Slashdot Mirror
Professor, ECA Dispute Video Game Aggression Study
Earlier this week, we discussed research which linked aggression in children with video games. The Entertainment Consumer Association responded with a statement criticizing the research, as did Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M. PCWorld sat down with Ferguson for a more in-depth discussion of the flaws with the study. In addition to bringing up the correlation vs. causation fallacy, he notes:
"Even if you took it at face value, which I don't, video game violence overlaps somewhere between, based on their own statistics, a half a percent to two percent, with a variance in aggression. If you woke up tomorrow and you were half a percent more aggressive than you were today, would you notice that? It's just not much of an effect. If the author said look, there's a little effect here, maybe video games increase aggression a tiny bit, but it's not going to make anyone into a serial murderer, yeah, alright, we may argue a little bit over the methodology, though I'd still say they should've controlled for other stuff. "
Someone PLEASE mod parent down.
Patty cake patty cake baker's man
Troll me a thread as fast as you can.
I can't say any more than that. About god-damned time.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Of course violent video games cause violence. I played GTA the other day, then I went out and stole a car, then I ran some people over, then I did some missions, got a rocket launcher and blew some stuff up, then I had 4 stars above my head and I knew I had some problems. The police came and killed me even though I totally loaded up an armor and life and all the weapons.
Fortunately I came back to life and appeared in front of the hospital, yet my sins felt strangely unforgiven.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
While I'm thankful that a professor can dispute the whole magic theory of someone going GTA on their city after playing the game, I can't help but wonder why the thread is trolled so badly.
Meanwhile, nice to have something easy and solid to point to in order to show people the whole "Correlation is not causation" thing, since many don't get it.
Lets see if that puts a stop to this nonsense... right? Right?! *rolls eyes*
I dont like what you say... Dont make me take mushrooms and jump on your head motherF#cker!
~
NoName
Shoot Yourself In the Foot
I forget who said it, but in the age of pac-man someone once said something along the lines of "If video games affected people at all then the kids would all be spending their time in dark rooms listening to repetitive music and consuming pills..."
As always, reason won't even reach those who accepted the false premise as truth. The distribution of information by "news" just doesn't work like that.
The only solution to misinformation is educating the population on how to interpret that information a priori and reject at least the most blatant idiocies.
Obviously the implementation of this solution won't come from the governing forces, which use the general lack of critical thinking to even more profitable means than news distributors.
Re:Can we gang rape Anonymous Coward? Yes, we can. If he would man up and post his home address and phone number. But I guess he's just a chickenshit little white boy.
Let us know where the next clan meeting is so we can watch you make each others asshole look like goatse.
Starting with Wolfenstein on my 386, and the usual collection of shooters from then on. I've never even broken my own nose before, let alone performed any act of aggression against any person.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Wheres the next clan meeting? I've always wanted to watch a bunch of fags with sub optimal IQ's get dressed up in sheets and fuck each other. Does the grand dragon give out blowjobs to the best /. troll? I heard he deep throats like a champ.
This is something that is going to continue getting flogged at us.
It's in the interest of the game manufacturers to show that there is no influence, as this would increase sales of both games and gaming systems.
At the same time there are examples that make sense. My friends six year old son does in fact become more unruly, violent, and rude after playing or watching violent video games. While there is apparently no difference in behaviour for an individual whose development has progressed beyond that level.
The conclusion that I draw from this is that children should not be exposed to violence, and adults can make up their own mind.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Hume said that causation was a correlation, that of constant conjunction. So if playing video games was always correlated with an encrease in violence after playing the video games, then we wou'd say that the video games caus'd the encreased aggression. In the say way we say that hitting a billiard ball with the cue ball causes the billiard ball to move: we never perceive any force in the hitting by virtue of which the billiard ball moves, we only perceive that it does move, and that this arrangement is constant in reproductions.
I am agnostic about video games and violence, but as a population scientist (epidemiology), Ferguson missed the boat big time on a half-percent increase.
For individuals a half percent increase is, as he pointed out, small, even, perhaps ignorable. But from a population perspective a half percent increase in the average aggression score means that that very small increase in risk gets multiplied across the size of the population. So (to make numbers up only for the sake of example) if a half percent increase in aggression score implies a .00001 increase in the chance that an individual goes postal with aggression, and this applies to a population of, say 10 million, then you are looking at (on average) 100 people going postal, who would not have otherwise.
All this is aside from the issue of whether the study was well designed, or measured what it purported to measure, causal inference, etc.
Cheers,
Alexis
Ferguson, particularly in part 2, does a nice job of pointing out the problems with the study. In addition to the obvious difficulties in drawing causal conclusions from correlational data, a key issue is whether the effects that they are claiming to observe have any practical (as opposed to statistical) significance. To what extent does a small increase in "aggression" translate into an increase in real-world violence? And how big an increase? This is a key issue, because it is undisputed that real-world violence rates have dropped even as games have become more violent and more realistic. Moreover, as Ferguson points out, there is no correlation between media violence and real violence when you compare different countries. None of this proves that the claimed violence-inducing effect of videogames is completely nonexistant--but it does prove that any such effect must be so small as to be overwhelmed by other social and demographic factors that influence violence.
Okay, I freely admit I haven't read all the relevant materials, but since it's easy to get some misinformation from the out-of-context quote, I may as well correct that.
A half percent population effect is potentially quite a large and meaningful effect. First, while it's possible it's a half percent effect in everyone, it's also possible it's a huge effect in some people but negligible in most. A video game that created one serial killer in every city and suburb in the US would probably have a small population effect, but it would still be very consequential by most standards. Second, even if violent video games cause exactly half a percent increase in agression (or whatever) in everyone who plays them, that could still be socially meaningful if violent video games are widely played. For example, suppose that you have to reach a threshold of violent feelings before actually doing anything, and people are distributed across a wide range of their pre-game level of aggressive thought. That half percent increase could easily cause a marked increase in consequentially violent acts, even though it's a small number by some standards.
On the whole I don't believe violent video games cause much if any harm, but it's still important to understand these effects and their consequences in a little more context.
It would be beautiful if a /. admin would just post this guys IP address or any tidbit of information, lol. 0wnage.
I think political discussion makes people want to shoot other people far more than any video game ever could. When will we ban political discussion? Or politics altogether? By this logic, surely it's bad! Or wait.. it's the children.. i'm pretty sure being forced to watch Barney as a child would've made me a serial killer.. playing mortal kombat on the other hand.. was fun and relieved stress :)
They're talking on the issue of child aggression on video game violence and show a screenshot of game which is rated 18+ to play, just what the fuck?!
That has been long known!
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13