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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.
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
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
"Trust me" says the Anonymous Coward pointing to hypothetical results of an unnamed study that may or may not even exist.
"Sure," says I, "When I get bacon delivered through my second-story window fresh off the flying pig."
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
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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"Personal responsibility" is a code-word for a refusal to look at contributory factors. It's a kind of simple-mindedness. The master-narrative you're playing into is this: social scientists are going to push through a bunch of regulations and restrictions because they correlate some influence with an unwanted behavior, when people should just be held responsible for their behaviors.
That populist sentiment misses a lot of the point of that kind of research. It may not have much to do with "banning" anything at all, but, for example, giving parents information that will help them decide if and when to bring videogame consoles into the home, or whether someone who is having trouble with violent behavior should be advised to stay away from videogames. That research is worthwhile even if there isn't a direct public policy connection.
I'm all in favor of the more nuanced view of the topic of media effects on behavior, and I think the authors of this book are right on. But the old canard of "what about personal responsibility?" strikes me as anti-intellectual crankiness.
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
"Personal responsibility" is a code-word for a refusal to look at contributory factors.
But how come it's only ever the "unpopular things" that are questionned as to whether they affect behaviour - fictional violence, video games, rock music, Marilyn Manson, porn?
No one questions the violence in religious texts when it turns out a murderer was obsessed with the Bible or killed someone because "God says so". Unless they're a pagan or satanist, in which case, it's back to the "unpopular things" which must be banned again.
I've nothing against providing parents with information, but note that people do use these claims to ban things, even for adults. I think "personal responsibility" is a valid response when the claim put forward is that media alone can turn people into violent criminals.
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.
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