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Harvard Phd Vs. About.com over Gaming
MaryAlan writes "I don't know if anyone has noticed this, but About.com's Aaron Stanton is in the middle of a back and forth firefight with Dr. Thompson, a Harvard researcher who recently testified before the U.S. Congress about violent video games. She published a study that listed Pac-Man as being 62% violent. Stanton attacked in an article criticizing her research. Then, Joystiq.com contacted Dr. Thompson and got an interview and a response, published her rebuttal, in which she defends the Pac-Man rating and the study.
So today, Stanton attempted to tear the study apart, detailing why it's flawed even though Thompson claims otherwise. On one hand we have an established Harvard Phd, who has testified before the U.S. congress, against a game journalist with a bachelors degree in Psychology. Hmmm..."
Since when does having a Ph.D. excuse someone from making moronic statements? Also, testifying before a Congress that is little more than a religious/corporate tool isn't much of an accomplishment.
As Staton says, Thompson's methods found that Pac Man was 62% violent, Dig Dug was 67% violent, and Centipede was 97% violent (!). These results (which, not so coincidentally, were expunged from the final report) indicate that the whole method is flawed. This only begs the question - why were these numbers removed? Perhaps because it would have signaled to anyone reading the study that it was hopelessly flwed?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
So? If a PhD came out and said that all fish were descendant from cows and some fry cook said it was the other way around, who would you believe? You should base your conclusions on the soundness of the arguments, not who made them.
For that matter, who the arguments where made to shouldn't give them added credibility. Do you really believe that someone having testified to something before Congress makes it automatically true--or even more credible? 'cause there have been a lot of woppers told on the floors of Congress.
--MarkusQ
I haven't checked recently, but has it become passe to ignore that you need to do isolate as many dependent variables as possible in a scientific experiment for the results to be valid?
The kind doctor's response? Well theres a lot of studies so our study (whether it's crap or not) is going to be only one data point. FFS, if a data point is made-up it doesn't deserve to even be in the statistical sample!!!
"Reality continues to ruin my life" - Calvin and Hobbes
No. It is the abstraction that removes the "violence" from the loss.
Violence is only violent if there is some aspect of realism.
By her "logic", chess is an incredibly violent game.
Say I created a game in which you spent 15 minutes having sex with a prostitute, then 15 minutes beating her to death and cutting her up into pieces. Would this game be 50% violent, 50% having sex with hookers?
As someone with the letters P,h,D in my professional background - I speak with some authority on the subject: Yes, quite a few of the "Ph.D. club-card holders" are completely full of shit.
Caveat Emptor. Grow up Americans. Think for yourselves, people.
and since when does testifying in front of congress give someone credibility? The people in Congress are not the brightest critters out there. To me, congressional testimony is as good as saying you were a witness in a trial. Whoop de doo.
Nobel prize winners can even be crackpots. Linus Pauling has been pushing the benefits of Vitamin C. Of course nutrition isn't the field he won the prize for.
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William Shockley won the prize in Physics for inventing the transistor. He used the prize as a foundation for the soapbox from which he spouted racist bile.
A proper argument is based on facts. PhD vs. grade eight education. Doesn't matter. If some illiterate has the facts in his corner and the PhD only has theory well; reality always trumps theory.
Actually, taking experts too seriously can sometimes have horrible consequences. There was a British 'expert' who got a bunch of people convicted of murder because their kids died of sudden crib death. "... the testimony of Sir Roy Meadow, a prominent pediatrician who was the first to suggest in 1977 that some mothers induce illness in their children to draw attention to themselves." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=he
The whole study is fundamentally flawed in that it doesn't seem to distinguish or identify between different types of "violence". It seems to use such a broad definition of violence as to include what I would call conflict or competition, but not necessarily violence. It fails to take into account the grade or realism of violence, and lumps it altogether as a single universal constant, rather than a subjective scaleable value.
By their standards it would seem like one minute of thumb restling out of 2 minutes of gameplay would be rated as 50% violent whereas 1 minute of shooting a guy in the face with blood splatter effects and visceral gurgling sound effects out of 10 minutes of total gameplay would only be rated as 10% violent. It's a flawed system of measurement which completely fails to take into account all the factors involved in what a normal, average, discerning, human being would normally use to define "violence".
Even when it measures relative deaths per minute, it doesn't seem to care exactly what is dieing. Apparently a goomba or a turtle from mario, or a plant monster, or even a ghost, is measured exactly the same as a poor defensless civilian grandmother from GTA. It also doesn't seem to care about the method used in killing; whether it be bopping on the head, causing it to instantly dissappear, or to light a person on fire and watch him burn to death screaming. Burning someone to death usually takes a little while, so you might actually get a lower violence rating if you kill people exclusively with flamethrowers.
The relative levels of education involved in this debate in this case is just another misleading factor. Just because the person who conducted the study has a Harvard Phd doesn't mean she has a clue. Her study may very reliably and accurately measure the level of something in videogames, it certainly isn't what most people would call violence. And whatever it measures, it certainly doesn't seem to be anything useful.
How would a game like Hitman be rated? In optimal gameplay, you're "violent" for maybe 5 seconds out of a 15-30 minute mission. Does that make it under 1% violent, more child friendly than Pokemon? If preparations to do violence counted, then Dig Dug should be near 100% violent, rather than the 67% they gave it. The whole purpose of the game is to blow the enemies up, as Hitman's purpose is to kill your target. So what's the deal? Am I missing some other criteria in their judging system? From where I'm sitting, they're just looking foolish.
Her doctorate is an "Sc.D., Harvard School of Public Health"
Don't inflate it, this isn't a hard science PhD. Its not even a Psych PhD!
Her field is "risk analysis"
Either her data hold up to peer review, or they don't. Of course, this is a sociology study, which isn't noted for being the most scientifically rigorous field in academia.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Of course, just because someone is educated, doesn't mean they're necessarily smart... or don't have an agenda... I don't really see how Pac Man could EVER be considered in the same violence league as Grand Theft Auto, etc.
Just my $0.02 - Wonka, wonka, wonka...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I think that there are some fairly serious problems with this entire field of videogame violence studies, which has been characterized by some of the sloppiest, most overinterpreted "science" that I have ever seen. Dr. Thompson is far from the worst offender. The main problem with her work is that it utilizes an arbitrary, unvalidated definition of "violence." If she wishes to relate here work to the studies that purport to detect harmful effects of videogame violence, then she certainly needs to establish in some rigorous way that what she calls "violence" is in some sense comparable to what these studies are examining. (those studies are mostly pretty bad, too, but that is another issue).
Stanton's point that Thompson's classification system yields high violence scores for games that most people, and most parents, would not consider to be particularly violent is a perfectly valid criticism, and her defense, which was essentially "we aren't using it for those games" simply dodges the issue. Given that her criteria are clearly misleading for some games, how does she decide which games it can validly be applied to. I think that it is highly irresponsible for her to report her %violence measures to Congress without properly explaining the criteria she used for classification (saying that it's in her papers is hardly adequate here, considering that her audience is most certainly not going to be reading those papers). Frankly, it seems highly questionable to me whether Dr. Thompson's studies have any value at all. I thought that her defense of classifying Pac-Man as violent was particularly revealing:
What I find notable here is that she seems to have made no effort to actually determine whether many--or indeed, any--young children actually interpret Winky, Blinky, et al. in Pac-Man as "ghosts trying to kill you" or are actually frightened by the game. This kind of uncritical thinking seems representative of her approach.
I should note, however, that her actual recommendations to Congress seem fairly reasonable. She suggests, for example, that ESRB members should actually play the games, hardly a radical suggestion. And somewhat ironically, she suggests that they should do what she failed to do herself in her testimony--"make its rating process and the terms that it uses in its ratings more
transparent."
I think it comes down to how the Dr T defines violence. It had little to do with how graphicly it was depicted but how it related to the experience of playing the game, like the winning and loosing conditions and the interaction between the game objects. As for how valid that view is, is open to opinion. Ditto with how much violence seen or acted out is good for a person.
So for pacman, eating dots being the primary goal isnt violent, eating a power pill and then eating ghosts a supporting goal is violent, and getting caught by a ghost to loose a life is also violent. The fact that the violence was not portrayed in a realistic or gruesome manner was not considered.
Thus by her definition, Space Invaders, chess, Quake would all easily out rank pacman for violence because the primary goal is eliminate/kill an enemy, and the loss condition being death of the players avatar. Where as solitaire, most racing games, or DDR would be almost devoid of violence.
The best bit about her reply was saying that the parents of kids are ultimately responsible for what they let their kids play.
Regardless of what Dr T said to some senate committee, it will be perverted/given spin by the politicians for their own means.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
It really doesn't matter at all how many degrees and certificates she has. They prove that she has studied, and is able to write reports.
Trying to say how violent a game is by how many minutes of 'violence' there is a game without ANY weighting to the context or impact of said violence is ridiculous. To say that Centipede is 100% violent because the entire game is spent being chased by something that intends 'harm' is just stupid. It's a reflex/puzzle game... and it's a game of tag effectively. To rate it higher than GTA because there are stretches in GTA where there is no violence is just plain moronic.
You can't apply an objective measure to something so plainly subjective as violence in the media.
I don't care how many pieces of paper she has.
Disclaimer: I didn't read the attached article just because I really don't give a flying fsck.
Well then what the heck are you blathering on about? The article was a well-written critique bringing up very valid points. In other words, to directly answer your question, Person A. Some advice... don't get starry-eyed because someone has letters after their name-- try to judge ideas and methods on their own merits.
E pluribus unum
I have no interest in the PhD flamewar, but the violence rating system Thompson used is clearly useless even for the purpose you propose: by Thompson's standards, Centipede (92% violent) is probably more violent than the movie Robocop (I believe Robocop is about 100 minutes long, that means it would need 8 minutes of "non-violent" material just to be on a par with Centipede!) Does this mean parents should consider Robocop more suitable entertainment for their three year old child? Consider: Centipede (in which a gnome destroys some bugs), or Robocop (the opening scene of which features a man being shot to squishy bits).
Parenting is a hard enough job as it is without studies like Thompson's being taken out of context and used to give parents yet more confusion. Television and tabloid psychologists should always be ignored in favor common sense. "How do I determine if this game is too violent for my young one?" Look at the packaging, read the copy, scrutinize the screenshots. Think about the implications of the words "Rape, pillage, claw, and shoot your way through 69 bloodthirsty levels of gore, guts and mayhem!" If you're still not sure, try renting the game and maybe even playing it yourself.
She is arguing that video ratings need to be rethought, for instance that games should be actually played before they are designated 'violence free'.
Don't be ridiculous. If the Hot Coffee scandal has taught us anything, it's that merely playing a game would be an utterly inadequate means of rating it, since one can view the worst accessible content in a game and give it a "mature" rating and still be lambasted in the press for failing to guess that it can be hacked to display simulated sex.
It's not feasible for game raters to play games in depth, and even if they did, they would inevitably miss content. That's why the current system has them rate games based on videos of the most violent/whatever moments. It's a good system, and no more flawed than the alternatives.
Writing off violence just because it is cartoon violence doesn't really cut it, since young children can be affected by cartoons as well as real life.
Why, could this possibly be why ESRB ratings have contained helpful little content descriptions like "animated violence" for about 10 years now?
the ESRB needs to provide more information about the games it rates so that parents can have a better idea of the content in their kid's games.
Perhaps the real problem is that nobody, apparently not even Harvard researchers, bothers to read the content information the ESRB already provides.