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

So what?

[mobby_6kl]

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?

outsiders underestimating the ease of games?

[bigbigbison]

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.

Reminds me of a study I read about in the paper

[xenocide2]

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!