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'Boozy Gamer' Researcher Questioned
Via GameSetWatch, a Gamespy interview with Sonya Brady, the person who ran the research study we reported on a while back. The one that claimed gamers enjoy getting high, drinking alcohol? From the article: "What kind of feedback have I received? My feedback from research colleagues and other older adults has generally been positive. What I find most interesting is the feedback I have received from adolescents and young adults. Some people are interested in learning more about the research, even if they are skeptical of the results. Other people have been very angry."
These are the people that would be better off as "boozy gamers" :D
Listen p*ssy. I'm sure your the same homo that posted earlier about alf's boner and you just want to remain anonymous fo
When I saw "Boozy Gamer" I thought for a minute I was reading about some future Ubuntu release.
And for the question of the year: Who really gives a shit? Come on, young people are demonized as a matter of course, particularly for drinking or doing drugs. Trying to draw a causal link between games and that sort of behavior is unnecessary.
..makes it sound like he is being questioned by police or academics or something for, perhaps, faulty research - when in fact he's being questioned in the context of an interview! Here I was all excited to join the crowd of people slamming this guy for his anti-videogame-ways only to be thwarted by the english language! Now what am I going to do with my afternoon?
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The original research said that a group of people were made to play either GTA or the Simpsons driving game (Hit and Run). The people who played GTA had more permissive views of drug uses than the people playing Hit and Run. Assuming that their methodology for those results are valid, the research still leaves a lot of questions unanswered:
What if they were made to play other sorts of games? What would be the differences between Katamari Damacy and Tetris, for example.
What if they were exposed to other sorts of things? What would be the difference between playing GTA and watching Casino? Or between watching football and watching fishing.
I think more data is needed to avoid making an oversimplified generalization from these results.
Believe it or not young ones but there was a time when some people claimed smoking wasn't just not bad for you but actually GOOD for you. Boggles the mind doesn't it? You can imagine that smokers having grown up with idea that smoking a good thing didn't react all that well when people started telling them how bad it is.
Even worse when smoking parents were being told they were harming their childeren.
It is a sorta holy war. A constant one is the debate as to who is right when it comes to working hours. The americans with long working weeks or the europeans with short ones. Part of the problem is perhaps that their is no right answer but I think the main reason that such a discussion always becomes a flame war is that each side feels themselves being attacked for a fundemental part of their livestyle.
To test the effects of violent games on gamers lets use another hobby but one where we have very clear examples of the violence it generates. Soccer.
I am sure even americans have heard about violent soccer fans (hooligans) that are a major problem in europe and have been since I was a kid. Almost every match needs a sizable and costly police force to keep things under control. Even with this huge cost to the taxpayer it still frequently goes wrong and you the results are very clear closed of city centers that look like a disaster struck and a constant bill for public transport in destroyed vehicles (and a train costs a lot to rebuild).
Now I challenge you with this. You go on public tv in europe and claim that soccer is the cause of this violence and that restrictions should be put in place to curb the violence. Good luck.
The evidence of violence is very clar as is the link. If a hundred hooligans go out of the stadion and on a rampage it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you forbid audiences at soccer matches you would limit the problem.
Hell, even simpler suggestion. Let the soccer clubs pay for the police presence. They make billions they can afford it. Good luck again.
So, nobody likes to be told that their hobby is the cause of problems. Nobody likes to be told what they should do.
So is that strange that gamers react strongly to being told that their hobby is bad and should be regulated or even banned?
It doesn't matter if the accusations hold water. What matters is that your lifestyle is being questioned. The smoker doesn't want to be told to stop smoking, the soccer fan doesn't want to pay for the soccer hooligans and the gamer does not want to be restricted in the games he can play.
Very normal. But is it helpfull?
Smokers have lost, soccer fans hangon because soccer is a billion dollar industry with a wide fanbase. Gamers? Well, we are not exactly popular are we. We don't have the public on our side.
Does it really help our case of "violent games don't cause violence" if we react violently against anyone who claims it? Isn't that rather like claiming "I am peacefull and will kill anyone who claims that ain't so"?
It is easy to feel attacked in your personal freedom but when you attack your enemy for claiming your violent you are only proving his point.
Worse, perhaps we are like those smokers who claim that smoking ain't bad for you. How many gamers are even willing to consider that the link between violence and gaming could exist? Based on past experience, not many. This is another holy war and both sides got their fanatics.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I just sent feedback to gamespy.com about their article, as suggested on page 2. Hopefully they'll get back to me, but I'm not holding my breath. Here's what I sent 'em:
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And I ask again, how is being permissive towards the use of alcohol, sex or even drug use a problem? Alcohol can be used in moderation, sex can be safe when using condoms and some drugs can be perfectly safe when used in moderation, so safe, that many are prescribed by doctors!
This research is like saying "reading books about food will make people hungry" or "reading a wine tasting magazine will make people more permissive towards alcohol use". Geez!
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
And if drinking is too hard... Try drugs instead.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Of course some people are going to be angry. When you present skewed information and lies as fact you are going to upset someone.
---space.is.the.place---
"We randomly assigned 100 male undergraduates aged 18-21 to play a game relatively high in violence, Grand Theft Auto III, or a game relatively low in violence, The Simpsons: Hit and Run."
So they used 100 guys 18-21, likely most of which were from one geographic area. They also had no control group, so there is no way to prove that Gamers are any different than Non-Gamers, only that 18-21yr old males who play these games have some difference.
"Those study participants who played Grand Theft Auto III had greater increases in diastolic blood pressure from a baseline rest period to gameplay in comparison to participants who played The Simpsons."
Which is much more likely based on the fact that GTA has much more realism and realistic punishments. Death and prison register in our minds as real possible penalties. Death of a cartoon figure registers as little more then a Saturday morning cartoon with little association.
"After gameplay, GTA III players had more negative feelings, more uncooperative behavior, and thought that using alcohol and marijuana was less harmful to their health than players of The Simpsons."
other then being subjective and with out statistical backing, this is a great result. With only 100 people in the pool, any findings could be easily skewed by a few outliers. Also, there is nothing that states the pool sizes. So if the GTA pool had 65 participants and the TS pool had 35, it would be factual to say that the GTA group had more negative feelings. Also, the result is poorly worded, I highly doubt that everyone in the GTA group thought that "using alcohol and marijuana was less harmful to their health." It is more likely that GTP players were "more likely to think that using alcohol and marijuana was less harmful to their health."
"Among those people who grew up in more violent homes and communities... Among those people who grew up in more violent communities..."
So now, out of 100 people they are making conclusions for the entire male 18-21 gaming community based on a hand full of people. Assuming a third of the participants grew up in a violent house hold, another third in a violent community, and the final third grew up in Mayberry, and then each of these groups was evenly distributed between GTA and TS, you're looking at 16 people to base your research off of.
"Consistent with the results of many other people's research"
None of which appears to be sited.
With no statistics posted, this should outright be tossed as a valueless publication. And judging by their claims and process, any statistically substantial findings they made are most likely due to outliers skewing the results.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
So if you don't like the conculsions of her research, go to school, get a degree and do your own. Almost sounds like she has no interest in input from anyone but her peers. Most of which are probably not gamers.
However, at the same time, it is kind of like asking a WWI General about how the war is going on in the trenches when you are both sitting in a nice French Chateu sipping on noon tea.
Chances are they are quite educated about the analysis and the subject of war fare, but you are going to get quite a different outlook than when you ask the soldier who is sitting in the mud with shells going off about his fox hole.
The General may go down to the supply area (far back from the trenches) on a sunny day and ask one out of 100 troops his opinion which most of them unamiously agree the war is going great. So the general goes home and writes a letter home to his wife saying the war is going great.
However, two trenches up closer to the main lines, the troops are distinctly aware that they are going to be over run and a severe breakthrough and encirclement is about to happen. Dispite their best efforts to let the general know, he disregards them because they are not his peers. The next day enemey troops kick down the Chateau doors and haul the general out of bed after a very bad route.
The moral of the story is... Just because you are an expert and do polls on a handful of people doesn't mean you know the entire picture and chances are your research did't include the right people.
I'm not sure how this relates to gaming, but from personal experience in the trenches, I've never experienced gaming causing me to get violent or want to murder someone... Expect Tetris... And my drinking habbits stem from work related stress... Not gaming. Of course this is personal experience and all other gamers in the world could have this problem, but if it was a serious issue like he says we'd have thousands of mass murders and alcoholics on the streets begging for change to play at the arcades.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Here's my observation of the way the study is being presented: Playing an intensely violent and realistic video game led students to say that alcohol and marijuana use are less harmful than they would have otherwise.
Where was this published, in the journal "DUH!"? Since when is it a surprise that people reduce their assessment of other risks when confronted with a specific risk? I don't worry about government wiretapping when I'm high off the deck rock climbing. We are, quite simply, wired to deal with the risk we are facing. A real control in this experiment would have put some of these randomly selected students in a risky, blood pressure raising situtaion (climbing could work, ethics guidelines are not likely to allow a simulated mugging), and ask them the same question.
Games like GTA really do induce a "reptile brain" response. I'm 45 years old, and find it kind of scary getting behind the wheel after virtually driving wrong way the length of the Las Veturas strip at full tilt with a mob goon tied to the hood of the car. In that situation, I am hypersensitive to driving risks, and likely not worrying about other things.
Last, somebody needs to point out that you can't reasonably play these games when you are wasted. GTA is freakin hard to play. I assume that computer games provide an alternative to drug use, rather than fostering it as is implied by the headlines.
Are we seeing the birth of Jack Thompson's successor? He's slowly falling out of favour, and with continued litigation against him we can be sure few will listen to him. But know we see a "doctor" actually "researching" the subject. She seems much more reputable than Thompson - and this could mean the start of some serious problems.
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But it is a symptom of causation.
What was the research topic again? Was it where a group of 100 was split into two groups, one playing a GTA game and the other playing a Simpson's game, and the GTA players had a higher level of social tolerance to alcohol? If so, a reasonable person can conclude that the Simpsons game reduces the social tolerance for alcohol. While I haven't played the game in question, I do know that The Simpsons TV show ridicules drunks by the portrayal of Barney: "Haay, com 'n' joine dah partee! *BUUUUURRRRPPPP*"
(For the above, I'm assuming that the results are trustable - which they are not. The correlation study has not included the control group that did not play video games - without this third point of reference, the research can easily be backwards without noticing it. Unless this is really a preliminary study that is intended to lead up to more research, in that case this is okay. )