Slashdot Mirror
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.
What?
So what you're saying is that humans can tell the difference between reality and video games??
Another long-term study found a link between empty wallets and gaming PC upgrades.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
During the period of the study, ALL violence was in decline, public perception to the contrary (thanks to our overhyped news cycle that treats news as infotainment).
So, GIGO strikes again.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
and violent acts either. It really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the rise in violence had a very well explained physical cause
http://www.forbes.com/sites/al...
What kills me, is that more hasn't been done to stop these legal/political shakedowns of particular industries. The formula should be known to everyone by now,
1. Find Deep Pocket
2. Blame problem on their activities
3. Agitate in the media until they make token gestures (Wow all cartons have to have morals) and pay off the people shaking them down.
Violence as a whole is drastically down the last two decades as a whole - so a meaningless correlation if there is one.
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
Another long-term study found that grass is green, sky is blue and water is wet....
portfolio
Nerds declare it's long been obvious. Details at 11.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
And advertising has no effect on consumer buying habits. Political campaigning has no effect on the vote...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
In terms of scapegoating games for larger societal problems, yeah, I hope that's over. Couldn't happen soon enough as far as I'm concerned.
However I disagree that there is nothing to talk about. As a long time gamer it's pretty obvious to me that games do affect us - why else would we be so passionate about them? - just not in the way that the Jack Thompsons of the world claim.
My hope is that now that the 'video game make you evil' hysteria has been thoroughly debunked, we can have a more nuanced discussion on the subject.
From TFA:
For the first study, independent raters evaluated the frequency and graphicness of violence in popular movies from 1920-2005. These were correlated to homicide rates for the same years. Overall, movie violence and homicide rates were not correlated. However, during the mid-20th century, movie violence and homicide rates did appear to correlate slightly, which may have led some to believe a larger trend was at play. That correlation reversed after 1990 so that movie violence became correlated with fewer homicides. Prior to the 1940s, movie violence was similarly related to fewer homicides, not more.
In the second study on video game violence, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) 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.
Are you kidding? They don't compare the effects on individual gamers or viewers, they look at crime rates and viewership for society as a whole. These are so far from being controlled scientific experiments it's laughable. Total worthless garbage.
Usually I wouldn't mention this in the interest of good taste, relevance, etc. but WTF is Stenson University?
My strong support of free speech makes me wish that were true. However, I've seen that kids who grow up watching violence and vulgarity tend to be inclined to violence and vulgarity, while people like my wife who grew up on G-rated material tend to act in G-rated ways, and be uncomfortable around that which they haven't been exposed to.
When we were dating, my foul language was a major turnoff to my wife, who had grown up around more polite language and thus didn't cuss herself. I had to clean up my language if I wanted to be with her, which I did. Other kids of friends and family are exposed to, and desensitized to, stuff that makes my wife quite uncomfortable.
Common sense is that what we continuously feed into our minds will of course have an effect. That in no way implies that the GOVERNMENT should adopt any particular policy. It does mean that just as parents are mindful of not letting kids fill their bodies with junk food, we parents should be mindful of how much junk is fed to our kids' minds.
So he is saying that that study used such insignificant populations that significant correlations are likely due to chance? How is any of the results supposed to be worth anything if what the researcher says is true?
I am inclined to believe that they are simply wrong and it is not due to chance. From what I remember, previous studies have found that on a societal level violence goes down.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If it's funded by a special interest group then don't even bother to look at it. Whoever pays the bills gets the result they want. This is true for academia as much as anyone else.
Why is Snark Required?
Of course not. Now that they've ruled out video games causing violence we have a new crowd attacking games from a different angle. Now Grand Theft Auto doesn't make gamers into violent crooks, it makes them in misogynists because the game contains hookers. Princess Peach isn't just a pointless bit of story to explain why you're crushing mushrooms and turtles, she's "teaching boys to keep women in the kitchen."
So conservatives may have finally moved on, but a new group is attacking video games as being "bad for us" from a completely different angle. So be prepared to hear even more about that. And once people prove that isn't true, I'm sure the goalposts will be moved yet again.
Television does not affect behavior. Unless its the network selling advertising time.
Have gnu, will travel.
New group? It's the same group: prudes.
>
My hope is that now that the 'video game make you evil' hysteria has been thoroughly debunked, we can have a more nuanced discussion on the subject.
Damn I started Lawful Good and wound up Chaotic Evil, I blame DDO
the worst part is that its *not* just conservatives, unless you want to slap the "conservative" to include many mainstream "liberals".
Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Clinton, et al, come to mind as people who have jumped on the fear mongering bandwagon in the past.
>Can this "debate" please not go on like climate "Debate" has?
that would be a godsend, instead of a onesided monolouge ending in a massive restriction of rights and putting innocent people on terrorist watchlist as long as other forms of harrassment.
Which is exactly what happened. from around 1980-2001, when all of a sudden muslim terrists became a the new threat to society.
Neither do cartoons. When I was young, two of my favorite cartoons had a whole bunch of people dying (Grendizer and Harlock's french versions), My first FPS was DooM, I played Quake2 and Unreal/UT for countless nights, and still have a thing for a nice deathmatch from time to time.
It doesn't mean I'll go on a rampage and kill people with a chainsaw. People who have problems making the difference between reality and fantasy could also snap by reading a book or any other trigger.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I would actually have expected a reverse link -- violent video games having a cathartic effect.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Take that, Jack Thompson!
All male gamers are still rapists though, right?
Well, yes, of course.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Other long-term study finds no link between video-game boobs and real boobs.
Thanks really. If video games make you violent, you're the problem. Thanks for stating the obvious.
I'd argue that was true for any object people commonly blame for their own violent behavior.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Who else can see the glaring error in this "scholarly paper" published in The Journal of Communication?
I mean, it would be shocking if it wasn't so common in studies of culture and violence.
You are welcome on my lawn.
the problem is that we don't have any real populist political canidates. What we have is a guild of trial lawyers that create laws to generate lawsuits, and make money in lawsuits instead.
And of course shakedown of industries for token gestures, that include cash bribes to further lobbying efforts.
The problem we have in America isn't that we have socialist politicians, the problem is the socialist politicians have been replaced with jackass "cronyists" who are simply more capitalists, who really don't give a rats ass about corporations further than what they can shake them down for.
aparantly not.
please call us back after you've found reality.
This isn't really a plus for society. Medical care for those gamers who reach adulthood will tax the rest of us heavily.
I agree. While we're at it, we should stop people from reading, watching movies, coding, painting, or any other activity that involves them being inactive and placing a burden on society.
This is a silly argument. Damage to a person's health in the pursuit of their interests is in no way unique to gaming. Likening gaming to watching porn is exactly as valid as likening it to any of the examples listed above.
Spork
Tyrant or Victim of Changes?
Sure you can find studies either way. Most studies show that what we see and hear affects what we do, but sure you can find some that look at a completely spurious correlation and claim otherwise. Check out "Internet Explorer vs murder". It's hilarious, and very similar to this study - comparing trends over time rather than comparing groups who have/do one thing with groups who don't.
Rather than using spurious correlations with literally thousands of other factors in play, a study can do the obvious- compare kids who do watch crap vs kids who don't. Duh. When you compare kids who see a lot of crap vs those who don't, shockingly the kids who see crap tend to do crap.
Have you ever been to a country other than your own? You may have noticed that people in Iran have a different outlook and act differently from people in the Netherlands. That could be genetic, or it could be that what people see and hear as they grow up affects them, that they tend to be similar to what they see. I'm betting on the latter.
but Anita Sarkeesian swears it does!
Oh, wait, no, that's sexism, not violence. I'm sure it's completely different.
I wonder if there is a difference between (playing FPS) and (playing FPS and having access to a gun IRL) when it comes to IRL violence.
She does, in fact, claim that. She just uses more words to do it.
When you compare kids who see a lot of crap vs those who don't, shockingly the kids who see crap tend to do crap.
Where is your rigorous scientific study that isn't based off of subjective soft science, and where is the scientific consensus?
I believe the term you are looking for is "limousine liberal". Yeah, we all hate them. But don't for a minute think DINO equates to conservative.
Also, equating real-world experiences to fantasy violence seems rather silly to me.
Tropes are not evil or negative.
Calling them as such is like saying grammar causes violence, or spelling teaches boys to rape.
Tropes are literary tools, just like spelling and grammar are. And just like how only certain combinations of letters in our alphabet make words.
Plot points can only combine in certain ways and keep the story readable. These are tropes and some tropes are more popular than others, damsel in distress is one of them because it's simple.
Shocking, vidya games are almost subject to the same level of scrutiny, review, and criticism that literally every other form of expression has been subject to for centuries, and guess what - people still write, paint, sing, sculpt, draft, build, et cetera...
Damn, now I cannot blame my violent tendencies on watchin Roadrunner, Tweetie Bird and Bugs Bunny anymore.
Can this "debate" please not go on like climate "Debate" has?
Studies have shown that climate change makes people violent. No joke.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The blame game has always been popular. It is always some made up bullshit excuse instead of finding & treating the root problem. One small set (or sect/group/cult) of society tries to blame an inanimate object for all of society's woes and spreads their propaganda to anyone who will listen.
Every "next technology" is always scapegoated.
1900 Film
1920 Prohibition (Alcohol), Phonographs
1930 Jazz, Movies
1940 Radio
1950 Dancing
1960 Psychedelic Drugs, Sex
1970 Rock n Roll, Movies (again)
1980 MTV, DnD, Heavy Metal
1990 Computer Games
2000 Internet and "strangers online"
2010 Guns
Then you have idiot psychiatrists like this who say 20+ year olds playing computer games is not "normal."
http://www.destructoid.com/pla...
To which I'll counter:
1. Hey fucking retard -- the medium is irrelevant.
Why is playing a card, board, or sports game like poker, go, chess, or baseball / hockey / basketball / etc. considered "normal", yet playing a digital game isn't normal??
2. Well guess what -- all these people were not normal as well:
Leonardo da Vinci was not normal
Isaac Newton was not normal
Charles Darwin was not normal
Albert Einstein was not normal
Stephen Hawking is not normal
Normal people don't do exceptional things.
The real issue is:
Are _you_ balanced in your daily activities, responsibilities, and hobbies?
Whether it's outright with a bullet to the head, or a slow smothering with punitive taxation and regulation, the result is esssentially the same. That's why there's little difference between leftists and neocons.
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.
Been to a dozen countries, and I'll agree that outlook and behaviour is different. Amusingly,most had common shows. More amusing, the one with the MOST violent shows at the time (Japan) was the least violent socially. Culture impacts children heavily, and while entertainment is part of culture, it's not the entirety of culture, and being cognizent that entertainment is simply entertainment, diminishes that impact.
You forgot cartoons and television. And I guess in the early 1500s reading was considered evil as well.
-- Cheers!
Check out the graph of IE market share versus murder rate.
This is precisely the same thing. They picked two things that changed over the last 20 years and reported them as if this would test a cause and effect relationship. If you chart Obama's age vs atmospheric CO2 levels, you'll see that the older Obama gets, the higher CO2 there are. To save the planet, we must kill Obama now before he gets any older, thereby increasing CO2.
Over the last 30 years, speed limits on highways have increased. Also, the speed of the "information superhighway " has increased. Therefore, for faster internet just raise freeway speed limits.
Without looking at the data, I'm speculating a lot with that suggestion, but I don't think you should dismiss the possibility of inverse causation out of hand.
There's a huge difference between two completely unrelated things being correlated and two different expressions of the same basic psychological urges being correlated. Internet explorer use and CO2 levels are only very distantly related in that both represent signs of a strong economy in a technological society. So odds are good that such a correlation is a fluke, or at best reflects a common cause (more money allowing people to buy more computers and cars).
By contrast, expressing violence in a game and expressing it in real life are similar activities in a lot of ways. If you see a strong reverse correlation there, the odds are reasonably good that you have causation, reverse causation, or a single common cause of both changes. Of course, this assumes a truly strong correlation, as opposed to just a crudely opposite trend, where only the changes in one direction are inversely correlated. And even with a strong correlation, I wouldn't call it solid evidence of inverse causation unless you could find similar inverse correlations at other levels of granularity (e.g. states, cities, and neighborhoods), from other countries, and so on. With that said, the hint that such inverse causation might exist would make it worth further study.
If, on the other hand, you just have a crude trend match (where one is trending upwards and the other is trending downwards, but they don't change directions at about the same time), then yeah, I'd agree that the inverse correlation is probably more like pirates on the high seas protecting against global warming....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I'm wondering how Hatred will be commented by games-cause-violence community ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It is a bit like selling reverse crosses, pentagrams and virgin blood packaged with D&D rulebooks in 80ties would be
I'm generally quite tolerant game-wise, but I must say that Hatred crosses some line for me. But same is true for some movies (Saw, Human Centipede etc), which seems to be 'ok' for mass distribution, so probably something is wrong with me in this case.
Part of it is also the reason that it should not be considered inconceivable that the way ratings tend to work for sex and violence has something of a schism. Now, generally I think the schism is bad - we can deal with this issue better. But at the same time, in thinking about explaining to children why something is or is not appropriate, violence is a lot easier to explain with far fewer edge cases:
Is violence okay? No.
Ever? Very rarely.
When? It is okay to defend yourself if attacked. You should try and avoid having to do so.
That will get you through 99% of individual life until you get to geopolitics and the diplomacy of nationstates, which a good deal of people will get through life without needing to know about anyway.
Sex on the other hand?
When is that okay? What is okay? Why do some people do that? What is normal? There's a neverending well of questions there, all of which have complicated answers, and which society has an active, ongoing and vitriolic argument about.
There is no concise answer. The simplest things get complicated fast, and very much unlike violence, people seeing depictions or media messaging about it don't have the option (in most cases) of dealing with it by simply not dealing with it. I can avoid most or even all violence and most of us will during our lives. But I and my children are not going to avoid issues of sexuality and it has the potential to be very much a defining element of how their lives will evolve.
To bring it back to the McDonalds and Coke point, this is very much the same reason they advertise. Because you have to eat. You do eat. They're not asking or trying to get you to do something so uncommon. And they know how your nose and satiation responses work. Unless you have an absolute policy of just "no" towards them, then all they've got to do is make "mcdonalds" or "I want a coke" come to the front of your brain with some type of positive feeling when you're anywhere near them.
Ban alcohol. A study on the economic cost of alcohol as a function of police resources, ambulance and hospital resources, lost productivity due to injuries and illness, and straight up population destruction, pegs the mean lost productivity at $20 billion per year.
Of course, we're not doing that because history tells us it will be a lot more if we do. Still...
Yes. You should clearly protest this unfair characterizing by leaping to the defense of people sending rape and death threats to women who write anything which could be construed as criticism! That'll show how peaceful and non-violent you are!
Everyone knows that not a single human was killed by another until 1972, when pong saw the rise of video game violence.
> In short, the more you think you cannot be affected, the more likely you are to be affected.
This is a nice kafka trap because you can't deny it without making it appear true. That leaves you with science vs. rhetoric and, well, let's just say that rhetoric tends to win even if it shouldn't, logically speaking.
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.
Rtfa, and what is immediately apparent is the confusion and lack of any concept of controlled testing. From the first 2 sentences of tfa:
"No link found between movie, video game violence and societal violence
An increased violent video game consumption correlates with declines in youth violence"
So, first:
1) there cannot be "no link" and a negative correlation at the same time. The words mean different things.
2) there are many points of subjectivity in the studies, from the movies ratings to the game ratings to the definitions of violence
3) it's a very one dimensional approach, yet drawing a sweeping multi dimensional conclusion. Looking at it only in the context of the mere existence of such games/movies vs total societal violence, but the existence of confounding positive or negative factors - war, economics, population density, television, Hell even weather and abortion - are apparently entirely disregarded
I am 47 and have played "violent" video games since they have ever been. I'm not by any external measure a violent person. I fundamentally don't believe that a nanny state should be involved in any way with evaluating content "allowed" to be consumed by children. Last time I checked, that's what parents were for, and yes, some will get it wrong. I sincerely doubt that playing Call of Duty will make a kid grow up to be a violent criminal.
(Heck, I'm not sure anyone has even established that a propensity for violence even equates with criminality; such a thing is entirely different than low impulse control for example.)
Yet, to suggest that constant exposure to routinized, casual violence has had no impact on my tolerance for, or on my reluctance to resort to violence would seem to fly in the face of the entire multi trillion dollar advertising industry that had flourished over the last 70+ years.
-Styopa
And the result will be precisely the same as with all the other "attacks" on popular media or entertainment. Nothing at all will change. That's why I don't get why people are flipping out about these particular "attacks". They're just social commentary, and simply designed to promote more awareness of the commentator's particular views - nothing more, nothing less.
What's hilarious is that feminist social critics like Anita Sarkeesian (that's who we're really talking about, right?) probably now get significantly more attention because of the attacks on them than because of their criticisms of videogames in the first place. People are nothing if not consistent, repeatedly demonstrating their willingness to fall prey to the Streisand Effect.
I was more concerned by Jack Thompson or a number of legislators who started spouting their "save the children" idiocy, because those people tend to actually bring lawsuits or even new legislation to combat whatever windmills they're tilting at today, and those can have real-life consequences. Even for all that, we can see that their efforts effectively came to naught. Videogames are still with us, are more mainstream and more diverse than ever in scope and content.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Sure. According to one side, either you believe all male gamers are rapists (or at least overweight basement-dwelling misogynists), or you're aligning yourself with death threats and doxxing. Small wonder they're recruiting so many people to the so-called "death threats and doxxing" side.
It's called stress relief, and the correlation is very real.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
This is a classic example of yet another meaningless social sciences paper. What does it actually establish? And what does this mean? What predictions can we reasonably make based on it? Does violence in society really cause violence in videogames? Are people with locus of control issues and aggressive tendencies likely to be attracted to playing violent videogames? What happens if we replicate the study in a culture with low rates of violence?
I want to stress right off the bat that I am not in favor of restricting video game content. That said, any time someone comes along and asserts that games, movies, TV, etc (pick and and all) do not influence behavior, I point to the trillion-dollar industry called "advertising". Its stated, precise intent is to influence behavior.
I am a gamer and an adult and mostly secular. I am not sure there is no impact. I recently had a 16 year old friend commit suicide. There was a discussion, that perhaps, he suffered; mild post-traumatic stress, because he would spend, daily, hours a day, in battle simulation games on his game console. (I'm using no product names on purpose.) Considering, he was the most kind, generous, polite, emotionally stable young person, you could meet, questions remain about his death. I did not read the study, so I don't know if they gathered facts regarding suicide.
You might as well say soda does not cause violent crime because soda sales are up and Crime is down. Both have way too many factors linked to be useful
So your argument is based on the facts that radio was invented in 1940, dancing in 1950, and guns in 2010? I won't comment on the other dates.
Nah, you started Lawful Evil and ended up Chaotic Good.
Learn to love Alaska
Of course, we're not doing that because history tells us it will be a lot more if we do.
I thought it was because we cared about individual liberties? Haha, who am I kidding... "the land of the free and the home of the brave" would never care about such a thing.
Liberals? My friend, this has nothing to do with the liberal vs conservative false dichotomy, and more to do with people who want to censor this form of art. Individual opinions matter, not some ill-defined groups like "liberals" or "conservatives." I've seen people who identify as "conservative" who support FCC censorship, video game censorship, bans on public nudity, etc., so it's not just "liberals."
I think football is more likely to trigger violence than anything else. I'm all in favor of shutting down the NFL and all the other football leagues....and the 'wrestling' stuff as well. I mean the fake stuff, not the real sport.
Yeah, there are reasons why I tend to call such types 'statists', because they see the government as the solution to 'everything'. The only difference ends up being their stated reasons.
I don't read AC A human right
I _never_ said they were _invented_ at those dates.
The point was all I did is summarize the decades and what was (roughly) scape goated at the time -- which you _completely_ missed.