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Tracking the Harm Games Do
Every so often, video games are accused of causing all sorts of negative behavior in children, teens, and adults. These accusations are typically predicated on statistics that sound much more damning than they actually are. In that vein, gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun did their own tongue-in-cheek statistical analysis, complete with pretty charts and graphs. Quoting:
"As part of my research I thought to compare the sales of each GTA game with what the divorce rate must have been when each came out. As you can see each new GTA game has been directly correlated with an increase in divorces. ... An often ignored statistic (and you have to ask why it’s being ignored by the games media, don’t you?) is the sheer volume of PC games being released. We’ve all noticed the British population is abandoning the church, turning instead toward shopping, DVDs and knife crime. But few have thought to check for a connection between PC sales and the numbers of people attending their local Church Of England church on a Sunday. When you look at the data there’s little doubt left that as the publishers continue to release more and more PC games each year, our nation’s faith is being increasingly eroded. And at what cost? If only a graph could tell us that."
Irrational numbers, art about subjects other than god, romantic novels, TV, rock and roll, disco, heavy metal, video nasties, hip hop, raves, computer games......
Isn't this getting a bit old by now?
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
lightweight in more ways than one -- including security and reliability.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the loudest people who trumpet violence in the media as a source of inspiring violence in others tend to be religious groups and they are always calling for games and films that allegedly teach people aggression to be banned.
I would graciously accept the ban of all violent films, games, music and books if they would first pave the way by banning their own hatred and violence inducing holy book.
One thing that bugs me with all this study non-sense and the counter arguments is that they always have an extremely narrow field of view. It is either "they cause harm" or "they don't influence us at all", both are likely complete non-sense (even when done for humorous purpose as here).
What about general studies that simply discuss how child behaviour has changed over the years in more general terms instead of splitting it into good vs evil? Did video games cause less reading of books? Less watching of TV? Do people visit their friends more often due to the Wii or less often due to XboxLive? Or just how many hours spend kids with video games today compared to 10 or 20 years ago? How much of their allowance goes towards video games? How much power does a kid today use? Do they have a more realistic picture of war or a more twisted one? Did Google Earth improve geography skills and what not.
There are plenty of interesting questions that could be asked, where you could actually get at least some interesting result and people wouldn't all jump into defensive stance for their video games.
If Pacman had affected us as kids we'd be running around in dark rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive music.
You mean going to raves? Oh wait, we do.
Well unless the monarch is largely powerless, as the Queen is today, I can think of a few reasons why you might not want to choose your head of state on the basis of which member of a single inbred family is lucky enough to be born first. Having said that, I quite like that the power resides with parliament and the monarch we do have is pretty much a figurehead, I can't imagine the UK with a president.
Shut up! Shut the fuck up! Do NOT say that name.
He's like Beetlejuice.
"Oh well this could maybe hypothetically desensitize people and cause problems, etc, etc." K, but that doesn't fit the actual data that violent crimes in the US have been trending down since around the time that videogames came out.
Correlation isn't causation. And violent crime != violent behaviour. Furthermore you would first have to prove that aggressive/violent behaviour incited by consumation of violent video games/media (VVG/M) causes more violent crime before demanding that studies concerned only with increased aggressive/violent behaviour through VVG/M should first explain this correlation of yours.
I take it you didn't RTFA, or even the summary? This is satire...