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Violence in Video Games Debate Continues to Rage
ubermiester writes "The Washington Post is reporting on a newly released study by the American Psychological Association, claiming that 'exposure to violence in video games increases aggressive thoughts, aggressive behavior and angry feelings among youth.' This partly contradicts another study released a week before by a University of Illinois Professor claiming that 'game violence does not prompt players to project violent tendencies into real life.'"
How about someone does a study on the parents of the kids who commit crimes that are supposedly caused by video games. I bet you would get some conclusive results from that one.
A further study, released some time ago, suggests that there are "Lies, damn lies, and statistics."
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Yes everything you see and do influences you to some degree. Unless you're crazy to begin with, you won't act on them.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
The media is notorious for reporting things like this completely incorrectly.
The thing I most want to know is whether or not there were controls in place to weed out the influence of children who are more likely to be violent anyway (e.g. kids from broken homes). If not, then there's no way to separate causation from correlation.
I also have to wonder about possible bias. The APA funded this study, and it wouldn't exactly be surprising if an association of psychologists (i.e. people who get paid to cure insanity) wanted to suggest that a fairly popular hobby like playing video games turns children into sociopaths.
Oh, and what video games did they play? The GTA series most certainly portrays consequences for violent behavior, for instance.
Rob
Back in the "old days" it was the Waltz, then there was the Tango, the Charleston and then...
1950s OH MY GOD THE WORLD IS OVER, Rock and Roll... our children are being corrupted
1960s OH MY GOD, ELVIS is such a good boy, but those BEATLES
1970s TV is KILLING my Children
1980s HORROR MOVIES are KILLING my Children
1990s NIVARNA are forcing Children to top themselves
And of course now its Video Games which are forcing Children into a life of violence.
This is just another great "Aunt Sally" for politicians and "academics" to debate and get money from. If it wasn't this they'd be battering on at Cartoons for glorifying violence (there is nothing in Doom III worse than the violence of Tom and Jerry or Roadrunner). The young are ALWAYS being corrupted in the minds of the elders, and what corrupted them in their youth is now seen as innocent.
And have you noticed... its always the over 40s who start wars... something must be making them do it.... I blame mugs of hot chocolate.
And lets not forget when Marge banned "Itchy and Scratchy"
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Honestly, I do agree that violence (not sex) in games AND IN FILM does highten our appathy toward violence in life. And not just in kids, I think kids are really no more malliable than adults in this case, but it's the adults doing the study, and they want their violent TV, so whatever.
But I think the more pressing concern is the fact that American video game companies are profitting off the bigger issue, one we seem to refuse to look in the eye: that our society is completely infatuated with voilence, and to the point where children would rather spend their money on a game that's violent as apposed to one that's not. GTAIII was, if I remember correctly, the best selling game in the US, outsellng The Sims and Myst (the two next best selling games at the time). THAT'S something to be alarmed at, the fact that people are screaming for it, not that it's available.
We always blame the Media and Entertainment industries when all they're doing is giving us what we want. Our first mistake is in our thought-processes behind the blaming of enetertainment. We only get worried, and start making acqusations, after a person has crossed the threshhold and committed a violent act, and then we hide behind a curtin with claims like, but I can distinguish fantasy from reality”. THAT'S NOT THE POINT. These are NOT copy-cat crimes, these are not adults and children who are dillusional about reality. These are children who are being told by everyone in their lives: from the things they see on TV, from the other children they see beat up in school, from their parants fighting, even from the the rising tension due to polarized politics in our country (children aren't stupid), from ALL of these things, it's no wonder they get the impression that violence is just a way of life, because to a certain extent, in our country, IT IS.
Let's quit with all the studies being used to put the blame on everything but our own violent lifestyles, it just allows people to project their own problems on everything else. America has the highest crime rate of any fully industrialized nation, these games are marketted everywhere (and usually flop), as is hollywood, so it's time to wake up, and face the reality that it's our way of life that's causing the problems, and not our entertainment.
When Mommy get's a big SUV because it makes her “feel” more secure, and Daddy buys a pistol because he feels he needs to protect his family from the outside world, little Billy's gonna get the impression that fear is a healthy, normal part of life.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
I think you're missing the point - it's not that you ought to be keeping your kids away from pop culture or violence in games, or whatever. The point is you ought to be being parents! No-one said it was going to be easy...
*You* have a responsibility to raise your kids. It's *your* values that they will start with, if you can be arsed to get off your backside and teach them. Sure they'll rebel (it's part of growing up), but what is learned early is learned best. Give them freedom to choose their actions from an early age, and give them the consequences of their actions as well. That simple lesson is what is missing in most kids that have "gone off the rails".
Actually I think it's just as negligent to keep the kids away from bad influences (to a certain degree anyway). If you don't let them make mistakes when the consequences are small, they'll make the same mistake when the consequences are large, because they'll know no better.
It's a bit like when children grow up in antiseptic conditions - smothered by well-wishing parents, they never cut themselves, never get dirty, etc. They grow up with a significantly-impaired immune system, subject to allergies for the rest of their lives. The time put-aside by nature for "learning" things was wasted, and the nascent adult suffers because of it.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Correlation != Causation
Unemployment in the UK has been declining since 1995. Video games have been rising in popularity during those years too. So the rise in video games has caused a decline in unemployment.
Or not...
Who doesn't like free music?
Certainly *some* people in the US government are all in favor of *some* videogames increasing American youth's aggressive behavior, interest in violence, alignment with one side in conflicts and belief that the other side is evil and should be killed....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
True, but you are commiting even a worse scientific error, trying to use that to prove the negative.
The theory was that violent video games lead youth to be more violent. Ok, fine, now generally the first step when trying to support a theory is to find stastical evidence, generally a correlation. So we know that video games are getting more popular, and that there are more graphic ones available. This is a simple stastical matter. Thus, if there was a causal link between kids playing these violent video games and being more violent, we'd expect to see an increase in youth violent crime.
Well we don't, in fact we see the opposite trend. Well guess what? If you can't even find a weak correlation to support your theory, your theory is probably wrong. This isn't proof positive it's wrong, of course, but it's a serious blow. If the games cause children to be more violent, why don't we see the stastical effect of it?
Remember: Generally the first step is to show a correlation, then you go on to perform more robust tests to prove causation. If there's not a correlation, then you are probably not going to find what you are looking for. To say that X causes Y when there's not even an indication that X and Y are related is taking a long step on a thin limb.
My own questions are:
1. Which kind of physical altercations? No, seriously. There is a _major_ difference between being the aggressor and the victim.
Children get bullied for being "nerds" and "dorks" every day. So any study that just takes a blanket "involved in physical altercations" category, is from the start including the victims in that category.
Can you really say that games made someone violent, when they were the one beat up? By WTF of a definition of becoming violent? "Yeah, he violently had his face in front of someone's fist."
2. In the rare cases when a nerd does attack, in how many cases they were in fact provoked? Because that's the more common link that the politicians love to ignore: someone was tormented every day, and finally _that_ is what made them snap and fight back.
E.g., Columbine, as an extreme case, was not just a case of two happy kids that just got corrupted by video games and turned into killers. We're talking people who got bullied day after day, into desperation and beyond. And they finally snapped. Happens to non-gaming adults too: you give someone continuous stress, they eventually snap. Look up "postal" on wikipedia someday.
So if you bully someone every day, and they finally fight back, by WTF of a definition it's the games alone that caused that?
3. Arguing with "authority figures" instead of being sheep is already a different category, so I'm not even sure by WTF of a stretch of the meaning it's lumped together with "violence". Disobedience is quite different from beating someone up.
4. On the "autority figures" topic again: what is the cause and what is the effect there?
Because for example a common group that's having problems with authority figures _and_ with bullies, which is what gets them often bullied, are Asperger's Syndrome sufferers. The inability to distinguish body language can get one in all sorts of trouble of exactly that kind.
Incidentally Asperger's Syndrom also makes one more likely to like computers instead. Either programming or video games, stuff that's on a computer tends to be stuff that you can do/play on logic alone.
So what is the cause and what is the effect there? Are games _really_ the cause there, or are we talking two different effects of autism. Until they actually separate those in a different category, for a segment of their study they're basically pulling a "A => B and A => C, therefore B => C".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
From TFA:
" "Research indicates exposure to violence in video games increases aggressive thoughts, aggressive behavior and angry feelings among youth, the association said in a statement issued Wednesday. In addition, the APA statement said, this exposure reduces helpful behavior and increases physiological arousal in children and adolescents. "
So:
A) While they might have measured _some_ correlation (more about that later), what they present it as is causation. Sorry, there's no other way to read that.
It doesn't say "we found some correlation between violence in school and the fact that some people involved were playing games." It goes on and on about how it _makes_ you violent, makes you think violent thoughts (although even as a correlation, that appears nowhere in their actual study), makes you refuse to help other people, teaches you that violence is _the_ solution, teaches you that violence doesn't have consequences, etc. That's all one big lump that's presented as a clear cut cause-effect issue, not just as a correlation to base future studies on.
B) Even as a correlation, they just didn't measure that, any way you want to slice it.
If you look at what they measured, it's not even measuring one variable, it's lumping together such disparate issues as being an aggressor, being a _victim_, and questioning authority. E.g., if you're a gaming nerd and a jock (who doesn't play games) beats you up in school, congrats, according to them you're part of the "games cause violence" sample.
The whole thing is a textbook example of a Verbal Fallacy: they switch between two very different meanings of "violence". They use one definition in their sample (basically "any kind of physical conflict"), and another definition in their conclusion (basically "aggressor"). _And_ if that wasn't enough, they include stuff in the sample that doesn't fit either one.
"In any event, that variable could interact in that it enabled the relationship or made the relationship stronger, but it cannot somehow unmake this correlation as some people seem to think."
Again, you miss some points:
1) Again, it was presented as causation, not correlation. They presented it as: games _make_ you violent, less helpful, etc. And that can very well be "unmade", if another issue is the dominant cause.
2) In fact there isn't even that much to "unmake", since there was no "make" to start with. They haven't made a point, they just took a big leap of faith that isn't supported by _any_ logic or data. So there isn't anything to "unmake".
Even if I was to accept that correlation (although it's bullshit anyway), from there to the causation they present, it's just one big leap of faith. There's a whole big pile of work to be done in between finding a correlation between A and B, and concluding that A _causes_ B. Work which involves precisely separating all those other variables and their own influence on the measured result.
It's the kind of leap of faith like starting from "I've noticed a correlation between being thin and tall and being a maths nerd" (hey, that's the kind of maths nerds I've met in school), and extrapolating that going on a diet will improve your maths grades. Sorry, no. There is nothing to "unmake" there, since the whole "make" part between that correlation and the conclusion is just completely missing.
"So why bother doing studies at all?"
Definitely not to take them as more than just that: one correlational study, which says nothing about cause-effect. The study does raise some questions and can serve as a base for further studies on the topic, yes. But that's about it. It's not something that's become the One Truth, to be carved in stone, and that noone should dare question.
"This study presumably was peer reviewed, by the way."
I'd be interested by whom. The tobacco companies "there's no correlation between smoking and lung diseases" stud
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It would interest me to know how many parents are really the utter zombies I seem to see around at the mall. Just basic checks getting at "Are you making conscious choices at ALL?" might show a shocking level of apathy. (Apathy like that in, oh, American voters?)
My 12-year-old boy/girl twins both play video games, and I'm pretty attentive about which ones but I'm cool with that. I'm also pretty easygoing about half of what gets an R rating for movies -- the kids see little violence, but skin I think they are familiar with seeing as how they have some, so that doesn't bother me as much. The basic deal is that you have to be making conscious choices about what to expose your kids to.
The advocacy groups who object most vociferously to video games aren't about those conscious choices at all. They're about arbitrary standards, imposed by some sort of body of authority. I don't trust that impulse a bit.
The question has never been "Can stuff kids play with affect their attitudes toward the world?" Duh, yes it can. The question is whether video games are somehow the pervasive, destructive influence that luddites and a weird mixture of nannystaters and "social conservatives" think they are. Or are they just a form of media that parents need to keep an eye on, like -- duh again -- everything else including TV? I'm a reasonable parent, and personally I think MTV (for one example) is a much more corrosive presence in kids' lives. It's a nakedly brazen front for all things consumerist and sexist. Video games don't have nearly the same cultural weight behind them. Where game writers are mostly just trying to make a buck building something fun, advertizers are actively, consciously doing everything they can to exploit my kids and brainwash them to spend a lifetime thinking about nothing but products and money. There are whole academic fields -- "advertizing psychology" -- in support of that effort.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.