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Videogame Mythbusting
AsiNisiMasa writes "MIT professor Henry Jenkins has an essay over at pbs.org that debunks eight common myths about videogames. It covers not only the topic of violence, but gender and expression as well. This is what happens when reasonable people with an education tackle the subject objectively." From the article: "1. The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. - According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population. It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers -- 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play."
This argument always struck me as being as intellectually honest as claims that Dihydrogen Monoxide was frequently found in terminal cancer tumors. Once you realize that they're talking about water -- which is found in normal tissue -- you realize it's a meaningless claim. Similarly, if you actually think about the fact that most teenagers (or at least most teenage boys) play video games without shooting down their classmates, you start to realize that the games->violence claims are similarly bogus.
It's nice to see someone actually looking at the issue and noting that gaming and violence actually show an inverse correlation. I've always thought I'd rather someone go home and blow off steam playing Doom, Quake, GTA whatever instead of getting into fights or bottling it up until they do something drastic.
This is what happens when reasonable people with an education tackle the subject objectively.
In other words, "This is my opinion, and I think I'm intelligent and well educated and reasonable, so, of course, I don't see any bias when I say that is what ALL reasonable and educated people should think. It's reasonable and educated because it agrees with my point of view."
While there aer good points, there are good points for other points of views. Just because this article says what you want to hear does not mean that other opposing points of views aren't also help and supported by reasonable and educated people.
There's always at least two sides to any discussion and if you think there is only one valid side, then perhaps you missed something in your education.
"This article has no place on slashdot because it tells us things we already knew. "
You must be new here.
Seriously, though, this is an article that you would do well to send on to people who may not be avid readers of slashdot. There is so much FUD from the other side going around, it's important that people are aware that so much of what they are hearing is just FUD propaganda.
And it doesn't hurt that HJ is an MIT Professor -- his opinions will carry more weight with Joe Parent than mine or yours.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Do not! >: O
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play.
Is he sure he doesn't mean something else?
-- Cheers!
2. Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression. Claims like this are based on the work of researchers who represent one relatively narrow school of research, "media effects." The author is quick to dismiss what turns out to be a large body of well-designed, peer-reviewed studies. For instance, he suggests studies are flawed because they are either correlation-based (looking at whether two behaviours co-occur, not whether one causes the other), because they happen in a laboratory, or because the subjects aren't always "real" video game players. As a counterpoint, allow me to point out an article that came out in the November issue of Psychological Science (a highly regarded journal in Psychology) by Carnagey & Anderson at Iowa State University. They had college age adults play 3 versions of a violent driving game (Carmageddon 2) where they were either a) rewarded for violent behaviour; b) punished for it; or c) played a nonviolent version where killing pedestrian & other players wasn't possible. Afterwards they received a set of objective measures of physiological and psychological aggression, they found that subjects who played the version that rewarded violent behaviours (running over pedestrians) showed increased hostility and aggression. Note that since subjects were randomly assigned to conditions one can safely assume a causal model in which playing a game that rewards violent behaviour does lead to hostile/aggressive behaviour. Now, I am not saying that this means kids who play GTA will go out and kill pedestrians. But I also think it's ignorant to set aside scientific evidence that violence in media has no effect on people's behaviour. It does, both in kids and adults, and both in males and females. If gamers are going to defend themselves against overly zealous politicians, it makes sense to educate oneself about the science. By flippantly setting it all aside, this article does nothing to address it.
From the article: "Here's where the media effects research, which often uses punching rubber dolls as a marker of real-world aggression, becomes problematic."
When I read this, I couldn't help but smile at how right the article author is... why? because of a story my mom told me:
Way back in the day -- before videogames ever existed -- and my mom was a little girl, her mother volunteered to let her (my mom) be a subject in a study on child behavior. So, my mom is placed in a room with all sorts of toys. One thing that catches her eye though, is a clown bop-bag... you know, the inflatable punching bags that are weighted to stand back up after you knock them over. My mom had played with dolls and kitchen sets and many of the other toys at home, but she had never seen one of these punching bags, and she was fascinated. She poked it, and it wobbled. She hit it, and it tipped, but stood back up. So, being a curious child, she hit harder and harder, trying to see if she could make it stay down. The researchers were horrified at the "violent behavior" that this girl was showing... Surely, she must have deep psychological issues, intense hatred of clowns, or must have been brought up wrong. But no, as my mom distinctly remembers, it was simply curiosity in testing the limits of a new toy. She has since grown up and had no psychological problems or aggressive tendancies at all, despite the fears of the "researchers."
Anyway, I think that many parallels could be drawn between this story and the points made by the article author. Particularly that trying to make conclusions on what a child will become or policies to govern her based on a few minutes of observation is at best flawed, and at worst, more detrimental to society than the unsupervised child would ever be.
TFA brought up an excellent point, and one that I think bears repeating to those that think video games can "bleed" into real world behavior. All mammals distinguish between play and actual violence. TFA mentions primates, but I don't know about primates, so I'll talk about kittens.
Kittens fight. They kick and bite each other, pounce and paw with this wild look in their eyes. It looks like they're trying to kill each other, but this is how kittens play. They intentionally avoid injuring each other, and they have signs to tell the other kittens to stop if they actually get hurt. Yes, this play simulates a real catfight, as that's exactly what it's meant to prepare them for. Yet a kitten knows the difference between play fighting and real conflict.
Some people see kittens fighting, and instinctively jump in to stop them because they might hurt each other. Even more so because they're kittens - supposedly soft and sweet and helpless. I've seen humans peg the kitten who initiates play as "bad" because he is "bullying" the other kittens. Most people don't understand that the kittens are just playing.
I guess my point is, if a cat, an animal with a brain the size of a lemon, can figure out the difference between play and real, surely our own children can. We could at least give them that much benefit of the doubt.
I didn't see any claims that the opposing extremes of these myths were entirely accurate. In other words, he was simply debunking extremist claims of the negative impact of violent video games on children. He was NOT claiming that video games have no impact on children. Unfortunately, regulators have a habit of "picking up the torch" on issues like these. Then, they blindly run with it as though the existence of this torch is evidence enough of its superior integrity. This is, unfortunately, a common theme in society in general. The fact is, there needs to be some middle ground, which doesn't *completely* restrict the video game market or its users. As the author of the article states, "parents need to share some of the responsibility for making decisions about what is appropriate for their children." Herein lies the true root of the problem. While you can restrict the legal age for purchase of these games, law cannot entirely make up for a lack of proper parenting. However, there is one advantage to creating laws that restrict the sale of mature content to minors: namely, parents will be more likely to realize the necessity of preventing their children from playing such games if there is a hard legal opposition to it. For this reason, I encourage such laws. However, as with any law that restricts the sale of a particular product, there will be a necessary market shift. As with the tobacco industry, the video game industry will have to change its advertising techniques to correlate with correct legal practices. The author of this article obviously agrees: "Clearly, more should be done to restrict advertising and marketing that targets young consumers with mature content [...]" That being said, we should remember that the goal of such restrictive law is to force parents into the decision-making process, rather than to completely dispense of the consumer's right to choose its media for entertainment.