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.

Comments

Re:Studies

[Naerbnic]

I don't believe this is true at this moment. When I was taking my Psych 2 class, we had a few discussions on ethics in clinical trials. Aparently, it was unethical to hide the purpose of a study, in light of more famous programs like the Milgram Experiment, where the subjects may not desire to know how they would behave under certian circumstances. So (if I understand correctly) unless there is a pressing reason in the field of psychology, otherwise cleared with some sort of ethics board, researchers cannot use subterfuge in the execution of any experiment.

Re:Studies

[Boglin]

Actually, I was in a psych experiment just last year and they did the same darn thing. The experiment sign up said that it was a test of logical abilities. I went in and they gave me a test of logic problems. Then they gave me a quiz over some fine details of my conversation with the test administrator. It wasn't a study on logic problems at all; it was a study on human memory. However, one of the things which has changed is rules on disclosure. If you lied to the subject about the purpose of the experiment, you have to tell them the true purpose after it is over. So, if this was a study on human interfaces, the subject would have been told this after the program. Since he wasn't, I think we can assume that this was an actual study on gaming.