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New Book Cuts Through Violent Video Game Myths
Terry Bosky suggests a recent interview from Game Couch with one of the authors of an upcoming book which fights the "myths and hysteria" surrounding violent video games. Dr. Cheryl K. Olson explains how many of the studies linking aggression with video games were flawed or misguided, and she discusses some of her own findings. Quoting:
"Until now, the most-publicized studies came from a small group of experimental psychologists, studying college students playing nonviolent or violent games for 15 minutes. It's debatable whether those studies are relevant to real children, playing self-selected games for their own reasons (not for cash or extra credit!), in social settings, over many years. But media reports and political rhetoric often ignore that distinction. Also, the most-published researchers have built their careers around media violence. Their studies were designed under the assumption that violent video games are harmful, which dictated the questions they asked and how they framed their results. Media violence is just a small part of what we do, so we could look at the issue with fresh eyes and no agenda."
... but that last part sounded like they were saying "Our opinion matters more because we just don't give a fuck."
this article makes me so mad at the biased video game researchers. i need to go down to my local ammunation, get strapped, and start taking them fools out.
This book makes me so ANGRY!!! I just want to launch a plasma grenade at this 'doctor'!!!!!!
But seriously, folks, it's about damn time someone stepped up to the 'personal responsibility' plate and didn't get hit in the head by the ball (man, I pwn'd that metaphor). I grew up in the age of violent video games, as did most people here... come on, this website's name involves SLASHING people. My favorite movies growing up were Beverly Hills Cop and Aliens (I was all of six years old for those), and not once did I feel the urge to be more violent, or to shoot anyone. I thought "Wow, those movies are an awesome escape from boring reality. I'm gonna go read some Calvin & Hobbes now, maybe eat a cookie."
Yes, this is anecdotal, but if ten million people have (and apparently do) have similar anecdotal stories, that adds up, and this book is just the long-overdue sober second look at a popular, convenient myth.
PS: Jack Thompson needs to be clubbed with this book.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
I object to saying that video games are getting more violent. Think of say, Space Invaders, the concept was simple: Shoot Aliens. However with better graphics such as Quake with the same objective the game suddenly becomes violent. Technology has evolved and what people mostly say is they don't object to bad graphics aliens being shot but as soon as we move it to 3-D and add a bit of blood rather then just random colors it now is violent.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Not violence in games specifically, but I have done original research on behavior and its relation to violent video games. My results show a temporary increase (lasting around 15-20 minutes) in violent behavior after playing a selection of video games with varying types of violence. Some of these are first person shooters, some are fighting games, etc.
Now, before you naysayers get your panties in a bunch, keep in mind, we are professionals. No one in my group had any agenda apart from doing good research. We had no stake in the outcome, and were not funded by anyone who would be able to influence our results. We controlled for all the variables you can think of and plenty you can't.
The results are good, and I trust our conclusions.
And if even one of you tries that "correlation is not causation" thing you love I'll scream, especially since it doesn't even apply to our study.
People are always concerned about what the effects of playing violent video games might be, but nobody seems to question whether there are any undesirable effects of programming these games. I imagine that a programmer, stressing out to meet the game's shipping deadline in the face of a show-stopping heisenbug somewhere in the code, might be more inclined to do something violent during a particularly frustrating midnight debugging session, such as take the computer up to the roof of his company's 12-story office building and then drop it to the ground whilst yelling profanities at the top of his lungs.
I think there should be a law that people have to pass a background check before being allowed to program violent video games.
When it comes to self-selected behavior like what movies people see, what games they play, what drugs they partake of, etc., it is very difficult to determine cause and effect.
If people who watch R-rated games tend to be more violent than those who don't, are the movies making them more violent than they otherwise would have been? Maybe, but determining a "yes" or "no" answer is far from easy and far from certain.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That gives lazy politicians something to do! Lets save our children from the violent video games! Instead of, oh, I dunno, managing tax reform, social problems, basically stuff you were elected to do.
Violent media has been around since the dawn of time, in the form of TV, books, sports etc etc etc. Its not going anywhere, kids, so don't worry about it. Wherever there is a market, the product will get served.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
You really aren't versed in survey sampling standards, most surveys only involve a couple hundred people, if that. The way surveys work is you use a small number of people but you statistically balance the people involved based on catagories (they call these demographics). For example, if 40% of kids who play video games are between the ages of 6 and 10, white, and come from middle class families, then 40 out of 100 kids in the study need to be between the ages of 6 and 10, white, and come from middle class families. Depending on how accurate you wanted to go, if you have accurate demographics to start with you could get decent results using 100 kids in a single town, but that would be very very hard to do, and hard to verify your results. It's not 1200 that should worry you for accuracy, that's actually a pretty large number; it's the two states part. It seems to me they may not be taking region of the country into account for this, which might be a factor or might not.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I've developed violent tendencies towards zombies, trolls and robots.
You're being to simplistic -- the sample size needed for good predictions isn't directly related to the total number of gamers. The size of the sample needed is related to error introduced by the measures used and the phenomenon measured. If you have a robust methodology, you may need only a few subjects. If there are huge errors introduced by your methodology (political polling is a good example of this), you may need thousands of subjects.
I didn't read the article (this is slashdot, after all...), but any good psychologist would include statistics indicating the probability that the results were caused by error or random chance, usually this number should be very low, 5% or lower. See the wikipedia article on P-values for more on this.
But to answer your question: many psychological experiments are done with a much smaller number of subjects (50 or so), and get very low P-values. The effect being tested here may be harder to reliably measure, but the sample size is also pretty large. So there's no reason to think that 1,200 is too low, unless the stats say otherwise.
-Esme
Well, that happens to be one of those funny ways that mathematics likes to grab your intuition by the red rubber nose and give it a resounding snap.
IANAS (I Am Not A Statistician), but this is the situation as I understand it.
Suppose I have a room with a hundred people in it. Some of them are mathematicians, whose noses I've blackened with a magic marker. Everybody is wearing red rubber clown noses. Your job is to snap enough noses that you have a reasonable estimate of what proportion of them are mathematicians. Let's say you check five people, and two have smudgy noses. That gives you an estimate of 40%, but it's not very reliable, so you continue checking until you have snapped 50 rubber noses, and found twenty mathematicians. Now you're pretty confident the ration is about 40%, right?
Now suppose there were a thousand people in the room. You're a bit less confident in your 40% effort, but you're still almost as confident. But look: increasing the sample by a factor of ten made you a LOT more confident; increasing the population by a factor of 10 makes almost no difference (at least with these numbers; a 1 in 50 result would be a different kettle of fish).
Samples over a certain range get rapidly better -- much faster than linearly, and then they kind of run out of steam because they can't really get much better or they'd be perfect. The upshot is that for many experimental designs you aren't much better off having 500 subjects over having 50, whether the population you are sampling is 10,000 or 100,000,000. In fact you might be worse off it the population size is, say, 500 -- at least if you are interested in gaining any insights about your null hypothesis.
It's a good thing too. If you think about it, if you do something like a drug trial with a hundred or so subjects in it are supposed to stand in for all of the 6.7 billion people on the planet.
In any case, I'm always a bit skeptical when I see studies with sample sizes in the thousands. It's not financially efficient to conduct real studies this size, so they tend to be hashing together data from sources collected for other purposes. Such studies have their place, of course. They also have their limitations.
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I killed 15 people, 11 stray dogs, two parakeets and one goldfish after playing violent video games. And that was just last week. I blame it all on high resolution 3-d graphics putting thoughts in my head.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
No mater how hard someone doing a study tries, there will be some bias and it may be completely unexpected.
That's OK. that's why studies are done open, done many times, and looked at.
Certainly who sponsored the study is something to look at, but it doesn't automatically mean the study is flawed. It's especially important when a study goes against previous studies.
So stop with the 'study is biased ' crap. Of course it is. Look at the result and see if it skewed the data, or id the study used bad techniques.
For the topic at hand, It is clear that violent games have a short term effect.
Adrenalin, acting out violent behaviors are all common to some degree.
It will go on for as long as the adrenalin is their system, and/or until it stops being funny.
I think there can be a point where the game can cause problems. We're not there it technologically, but it doesn't mean we won't cross the threshold.
If someone had a holodeck, could playing war games cause someone to be shell shock? desensitize someone to violence? I don't know and i hope not. That doesn't mean we shouldn't study it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I object to your objection :)
Between space invaders and today's 3d there has been the time where blood could be drawn but mostly wasn't. Designers weren't using random color as soon as xevious, around '82. Drawing blood was technically possible and in topic in commando or green beret. And it would have impressed people, because we were impressed by VG graphics. We were impressed by marble madness fake 3d, or pole position fast sprites. Also, Video games were politically incorrect at least with leisure suit larry. It's not a matter of "we would have done it if we could".
Do VG mirror society or influence it? I guess it's kind of a feedback loop.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
It is in the summary, we need to look at the issue with NO AGENDA.
Be honest, how many of us does that rule out?
If have undergo military training in the past, and looking back, I know that through carefull management of my emotions I was being trained to be a killer. I really didn't notice it at the time, but training like that is designed to make you feel part of a group and you want to protect and fight for that team and kill those who are not in the same colors.
So I KNOW you can be manipulated.
Are claims that violent games decensitize you to violence then really that odd?
I noticed something, the same people who scream that goverments are training killers are the same who say that violent games have no influence on people. The two don't add up.
Any normal person can be influenced by media. A simple experiment, play the theme from love story and the theme from jaws over the same scene, wanna bet you look at each clip with a different heart rate?
But it doesn't really matter if the influence is there or not, first we got to accept that scaremongering politicans and selfish players are NEITHER suited to give an unbiased opinion on this subject. What next, we ask smokers about the danger of smoking or the tobacco industry? No, we ask doctors who are supposed to start each study with an open mind.
It is sad to see so clearly that this hasn't happened when it comes to games BUT this by no means proof that games are harmless. We really need independent study in this area AND then IF games are shown to have an influence, ask ourselves wether the influence is worth basic freedoms. For instance, we know drinking is bad for you, but we still allow it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Lets do a comparison or three: If you play with cap guns, it is generally considered not violent if you pretend to shoot someone and they play dead. It may even be called cute. If you shoot a paintball gun with red paintballs it looks more violent, especially since the projectiles actually make an implact on their target and it leaves a red bloodish looking substance. But this example is no more violent than the capgun example. Now if you acutally shoot someone with a gun, it looks more violent still because they are writhing in pain, screaming and spewing blood everywhere. But we know that it actually isn't more violent even though it only appears more violent.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
I agree, sadly. Much of the problem is that there are all sorts of studies on various forms of media and its supposed effects, some showing evidence, some not showing evidence, some showing a negative correlation. So overall there's no conclusion one could draw, but those supporting censorship can hand-pick the studies which do supposedly show an effect (even if they are old studies that have been discredited or later contradicted by other studies).
I saw this with the UK Government in its plans to criminalise possession of "extreme" porn - it commissioned three researchers with known anti-pornography views to dig out every possible study which showed some negative effect of porn (even though most the studies applied to porn that isn't being criminalised), producing the Rapid Evidence Assessment.
Now this was criticised by academics in the field as being "extremely poor, based on contested findings and accumulated results. It is one-sided and simply ignores the considerable research tradition into "extreme" (be they violent or sexually explicit) materials within the UK's Humanities and Social Sciences." This statement was signed by ove forty academics - but did anyone pushing for this law pay any attention? Of course, sadly not - instead we continue to hear the Rapid Evidence Assessment being cited as proof that possession of naughty pictures needs to be criminalised.
We were impressed by marble madness fake 3d,
I'm glad you were. I was too busy losing all the time. I still can't finish the last level, and getting through Silly (I think that was the name of it; the reversed gravity level) is still a bitch...
This is going to be one of those really unpopular posts where I get modded to hell, so I'll just say what I need to and get out.
Maybe ten years ago, I read On Killing, written by a psych professor at Westpoint, the U.S. Army Academy. The book was not about video games: it was a study of how the U.S. Army had successfully changed its effective fire ratio from 10% in WWII to over 90% in the Vietnam war, and how those 80% who got psychologically "tricked" into killing people they weren't prepared to kill were the ones who got extremely ill after the war. These people were trained to easily go past the non-violence barrier that most people have.
There is, however, a short chapter near the end of the book where he warns that the elements FPS games are functionally equivalent to the training methods the Army used,teaching players to go across that barrier, too.
Whether you agree or disagree, he still knew a lot about war and psychology.
Put identity in the browser.
Interesting that you mentioned space invaders. From wikipedia:
I wonder why he wanted the enemies to be airplanes... sentiments regarding WWII and the nuke, perhaps?
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
Look, I love video games. I've been playing them for years. COD is currently my favorite addiction.
Today, video games look pretty much like video games. You can tell you are not watching something real, though single-player COD is getting pretty photo-realistic. Flying bodies, spurting blood. But it's still cartoonish. Cartoonish enough that you know it's a game.
What happens when the game becomes indistinguishable from reality? When it becomes photo-realistic? We know that people can become desensitized to stimuli by constant exposure.
If we had games that simulated warfare like, say, a "holodeck", would there be any debate as to the harmful effects it would have on the psyche of the players? Would we not see traumatic stress issues?
If you agree that we would see such problems with hyper-realistic games, then I think it is reasonable to debate and discuss what happens as we approach that level of realism. At what point does the game become realistic enough to start being harmful?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
* Do you believe in the killing of unborn children?
* Do you believe you have the right to tell a women whos been raped that she has to carry to term the resulting fetus?
There are lots of unborn children who are not being carried by rape victims.
The whole problem with the 'abortion debate' is that the extreme participants argue under the assumption that if you are not universally pro-life, you must be pro-abortion, and if you are not universally pro-choice, you must be pro-government-control of bodies.
That's not the way reasonable people think.
I think abortion is bad *AND* I think the government telling a woman what to do with her body is bad.
On top of that, I realize that not all abortions are equally bad - aborting a one-cell fetus is not even in the same realm of bad as aborting a 38-week-old fetus. And telling a woman who is pregnant as a result of sex she agreed to have that she can't have an abortion is not as bad as telling a woman who never consented to the sex that led to pregnancy that she can't have an abortion.
Now, there is going to be a lot of variance in where most reasonable people decide the 'badness' of allowing women to choose to abort their pregnancies is less bad than forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. Most reasonable people are going to agree that the death of non-differentiated fetuses is a very small amount of bad. And most reasonable people are going to agree that the death of a fetus that is, but for a few inches of position, about to be a live birth as extremely bad. So most REASONABLE people support *BOTH* abortion *AND* limits on choice.
6 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Abort if you want.
38 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Sorry, too late.
A debate about whether abortion is OK or not is stupid. A debate about government intervention in a woman's choice is stupid. There is no debate - both are bad. The debate needs to be about at what point a woman's control of her body is outweighed by the interests of the fetus.
So back to your original questions:
#1) Sometimes.
#2) Sometimes.
paintball
At my school, the University of Michigan, two years ago. They had me play Quake 2 (ah the memories) for about ten minutes and then had me unscramble words. The thing is, each string of letters could form either a word with violent or nonviolent connotations. Presumably, if the virtual violence affected a player's actual state of mind, he'd make out the hostile words over the innocuous ones. I got paid $10 for my time. So if you were wondering how they really worked, that's how.
The whole problem with the 'abortion debate' is that the extreme participants argue under the assumption that if you are not universally pro-life, you must be pro-abortion, and if you are not universally pro-choice, you must be pro-government-control of bodies.
There are astronomically more people that believe life begins at conception than believe that abortions two minutes before birth are hunky dory. No one wants abortions - not NOW, not Planned Parenthood. They just want the option to be legally available.
One giant problem is how the anti-abortion movement is tied at the hip to the Republican party, which is equally dedicated to eliminating social programs. It is asinine in the extreme to use the power of the state to force women to carry a fetus to term and then do nothing to support that child once it's born. When Johnny is a fetus made up of a dozen cells, he is of sacrosanct importance. Once he's born, he can go screw himself.
6 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Abort if you want.
38 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Sorry, too late.
And what if it took said rape victim 38 weeks to save up money (because she has no insurance and we have no single payer health care) and make travel arrangements because the nearest abortion clinic is 300 miles away? And once she gets to the clinic, she has to go through a waiting period and being pressured into other options.
It is reasonable to say there should be limits on late term abortions, but it is not reasonable to put up roadblocks at the same time.