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New Study Links Video Games and Mental Problems
eldavojohn writes "A new study published today in Pediatrics Journal conducted in Singapore on three thousand children in grades third, fourth, seventh and eighth claims that one in ten are video game addicts and almost all of those suffer mental health problems. This comes conveniently after the suspect in the Tucson shooting has widely been reported as an online gamer. Among the accusations from the study are that playing video games leads to lower school performance and fewer social skills while exacerbating existing depression, anxiety and social phobias. Gamasutra reports that the Entertainment Software Alliance is already criticizing this study, saying, 'Its definition of "pathological gaming" is neither scientifically nor medically accepted and the type of measure used has been criticized by other scholars. Other outcomes are also measured using dubious instruments when well-validated tools are readily available. In addition, because the effect sizes of the outcomes are mainly trivial, it leaves open the possibility the author is simply interpreting things as negatively as possible.' It seems that the doctors are still disagreeing on whether or not gaming causes problems."
..Was reportedly walking. Now we need a study that links walking with mental problems!
Video games are way better then let your siblings lurk in the hood, take drugs, smoke or drink alcohol.
Could it be the other way around? Maybe people with this kind of mental health problems are likely to become addicted to video games.
Or, you know, it could be that people with mental problems also have a predisposition to become video game addicts.
I bet 8 in 10 of these school shooters have bicycles too. Why aren't they focused on the obvious bicycle problem?
Correlation is not causation. When will they figure this out?
Gaming, like alcohol and drugs is an escape. It's an escape from reality that is regularly used by people with mental problems. I don't have any evidence but I am hard-pressed to believe that games cause this condition.
A new study published today on Slashdot conducted in my mind on hypothetical children in grades third, fourth, seventh and eighth claims that almost all of those suffer mental health problems.
The video game part is irrelevant. Not as confident about the 3rd/4th graders but I don't know many middle school kids who aren't at least moderately depressed. They are in middle school, for christ's sake.
I hear sports cause bodily harm. They also cause aggression. Being in sports competitively can also lead to steroid use. Playing a game leads to mental exercise. Sure, you're not moving much(unless it's Wii, Move, or Kinect), but I'd rather play make-believe games then come home with something broken. There should be a study on how sports affect teen aggression and how the competitiveness of sports lead to athletes doing things to their bodies that isn't healthy.
Once again, a misleading Slashdot headline. The study does not claim that gaming causes mental problems. It claims that it can exacerbate existing depression, anxiety, and social phobia.
Seriously though, I bet if you did a study on the number of men under 25 you would find that 90% play video games or have played video games (aka, what they call a gamer). It would be like saying that the gunman didn't like doing chores or had at some point attended a concert.
People who feel bad inside want to escape reality. Some turn to games. Is this surprising?
I'm betting the gaming is a symptom, not a cause. Not that I'd say it's harmless to escape into a game when you really need therapy.
.: Max Romantschuk
It appears she's behind in most of her studies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Any activity that displaces the individual's perception from reality has the potential to contribute to mental illness. Whether it is drugs, TV, online games or romance novels, susceptible people risk becoming wrapped up in a fantasy world. Most often the results are benign to the outside world, so the pathology goes unnoticed. It doesn't mean the problem doesn't affect and detract from the lives of many.
Lets get it strait... the Tuscan shooter played ONE online game called "earth empires" which was about as sophisticated as mafia wars. The only interesting part of this were the posts he made in that games forums. He was clearly mentally unhinged and as you read them you can see the community is totally confused about what he's posting. They aren't sure if he's a Troll, just stupid or bat shit crazy. Unfortunately it ended up being the latter.
http://www.earthempires.com/jared-loughner-arizona-shooter-posts
He had to go to the second one because walmart does not sell ammo before 7 am. No one there denied him ammo for being crazy, just early.
His first stop, a Walmart between his house and the scene of the shooting, doesn't sell bullets before 7 a.m. It was only 6:12 a.m.
Source Arizona Daily Star:
http://azstarnet.com/news/state-and-regional/article_4ea654b2-b1a9-5ca0-ad91-8ef689b3ea5d.html
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
One of his two favorite authors was Nietzsche. His friends described him as a thoroughly nihilistic individual. Seems Nietzsche, not video games, had a truly profound impact on him.
Yet just the other day, I had a liberal coworker stridently tell me it was that eeeeeeevil Sarah Palin that made him do it. When I pointed out the Nietzsche issue, and the fact that he didn't listen to any right wing rhetoric, didn't matter. Heck, she didn't even know who Nietzsche was... but that didn't stop her, like a lot of liberals, from blaming this on Sarah Palin and some cliche political map.
Actually, it seems to me you illustrate an even bigger problem.
The way I remember it, a correlation in statistics (as opposed to the usual "I have a couple of anecdotes and watch me leap to a conclusion") involve looking at the covariance of two variables vs their normal distribution for _both_ variables. Even in binary terms, you'd have to look at the set of people who, say, do bad in school, people who play games, and the intersection. Though a more useful correlation would look at something like SAT grades vs hours played, or some such.
And even then, you know, actual measured variables than someone's self-assessment. See for example Dunning Krueger for one problem with self-assessments.
Basically you don't have to look at just how many people skipped school for gaming, but basically at whether you're seeing more than the product of two unrelated probabilities. The relevant question is, basically, are people who play video games more likely to skip school than those who don't?
What I'm getting at is that asking "have you ever skipped school to play a game?" without also asking "have you ever skipped school?" is pretty worthless. A questionnaire like yours which asks, or _also_ asks, about the distribution of that variable without the conditional, would actually be a better exercise.
IOW, asking just "have you ever skipped school to play a game?" will produce a semblance of a correlation just because there is no way to say, "does it count if I skipped school to smoke behind the school instead?" It's like asking "have you ever masturbated in the bathroom?" and concluding that bathrooms cause masturbation. It's not a real covariance if they're together simply because the question is phrased to only allow a "yes" if they appear together.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe, but I don't get the impression that the survey actually delved into that kind of details.
The question wasn't if you've played games to the point that you have to be dragged kicking and screamin to do homework or any chores, but rather whether you've done it at all. Which, yes, glosses over that important difference.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes, and yes. However, what I don't see is anyone paying for such a study in the first place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't believe there is any generally agreed-upon definition of what actually constitutes a "study", so: caveat lector. (Of course the media just want your attention, so they'll usually publish this kind of crap without scrutiny, but I digress...)
HAND.
It's even more perverse than that, even if you assume that all kids answered 100% truthfully and objectively. (Yeah, right.)
Let's say you ask a few thousands people how many miles they drove in the last year. Then you ask something like "did a bird ever crap on your windshield while driving?" That conditional right there is what you can do a pseudo-correlation for morons with. Of course the guys who drove only 1000 miles will be a lot less likely to say "yes" than the ones who drove 100,000 miles. So, there we go, we just proved that driving causes crap on your windshield. QED.
That's exactly what that kind of questions does in the survey too.
They don't actually establish that those "addicts" actually skip chores more than other kids, for example. The only thing that is asked is if that ever happened in conjunction with video games. Of course those who play more hours are more likely to say "yes", even without needing any other correlation involved. Even if they were perfectly uncorrelated, you'd still be looking at P(X)*P(Y), which goes up as P(X) goes up. It's just to be expected.
A more perverse effect is that you can use that forced conditional to associate anything with anything.
E.g., questions boiling down to "have you skipped homework in conjunction with X" or "have you done X while depressed" can show a false correlation between any X and bad school performance. A child more likely to skip homework or more depressed is likely to have poorer results in school, whatever activity X may be. Whether it's gaming or not. It could be walking, reading books, or playing with the cat, or whatever.
Whatever that activity X may be, what remains is that you found a sub-group of kids who do one or more of skipping homework, not studying for tests, etc, and some may also be depressed too. Of course they'll do worse in school than the larger mass of kids who aren't selected for those traits.
Essentially now we're seeing the effect of P(Y) on that P(X)*P(Y). Those with a higher P(X)*P(Y) are likely to have a higher P(Y) too. By choosing enough activities Y1, Y2, Y3, etc, with a bad effect on kids' grades, you can make it sound like you're seeing the effects on X on grades, but really you just selected a group likely to do all those bad things.
I mean, you could do a similar trick for making anything else sound bad. E.g., let's say I want to prove that listening to music while driving is bad. Lemme see:
- were you fined for speeding while listening to music?
- did you run a red light while listening to music?
- do you ever listen to music as a way to calm down when angry at another driver?
- do you ever listen to music as a way to stay awake on very long trips?
Etc.
So first I do such a list of, let's call them "music addicts" and then I can objectively show that that group is more likely to cause accidents and costs insurance more money, so, you know, maybe music in cars is a bad thing. But in reality I didn't show that. I just selected a sub-group of those that have one or more problems like routinely speeding, running red lights, driving while extremely tired, and getting road rage. And of course they'll be more likely to have accident than the group which wasn't selected for those traits. Whether there is any correlation between music and doing those things, I didn't actually prove it. The only connection was in imposing a bias in those who can say "yes".
Same for the kids in the study. Any correlation between their group and grades is pretty much tautological.
In fact, I'd say that they have to do the intermediate step of that survey is what should have been a red flag to people. If there is actually a correlation between gaming and either school performance or mental problems, such a survey would have been unneeded. Then you could just use the first set of questions and correlate number of hours played to grades. That they must do such a "have you done things that might indicate depression or lower your grades, in conjunction with gaming" survey and then correlate that result with... depression and lower grades, is the whole sleight of hand right there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.