Slashdot Mirror
Computer Games Make Players Less Violent
Stony Stevenson writes "A new study of computer gamers has found that a session in front of World of Warcraft can make players less stressed and more calm. The study questioned 292 male and female online gamers aged between 12 and 83 about anger and stress. They then played the game for two hours and were retested. "There were actually higher levels of relaxation before and after playing the game as opposed to experiencing anger, but this very much depended on personality type," said team leader Jane Barnett from Middlesex University."
"The thinking in the field is that there is a scale along which people, even those considered to be 'normal', can be placed on," said Dr Charlton.
Well, Dr Charlton is a bright spark isn't he.
liqbase
This just in...leisure reduces stress!
For the those unaware of the British University system, you need to automatically take a popularist study from a poly-technical University with plenty of salt.
Just add spam and lag then watch the fireworks
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I've been saying this for ages. With most people video games are a way to vent their anger instead of taking it out on others. If you're crazy enough to go kill 20+ people you really don't need a video game to encourage you.
Not that I 100% disagree with this, just remember that anyone is likely to be calmed by the effects of an outside influence on their brain. It's when they are away from that "fix" for a prolonged time that they may become agitated.
I can see the way that a RPG can calm you down, but I don't think this is a general rule for games. I've seen people all fired up from FPS so that they actually had to stop playing for a while to cool down again.
Every day now, and I really mean every single day, I read another news story about some psychological/biometric/neurological/... study from which some spurious result is obtained. These "studies" are often done on first year university student volunteers, under dubious conditions with little controls. The results are apparently "statistically significant", a quality which, nowadays, is not itself very statistically significant. Very often, a precisely conflicting "study" will be seen a few weeks later.
I'm concerned that these junk studies are doing real harm to science as a whole. It's becoming increasingly difficult to see quality studies amid all the noise, and even when you do, you may be too jaded to investigate further. This effect is I suspect, magnified enormously in the public at large, which may explain the modern public cynicism and even dismissal of scientists as a whole.
It's easy to blame the media, and in fact I do. But part of the blame lies with the scientific community. There are a lot of people running around calling themselves scientists, and their investigations experiments, when neither are anything of the kind. Scientists, and others, need to tackle theses people. Politeness be damned.
To conclude, I link once again to the Cargo Cult Science speech.
May the Maths Be with you!
The take home point is that all "violent" games are not equal. Some games fire us up and some cool us down.
ScienceSeeker.org
I'm sure it's difficult, costly, time-consuming to do these surveys, but I imagine the type of game is key. They chose a relatively benign game for their study. If they had chosen a more stressful game, the results surely would be different. (F.E.A.R., Doom 3, etc.)
... they'll all have slightly different effects on average, and they'll all affect different personality types differently ...
First-person shooters vs. RPG vs. strategy
The point is that by choosing different types of games, it would show that not all games induce violent behavior even if they have some degree of violence.
Full Tilt
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I once heard a "scientist" on a local NPR show claim to have definitively linked violent games to violent behavior. There were two problems with his claim:
1. His research only investigated the immediate effect of viewing violent or non-violent images and a single measure of aggression immediately following the treatment. His "link" was grossly exaggerated.
The research in the TFA seems to have measured only immediately following the session. Hey, heavy drinkers are often less stressed after their first shot too.
2. More apropos, the debate as to whether vicariously living an experience increases the participants' desire to engage in that experience (contagion), or it purges them of the desire to engage in that experience (catharsis) has been raging for more than two millennia.
While the research in TFA informs the debate, it still assumes that contagion is the case.
"This will help us develop an emotion and gaming questionnaire to distinguish the type of gamer who is likely to transfer their online aggression into everyday life."
We should be just as skeptical of research that appears to support gaming as we are of research with contrary findings.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
hmmm... Let's think for a second: If you are a violent person with lots of bad stuff in your life that you are pissed at then WOW will allow a cathartic release of those emotions. So the test results are valid. BUT... If there's lots of stuff in your life that you are angry at, playing video games gives you the sense of accomplishment without actually solving any of your real problems. So you have experienced release, but not actually changed anything. So... the study is deeply flawed in that the timeline for the research was too short. Of course people feel better after having a cathartic release of violence. But, what about the long term effects of this cathartic release without actually helping life get better. That's where real violence comes from: a fake world that feels good and a real life that keeps getting worse because you don't deal with it. Not a helpful study.