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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.
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FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
(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 --
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.
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!
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