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Another Study Attacks Violent Video Games, Claims To Be "Conclusive"
Killer Orca is one of many to tell us about a new study on the effects of violent video games on kids. The latest meta-study that analyzed research from 130 different reports claims to have "conclusively proven" that violent video games make more aggressive, less caring kids. "The team used meta-analytic procedures — the statistical methods used to analyze and combine results from previous, related literature -- to test the effects of violent video game play on the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of the individuals, ranging from elementary school-aged children to college undergraduates. [...] Anderson says the new study may be his last meta-analysis on violent video games because of its definitive findings."
As always, whenever this topic comes up, here are my thoughts on it:
http://livingwithanerd.com/violence-in-videogames/
Excerpt:
You have to allow the little monster to come out every now and then and release its frustrations. If you don't, you risk becoming a quivering mass of nervous and dangerous flesh. What better place to do this than in a simulated environment with simulated violence where the only things harmed are your eyes for staring at the screen?
Living With a Nerd
It's just another study by people with an agenda.
I'll shoot anyone in the face who says that I'm violent.
Just taking the viewpoint that the majority of comments will probably not take.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
You know what else makes people indifferent and uncaring... living in New York city. Nobody can ignore a bum on the street nearly as well. Should we ban living there too?
Nothing other than a double-blind study with random selection of test subjects can truly be considered "conclusive", IMHO. All studies that I've seen thus far are hopelessly thwarted by selection bias.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
FTA:
How did they rule out the possibility that children who are prone to violence might also be prone to playing more violent video games?
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
As a parent, that seems a pretty fair and balanced analysis to me. And yes, I have been known to play GTA myself. As an adult.
An attention seeking/instant gratification/short attention span culture is generating less caring, more violent children because their communication is self-centered, widely dispersed and largely meaningless between their 7000 text messages a month and their garish myspace pages with 10000 friends.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Reading your comment turned me into a violent criminal.
And that's conclusive.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
For people like me who take science very seriously, I find these results disappointing. I imagine that many people here do as well. Let's remember, though, that just because we don't like the results does not make them wrong. I was really hoping that the universe would not end in a boring heat death, but I'm not about to attack cosmologists because the results of their research have dashed my hopes.
We have to examine the data very carefully, trying to look for other explanations for the correlations that were allegedly discovered. If becomes an established conclusion in the field that video games weakly cause violent and antisocial behavior, we might still decide that we don't need to do anything to regulate them beyond "M" labeling. This research result, even if confirmed, doesn't mean that the prudes won and that the state will be prying Crisis from some fat kid's cold dead fingers. We have many choices in how to react to this. But let's not get on our high-horse and yell about how this research must be tainted because we don't like the result. Fundamentalists with no respect for science do that, and we should meet a higher standard.
Violent videogames do not in of themselves cause violence - BUT - works of fiction (or exaggerated works of non-fiction), including videogames, with characters that exhibit extreme behavior, can warp our perceptions of what "normal" behavior is, giving us license to act in ways we'd otherwise consider extreme.
"Yeah, I'm a gangster and I've killed a few people but it's not like I'm Scarface or anything."
"Yeah, I'm not the best manager in the world, and I goof around a lot, but it's not like I'm Michael Scott or anything."
"Yeah, I've been known to give a perp a beatdown after he's cuffed, but it's not like I'm Jack Bauer or anything."
And so on and so on...
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
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Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I remember when Columbine happened - i was in the den with my mom and we where watching the news.. they showed this "Violent GAME" that the kids had played - and it was the original DOOM - now my mom had remembered me playing that and looked at me odd when i started laughing..
i then explained. - this "Expert" on ABC was showing this "Violent GAME" which allowed kids to go around killing everything without any remorse or consequences..
what was on the screen was the starting level - he was running around with the rocket launcher and gold eyes (aka god mode)
so he had to cheat at the game to get the skewed point of view he wanted across
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Actually... there were MORE violent criminals before video games were invented.
Youth crime and violence have been steadily decreasing since the introduction of the playstation in 1995. And apparently, they haven't been this low since the sixties.
"As violent videogames have become more popular in the United States and elsewhere, violent crime rates among youths and adults in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, and most other industrialized nations have plummeted to lows not seen since the 1960s." - Texas A&M International University researchers Christopher Ferguson and John Kilburn
There are some graphs out there from the US Department of Justice that show exactly this trend.
My wife's PhD thesis was a Meta-Analysis, and I helped her create some new tools for doing the math behind the analysis so I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the topic. The process (greatly simplified) is this. Dig through hundreds of articles published in peer reviewed journals on the topic you are examining, and find as many as you can that test the specific theory you are studying. All the articles included in the meta-analysis must test the same theory. Next you need to reverse engineer the numbers reported in the article. This can be a bit tricky since each article may have reported their result using different statistical tests. Occasionally some articles don't have all the relevant numbers and you have to contact the author. Once you have all that data together the math is relatively straight forward.
Presuming that all the other articles that you feed into the process are based on high quality research, then a Meta-Analysis can give you an insight to the overall strength of the results of the theory being tested. As you might imagine this process can easily be a Garbage In Garbage Out sort of situation. The researcher performing the meta-analysis must have the ability to identify bad studies that overlooked key moderating variables, or were simply done poorly and remove these bad studies from their analysis. If you want to attack this meta-analysis, attack the articles it was based off of. A meta-analysis by itself is not 'conclusive' just because of the method it represents. The analysis itself must be performed on many many well done studies in order to have any credibility of its own.
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