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Long-term Study Finds No Link Between Video Game Violence and Real Violence
SternisheFan sends news that a study has been completed on the long-term effects of violence in movies and video games on violence in real life. A researcher at Stetson University found no link between the consumption of violent media and an increase in societal violence. The study was published in the Journal of Communication. From the article:
"Entertainment Software Ratings Board ratings were used to estimate the violent content of the most popular video games for the years 1996-2011. These estimates of societal video game violence consumption were correlated against federal data on youth violence rates during the same years. Violent video game consumption was strongly correlated with declines in youth violence. However, it was concluded that such a correlation is most likely due to chance and does not indicate video games caused the decline in youth violence. ... Previous studies have focused on laboratory experiments and aggression as a response to movie and videogame violence, but this does not match well with real-life exposure.
This author (http://www.stetson.edu/other/faculty/profiles/christopher-ferguson.php) clearly has experience in clinical psychology. However, he's been talking extensively about videogame violence for a year only; first publications and *very frequent* publications in both peer and non-peer-reviewed (majority) journals. He's stepped quite significantly into the gun+violence debate in the US, too: "Viewpoint: Stop Tearing Ourselves Up About Mass Killings" - http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/... . In short, be sure to read authors with a much longer history on the subject before taking this at face value. But wait -- isn't that the common /. story?
-dC
What?
So what you're saying is that humans can tell the difference between reality and video games??
Tell that to feminists, who honestly believe that historically correct sexism in some computer games causes sexisms in the real world, and that even the OPTION to act sexist in the game is wrong.
Probably negative in both cases.
From what I've seen, violent types will seek violence, gun or no gun. There may be something to the idea that allowing them to play out violent fantasies on a computer is catharic enough to reduce real world violence(and who cares how many digital mooks that have to 'die' in the process).
What guns tend to do is increase the consequences of the violence. Complicating matters is how do you differentiate people who have guns as recreation -hunting, target shooting, and such, and those that have them as a criminal trade tool?
I don't read AC A human right
Is this really controversial? The proof is in the amount of money spent on advertising. Sure, some advertising just gets the word out, but, for example, McDonalds or Coca-Cola ads are all about behaviour modification, because everybody has already heard of both things, even though individual people widely believe they are unaffected by the ads they watch.
That's why things like this study are useful to establish that violence is *not* among the things that are easily injected into consumer thoughts. Now, of course, a key difference is that McDonalds and Coke are specifically trying to change your behaviour. Games aren't trying to make you more violent, they are mostly just trying to be fun and occasionally they might try to make you think about something when the game creators are feeling particularly artsy. Arguably that one US army game might actually be about promoting violence in some sense, but it's an extreme exception to the rule.
Sexism is like violence in that it can be part of a game, both purposely and incidentally, but it's very rare that the point of the game is promoting sexism. So is the salient difference here the intention of the media? Or is violence just especially repulsive? That would be a follow-up.
Except correlations can be due to chance. You can test this, by picking things which can't possibly be causally linked, running the same statistic analysis, and observing how often you get a correlation hit.
And it's important to know this, because such a statistical issue was very much the cause of various excited reports of radiation, cellphones, powerlines and every other type of factor "somehow" increasing risk for cancer, despite the absence of any measurable causative effect.
Until it was realized that if you ran the analysis on any set of variables, you'd always get "roughly double" the risk even if the question was "cancer rates vs. mean daily use of swear words" or "cancer rates vs. global population of pirates".
Which is why they don't just report the result. Because without context, the result is meaningless.
Can't wait for this latest attack on games to collapse under its own incompetence.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I don't agree sexism in games causes sexism either, but I don't think you can link it to a "violence in video games" study.
Sexism is about attitudes and how people are viewed. Violence? Only partially. And arguably a case can be made that violence in video games could decrease violence in real life because it provides an outlet for aggression. As in "My boss was an ass to me today, I'm going to take it out on some virtual cops rather than deal with my anger issues the traditional way".
Whereas it's hard to make that argument work with sexism. "Oh, I asploded a stripper on the way to rescuing a 2D princess who will be my property when I get her, now in real life I'm going to treat men and women the same at the office and stop sexually harassing passers by because I got my fix from Grand Hitman Mario." Yeah. Doesn't really work, does it.
I think minds are a little more complex than those who look for causal links between sexism in media and sexism in real life claim, but I wouldn't think for a moment a study in violence in media is somehow relevant to the issue of attitudes towards roles seen in media.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.