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

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.