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
When all is said and done, I'll be lucky to have a "0 Funny" mod on this one. It is pretty lame.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
(AP) Bud McSchutin, the violent videogame guinea-pig, vanished today during a police interview. He was being questioned in regards to a string of car thefts that occured after he spent three weeks playing "GTA Vice City". When questioned about this, he mumbled something about going to find a hooker to boost his health. At this point, he is alleged to have entered godmode and escaped the interrogation room by floating away through a solid wall.
Police in a neighboring county are also putting a warrant out for his arrest in regards to several indicents of vandalism involving smashed bricks at construction sites and overturned tortoises at the zoo, rumored to have occured immediately after McSchutin's "Super Mario Bros" marathon."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I've played most of the violent games you could imagine, starting with Doom x, Duke Nukem 3D/MP, Quake x, Unreal x, UT x, Kingpin, Both GTAs, SoF x, all those realistic Rainbow Six games, of course Postal x, and many more I just can't remember.
and I never felt frustrated because of the violence.
Maybe the game crased too often and THAT made him frustrated? Oh and what about real life violence, doesn't it suck even more?
Thus, I have a theory. Gamers who play a lot are probably less likely to be affected by games than people who just play a few minutes in passing.
He's found the solution! MORE gaming for everyone! They should have mandatory gaming classes at schools, and everybody should get a 1 hour "game break" during work. Sounds good to me.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
In the results of the study published by Dr Phlagon, he concluded "The people who played violent videogames all the time said they had no problem with the real world. In fact, none of them was able to conclusively define the real world as distinct from their games."
Heh, 3 inches for a 360 turn is too high...
... approx 1 inch for
a 180 degree turn. Most of the time it's just very small movements... don't
want to waste time and effort having to move the mouse too far...
I can't playing any FPS without a super-high sensitivity
-- Silhouette
Then, when grabbed hold of the mouse, found it absurd the sensitivity they had it set at. Three inches to the left or right would cause a 360 degree turn and you couldn't click the mouse without the crosshair jumping. The effect was dizzying and frustrating.
3 inches to do a 360 is horrible! I have an inch and a half of travel at MOST. And I hope they inverted the Y-axis...
Your brain is not a computer.
It's entirely possible this study wasn't at all about video game violence. Often researchers will tell you a study is about something it isn't, so as to not skew the results with bias induced by your personal feelings of what the results "should" be.
This study may have been about human computer interaction, or the psychological aspects of dealing with something someone set up for you in a way that you don't like, or any one of a million things.
I've participated in a handful of studies back when I was in college, and I can say I think there were at least a couple that must have been studing something other than their overt purpose.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Perhaps what is really going on here is not that the people conducting the experiement are unintentionally skewing their results by imporperly setting up the games, but that the researchers are assuming that "games are easy!" The guy who wrote this article was an experienced gamer. He already knew how to play uT2k3. But as anyone who has tried to show a non-gamer how to play a FPS game knows, they can be very frustrating to learn. I think that these reserachers are severly underestimating the skill that it takes to become good at a game like UT2k3. If you have never played a FPS you can't sit down at one a play it for 20 minutes with the ai on hard and NOT get frustrated.
On the other hand, in a game like Pharoh, while much deeper in terms of strategies and the like, you aren't going to die ten times in five minutes trying to learn how to play it and so you will be less frustrated in that 20 minute window of time.
So my point is that, once again, people unfamilliar with videogames underestimate them. Videogames are not as easy as people seem to think, they take a certain amount of skill to be good at them and people constantly forget that. So what this test is really studying is if learning an action game can be more frustrating than learning a sim.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Does it occur to no one else that A) The test subject is rarely fully informed on the nature of the study as it is ongoing, and B) The frustration factor may be intentional?
I don't think any reasonable researcher expected the subject to play violent games and suddenly, without provokation, punch someone in the face. However, they might expect someone who plays violent games to be more likely to break or throw a controller in frustration.
The "complete the following words with the first word that pops into your head" section is clearly a stacked deck, probably to increase frustration in the test subject, hopefully leading to a violent outbreak.
Almost anyone can be pushed to an outbreak: I suspect that the researchers are checking for whether players of violent games have a shorter fuse.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
If they subjected me to having to play 'Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness', I'd be in a pretty violent mood too.
Dr. Wu
"Yes, There's Gas In The Car"
They're were actually testing for repressed homosexual tendency. The videogame stuff was just a red herring. This is a common psych ploy. Judging from your responses to the various tests it sounds like you "passed" the test, if you know what I mean...
"They're were actually testing for repressed homosexual tendency. "
You are right. Section I.A of the instructions for the game testers reads: "Grab the biological joystick of the player to your immediate right. Proceed to jerk vigorously for optimum results, while making sure to press the A and B buttons repeatedly."
But Battlefield 1942's slow engine makes me do violent things, like punch the computer case and cuss loudly.
Three groups were tested via a simple survey about their agressive traits for about five weeks. During those five weeks one of the groups was asked to play Street Fighter II on a regular basis, presumably in a controlled environment. The second group was asked to play Lemmings, on the same exposure level as the SF2 people. The final group was the control group. They were not asked to play any games in lab. I cannot recall what the rules of the outside lab behavior were, like perhaps no videogames other than during observation.
The experiment was designed to test two different kinds of exposure to violence: violence as a means (and glorification, I suppose) and violence as a result of failure. As anyone who's played an aggrovating game can tell you, the Lemmings group was far more violent after playing than before. The control group didn't exhibit any significant difference (supposedly) and the SF2 group (supposedly) had a small increase in violent activity.
That the SF2 people were more violent might shock your "hard-core" gamer, who argues on about how games promote catharsis, to most psychologists, it came as no little surprise. I believe the study compared it to other studies involving violent movies as being somewhat the same. What I found interesting was that the newspaper I read said the study concluded that exposure to violence as a punishment was far more damaging to the human psyche. Given the nature of Lemmings, I would imagine that the study noted that a more likely cause was the difficulty and frustrating nature of the puzzle based game.
Of course, we all know how much to trust science from a newspaper!
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I don't play golf myself, but TV and movies constantly portray golfers getting frustrated and throwing or breaking clubs however no one attributes violence to golfing. Of course I don't even necessarily believe that a person acting somewhat violently is bad. I've pounded on my keyboard and desk, hit my computer, etc. in frustration though I am about the most even-tempered person you'll find. Violence can be cathartic. I'm not suggesting you go punch the next person you see, or throw your monitor out the window, but non-destructive ways of unleashing a little violence like hitting a punching bag or blowing away a few guys in your favorite video game can be a great stress reliever.
I can remember as far back as the early 80's, getting very pissed off when playing BUGGY or unfairly balanced games. It wasn't unusual for a controller or two to get thrown around in frustration. They should be studying the stress effects of BAD games. I can guarantee they will see a correlation from bad game to stress amount, and consequently the level of actual physical agression or anger.
:-)
Bad games make us violent.
I was actually the writer of the column. I just thought I would answer some of the comments here. I generally play on a Supermat with a sensitivity of 1.6 on Counter-Strike. The movement i use for almost all games is not quite a 360 if I cross the entire mat. The sensitivity on UT2K3 for the experiment was so high that when I'd press fire, the crosshair would jump down from the targets head to it's body. They did tell me after the experiment exactly what they were looking at. Legally, experimenters HAVE to debrief you following the experiment. I paraphrased it in the article so that the integrity of their experiments wouldn't be hurt should someone else take it who had read my article. Of course, the intergrity is in question anyway. Games naturally get harder as levels go on, yet I was started in the middle of TR:AOD and on a high skill level in UT2K3, yet at the beginning of a map of Pharoah with the games auto-help telling me all I needed to do. Intentionally or not, the study is definately flawed.