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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 don't think anyone is claiming that it disproves causation. The classic example is a study that surveyed young children showed a correlation between reading age and shoe size. It was a very accurate correlation - there were very few outliers who didn't have a reading age that you could predict from their shoe size with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Of course, children in the age group surveyed were all still growing, so both reading age and shoe size were correlated with age. Older children had been growing for longer (so had larger feet) and had been reading for longer (so had a higher reading age).
Any half-competent statistician would obviously spot this, but many of these 'x is correlated with y' stories have a correlation no more valid than this, but are presented as 'x causes y'.
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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
you missed country music.
Joking aside, video games are a pariah, and the main reason they are targeted is because of the interactive nature of them. But if you read page 22 of this you will find that books and movies are MORE influential than video games. And what is the #1 behavior? Self published violent writings, which Jared L Loughner did in spades.
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.
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