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

Studies

[GigsVT]

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.

For a Psychological Study...

[Thedalek]

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.