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

Results of interview

[AtariAmarok]

(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."

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.

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.

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.