Clinton, Lieberman Propose CDC Investigate Games

Gamespot reports that Senators Clinton and Lieberman have asked the Centers for Disease control to investigate how games impact us poor deluded citizens. From the article: "Even though the legislation--called the Children and Media Research Advancement Act--does not include restrictions, it appears to be intended as a way to justify them. That's because a string of court decisions have been striking down antigaming laws because of a lack of hard evidence that minors are harmed by violence in video games. The original version of the bill earmarked $90 million for the study, but Lieberman press secretary Rob Sawicki said that the committee had approved the measure without any dollar figure and that such a figure would be added later during the appropriations process." Gamasutra has some background on the bill, which was originally proposed in 2003.

Comments

prejudging the data

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll be interesting to hear the wailing here from supposed scientists decrying research into this question. While I'm sure this is a fishing expedition looking to prove the hypothesis that game are harmful, if gaming fans' claim to the contrary is correct, this research could support that. What exactly are you all afraid of?

brain research

[Colonel Panic]

I'm not sure why there is such resistance here on /. (other than the fact that most /.'ers are possibly adolecent gamers) to the idea that activities you engage in for a large percentage of your time can have an impact on brain development and function. Those changes in brain structure can lead to changes in behavior - that's the emerging consensus from scientists who research the brain.

They'll hire top men... TOP men...

[Jim in Buffalo]

I'm sure that they'll hire people tops in the field of study, just like Meese did when he set up his committee to investigate pornography back in the '80s.

Studying Violence in Games?

[Slipgrid]

Now I'm a liberal, and proud of it. Why am I a liberal? I like the whole liberty thing. But, Hillary and Joe don't seem to get that. Sure I don't want a big company selling harmful products, but lets please separate ones views of decency from harm.

In this article, they do talk about the CDC, and that is the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. So, why this study? Is it to make sure the new Nintendo controller is ergonomically safe? I doubt it! It's to grab some of them "values-voters."

The government created rating system for the movies harms the creativity of the movies. To make sure the box office gets the max income, producers will curb the language, so the movie can earn a PG-13 stamp. At the same time, I'm an adult who likes adult issues and situations, but all of my R rated movies have sex scenes that are about as original as American cheese. They all look the same. Don't ruin the new media forms before they hit their potential.

Seriously, if the CDC is going to spend 90 Million plus USD to study the effects of gamming, why don't they study the effects that my monitor has on my vision. I don't care if someone else's child is going to be harmed by playing a game that their parents shouldn't have let them have in the first place. I do care about creative artwork... Artwork that isn't censored or cheese.

I think that if the Senate did a honest research of gamming and children, they would find that children who play video games are going to be faster, smarter, brighter, and will excel in every area... except maybe with the women.

It's a philosophical problem

[John Miles]

I'm not sure why there is such resistance here on /. (other than the fact that most /.'ers are possibly adolecent gamers) to the idea that activities you engage in for a large percentage of your time can have an impact on brain development and function. Those changes in brain structure can lead to changes in behavior - that's the emerging consensus from scientists who research the brain.

The resistance comes from the implications of your proposition with respect to what it means to be a human being.

To the extent that books, movies, and computer games actually have a deleterious effect on adolescents' brain development, they are effectively the same as executable content. It's not much of a leap from there to conclude that people, or at least children, are nothing more than sophisticated programmable devices -- machines that have no free will to choose their own influences in life. It's an argument that rests on determinism, which bothers freethinking geeks the same way evolution frightens protestant Christians.

More specifically: if it turns out to be true that children can be "programmed" by media exposure alone, then everything Hilary Clinton has ever said about child-rearing being a collective responsibility suddently gains a lot of scientific weight. Any conservative who's tempted to jump onto this particular bandwagon had better think carefully about its direction and speed of travel. The bandwagon's next stop will be in the far-flung territories mapped by Huxley.

Re:Where do we draw the line for the CDC?

[Surt]

Clearly, this sort of study is all about finding out just what might be causing such serious harm that it is worthy of societal intervention. It used to be that we said physical discipline was a parent's right. Now we have numerous scientific studies that say that kids who are beaten so hard they wind up in the hospital have serious, society draining problems for the rest of their lives, so we have decided the line is somewhere before that position, and everybody who works with kids are now mandated reporters of child abuse. Likewise sexual and emotional abuse. When mandated reporters notice signs of these problems, they notify the authorities, and the authorities attempt to determine what corrective action needs to be taken. It will be the same thing with games. If games are proven to be causing significant long term harm to our society, laws will be established to force parents to handle the issue appropriately with their children.

Re:Is gaming a disease?

[Surt]

DSM-IV diagnosed mental disorders are considered diseases, and are considered appropriate research areas for CDC grants. The theory here is that games may be a cause of DSM-IV diseases, and so should be researched further by the CDC. It's much like child abuse, the CDC funds tons of research on that, but it's not like you catch some virus and start hitting your kids. It's about what is good for the public health, and the health and functioning of our society as a whole.

Re:Where do we draw the line for the CDC?

[IAmTheDave]

Where do we draw the line at what is considered "neglect" by a parent?

Yeah, good luck with that one.

I can't tell you how many times I've read some /. comment that says "noone can tell me how to raise my kids!" and "keep the government out of my way as a parent!" etc. But any "line" and any "neglect" is really just your individual understanding of morality.

For instance, a hundred years back, it wasn't uncommon for a child of 10, 11 to labor in the fields of his/her parents farm for 8-12 hours a day, weekends too. Now that would be considered abuse.

Some parents also believe in corporal punishment, to varying degrees. I guarentee you that some of the commentors who insist that only a child's parent best knows how to raise said child are also the first to decry anyone that might strike a child in any fashion.

Add to that that the world is riddled with unfit parents who neglect the health and well-being of their children, but put off any attempt to correct them in their actions.

So the line is so broadly spread based on who you talk to, it's most certainly difficult to pin down. However, we do have to have SOME established line, even if some people don't agree with it. It's probably legal for me to teach my son about the mature female anatomy and sex by showing him pornographic pictures, but hardly legal for me to encourage that he explore the mature female anatomy himself.

So best of luck. Honestly, the thing that sucks is that some of these anti-game crusaders do it for political gain (Clinton) but others truely believe in their cause, so it's harder to fault them for standing up for what they truely believe, especially when it revolves around the welfare of children.

Sorry for the run-on thought pattern here, but you ask an almost impossible question.

Ontopic reading material

[lpangelrob]

If you're interested in more material in the same line of thinking, here's a good column that got published in the Chicago Tribune today. (Reg. required after 5 hits to the Trib website).

In a nutshell, it describes the anecdotal reactions of four to six year olds of various R-rated movies in movie theatres (the ones specifically mentioned are The Ring and Eurotrip). The column ends with the subject of the column (not the columnist) thinking of laws banning children (she thinks of 4-6 year olds, clearly everyone here would think 18 years and under) from watching R-rated movies, period.

A good quote from the column is this:

"Kids up to the age of 6 or 7," she said by phone, "don't know the difference between fantasy and reality. What they see, they experience as if it were happening."

What's more, she said, "Young kids are very responsive to visual images, and grotesque, violent visual images are inherently scary. If they see a monster or a vicious-looking villain chasing somebody with a knife, they don't make any allowances for the fact that this is somebody's dream or that it didn't really happen. Until their brains develop further, they can't put anything into context."

Also consider that, again anecdotally, children did not have nearly the same reaction to watching images of 9/11 as adults did. They didn't think it was real. Would the reaction have been the same in 1950?

Anyways, I'm not really pushing for or against any particular viewpoint at this time, other than I can't see why the CDC shouldn't at least look at the issue.