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..."

Comments

Re:The hell?

[shimage]

Having a PhD doesn't make you smart. It means that you're probably hardworking and not-dumb. But she doesn't have a Havard PhD. She is, however, a tenured professor at Havard (I am assuming that Havard uses the same nomenclature that most other schools use, in which "associate" refers to those tenured professors that have not yet achieved "full" status). I'm not sure if you read her response, but she seems like most top-tier professors I have talked to, which is to say, cogent even when I disagree with them -- the opposite of moronic.

From her response on Joystiq:

I believe that parents need to pay attention to their kids and to what their media experiences because all media are educational, whether intended or not. I will also note for you that the ESRB has assigned content descriptors for violence to games in the Pac Man series, which you can see for yourself by searching www.esrb.org. I am a huge advocate for self-regulation and for better parenting (I believe self-regulation means responsibility is required by all).

and also

Violence is part of life. I am comfortable deciding what is appropriate for me and my family, but I would not determine acceptability for anyone else. Our research seeks to help make parents aware of the violence and other content that may be of concern to them in video games and to make sure that they actually pay attention to their kids and their kids' experiences with games.

Now I don't know about you, but I completely agree with her. Her main bitch seems to be that the ESRB gives out ratings without playing the games. She wants there to be an adequate tool for deciding what her children are allowed to consume, not to keep you from playing violent games (or even keep you from letting your children play M-rated games). Her goal is for ESRB ratings to be

1. More comprehensive
2. More consistent

and this is not something I can really find fault with.

As for the study itself, I don't really think it contains useful information (yes, I've read it). The violence she calculates is undifferentiated, which means that cartoon violence against space invaders or centipedes is the same as any other kind of violence. At that point I could have told her -- without even playing the video games -- that there's tons of violence in E-rated games. With some notable exceptions, my video game experience is almost completely dominated by acts of senseless cartoon violence. I fail to see how it was in any way worse than your average episode of "Tom and Jerry". I haven't read the subsequent papers, though; perhaps this is fixed in those, since she explicitly mentions in the Joystiq interview that the type of violence is important (more important that the quantity of violence, in fact). Lastly, I hate papers that just compile statistics (also, she included too many sigfigs in her percentages), so this is a paper I wouldn't put much credence in on general principles.

In short, I don't think she says anything moronic; I just think she doesn't say anything useful either (for similar, but much more explicit reasons [at least in my opinion] than Stanton).