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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..."
... or so my study indicates.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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.
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
Some repressed Japanese game desinger I think, it was the 1970s, after all PacMan himself looks a bit like a femine part and the ghosts look like eja... Oh crud, there goes my karma.
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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?
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"
Now, Ms. Pac Man is another story - that Bitch with her damn little bow.
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."
Pacman isn't violent, it's just drug obsessed. You're essentially boiled down to a simple mouth with the single goal of avoiding what can only be your own hallucinations (ghosts?!) while constantly munching down little pills fervently just to stay alive. You're so fucked up that most of these drugs just keep you going, nothing more. However, you're on a quest for the real good stuff, the uppers that let you conquer your darkest demons. Still, even these hi-powered feel good drugs really only serve to drop you even harder when you come down and suddenly you're closer to your fears and problems than ever before. Yeah, pacman is a really loser-junkie if you ask me. Sure he might turn to violent crime eventually to feed his habit, he might even slap Mrs. Pacman around a little bit, but I think that's reading into the game a bit much don't you Mrs. Thompson?
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