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Video Gamers From the '90s Have Turned Out Mostly OK (arstechnica.com)
A study reported on by Ars Technica indicates that video games, much ballyhooed (alleged) source of mental, physical and psycho-social ills for the kids who spent a lot of time playing them, don't seem to have had quite as big a negative effect on those kids as the moral panic of the past few decades would have you believe. Instead, There didn't seem to be an association between the number of games the children reported owning and an increase in risk for conduct disorder. When examining depression among shoot-em-up players, there was evidence for increased risk before the researchers controlled for all the confounding factors, but not afterwards. Of course, there's a lot of data to go around in the several studies referred to here, and the upshot seems to both less exciting and less simple than "Video games are good, not bad!"
In regard to social issues, I do like that Slashdot is getting back to its roots at least! :)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Just like the kids who grew up on metal, and comic books, and rock 'n roll, etc.
Full study here.
Pretty tame conclusions, but I'm glad they're still doing research into this. I'm actually really curious to see what kind of psychological effects show up (or don't) as graphics technology gets ever closer to perfect fidelity. Not in the moral panic or "we must legislate this" sense, but just to understand whether and how a technology is capable of damaging us. VR is right around the corner, and game developers are focusing constantly on immersion -- this makes me wonder whether a sufficiently advanced game could cause PTSD, or a similar condition. I suspect not now, and not soon, but it'll probably be an issue some day.
I have read about people neglecting their kids to play farmville, I have even done a few nasty binges where I would swear to "stop by midnight" only to look outside and see that it was dawn.
The big kerfuffle in the 90's wasn't that games were addictive, it was that they were violent and that we were going to turn into desensitized savages who want to dismember people. Basically this article is about kids that grew up on Mortal Kombat.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
There's a reason people dismiss claims of IRL "harm" the from Tipper Gores or Jack Thompsons or Anita Sarkeesians of the world. The burden of proof is always squarely on them, they almost always fail to meet it, and years later we (as often as not) get scientific evidence showing the opposite.
or you could play the masterpiece, Portal 2. And actually get smarter while you play. So says Stanford et al. http://www.fastcompany.com/303...
They're using their grammar skills there.
They didn't even get to ask the ones who are dead or still in prison did they? What happened to the other 2/3 when they started the study? Even with the people that did respond there is a clear pattern of puzzle games being increasingly more popular over violent types as the person's education level rises.
I am not sure what to make of it all but I am still glad I installed these games on all the machines on my LAN, http://www.chiark.greenend.org...
I definitely didn't turn out OK... in fact, I died of dysentery.
or you could play the masterpiece, Portal 2. And actually get smarter while you play. So says Stanford et al. http://www.fastcompany.com/303...
The wait for Portal 3 is driving me insane.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Why do you need Portal 3, aren't you already smart enough from Portal 1 and 2?
I'm doing ok, I got a successful retail business and I got pretty straight morals, yes I've done things as a teenage that makes my kids and others go WTF? But that's another time and place in history.
We use to play TONS of video games, believe it or not we actually walked in snow and -10+ temps for 30-45 min each way to the closest video game rental place (Overwaitea Food). One day a few buddies of mine came over and asked me to stash some Nintendo machines and box on top of boxes of games. I sure as hell didn't mind as my eye and thumbs twitches at the gloriousness that will be happening to me in the next few week of my teenage life. I truly had a Nintendo thumb and 3 hours of sleep for weeks. Well it turned out fine for me and majority of my friends.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
What has this got to do with video games? Who knows? But we must understand that this generation is one of the most mentally fucked up generations to have ever walked the face of the earth. So, saying 90's vido gamers turned out 'ok', is clearly bullshit.
I think the idea is that they turned out okay compared to non-gamers from the same time period. Although it's next to impossible to exclude other correlating factors, because those who played games likely had more similar demographics than compared with those who didn't.
As for speculations of why the late 30 early 40 somethings of today are so fucked up, I would guess that the conservative resurgence and Mrs. Reagan and "no child left behind" is part of the problem. A coddled generation taught to rote learn and not to think, and that the grown ups would do all the thinking for them. Not a good recipe for brilliance, in my opinion.
There are games and there are games. And my guess is that games that map onto the real world more closely may have more intrusive effects than others. How could PacMan realistically affect real world functioning? You are guiding a blob of pixels around a maze, there are no real world corollaries to this. However, interacting with with photo realistic others in simulated environments could have a very positive impact. Take as an example some vulnerable kids who have learned to deal with others with aggression, then expose them to a simulated where game play success is only achieved through appropriate interactions, we might see positive effects in real world behaviour. At least this is the thinking of some developmental behavioural scientists... whose names and work I cannot at the moment find.
Adult children who live in a deluded world view where women are either villains, trophies, and the reason women won't have sex with them is entirely because they're disgusting. How much of that is from video games? It can be argued that the degrading treatment of women in the games played a role, but it could also just be that they don't get out of their moms basement to see the world isn't the awful place that they think it is.
As opposed to adult children who live in a deluded world view where women are perpetual victims of a mysterious and mythical patriarchy?
The worst thing video gamers have become is skeptical of feminism? Yeah, that's a result of not just listening and believing, but of actually employing healthy skepticism. Modern second wave feminsm does not hold up to such scrutiny, so it can safely be dismissed as false. Thankfully, more and more people are doing this, and feminism true nature is becoming clear to more and more people. Hopefully this cancer will be gone from politics and academia in a decade.
It's complex. I've known two people who have seriously messed up their lives as a result of excessive gaming and one who came close (but pulled back at the last minute). I've known a lot more people who fouled up their lives for other reasons.
The two I knew who seriously messed up their lives were friends from my university days who managed to get so heavily into the QuakeWorld/Quake 3 online scene that they failed their exams at the end of their second year and were thrown out (my university didn't "do" second chances). One of them went into the workplace without a degree (and is doing more or less ok now, almost 15 years later, though probably not in the field he wanted to be in) while the other enrolled at another university and came damned close to flunking out a second time (but scraped graduation and is now a teacher, so draw your own conclusions).
The near-miss was more recent. A friend I've known for about a decade got so heavily into an MMO last year that it started to affect his attendance and performance at work. A few of us spotted what was happening and did a bit of an "intervention" (god, I hate that term, but I can't think of a better one). The immediate result was a week long sulk - but after that, he realised the danger he was in and pulled back from the edge.
Thing is, though, I'm not ultimately convinced that "gaming" was a unique factor in either of those cases. In both cases, I think the social obligations that existed around gaming were a bigger factor. The Quake-pair weren't just playing the game; they were heavily involved in the competitive scene and had weekly practice and event schedules imposed on them by their clans. They both knew (one more than the other, perhaps) that they should be playing less, but didn't have the experience or maturity to tell their clan-mates when enough was enough. The MMO-player was, as he later admitted, more or less hating the game, but was so bound into his guild's hierarchy and structure that he felt he couldn't stop playing (or even cut back) for fear of letting other people down. So it wasn't so much video-game addiction as it was a kind of social entrapment.
Thing is, I've also seen people mess up their lives even more spectacularly for non-gaming reasons. In my first "grown up" job, one of my colleagues was into mountaineering. Seriously so. He'd take months of unpaid leave each year to go on expeditions. He'd done a couple of Himalayan 8,000ers as well as a whole load of peaks in Alaska and the Andes. And over time, it destroyed his life. His marriage fell apart, he lost contact with his son and, when redundancies came around at the office, he was the first one out the door; his lengthy absences meant that people had gotten used to doing without him, so he wasn't able to pull the "look indispensable" trick.
Another guy I was at university with ended up not just flunking out of his course but also winding up tens of thousands of GBP in debt. How? Poker. He convinced himself that as an "elite" maths student, he would be able to clean up. Turns out he couldn't. He ended up hopelessly addicted and throwing good money after bad.
I've also seen people wreck their lives through mundane and even unpleasant stuff. One guy I worked with got so drawn into work for the building management committee for the apartment block he lived in that it took over his life to the point he was spending most of the working day on it - and again, he was out the door at the first whiff of redundancies. He always told people that he was only doing it because he felt people were depending on him...
People are remarkably adept at finding ways to wreck their own lives and will use any tool at hand to do so. Games can be one of those tools and there certainly seem to be some people with a high general propensity to addictive behaviour who will be especially prone to gaming addiction. But for those people, I can't escape the view that if it wasn't gaming that brought them down, it would just be something else.
As for gaming and violence, whi
I don't remember anyone really talking about video game addiction until Everquest.
I remember talk about video game addiction back in the 80's when you had to go to an arcade. There was even a short about it on HBO about a guy whose wife and kids left him, but he didn't care because all he needed was another round of Galaga.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
He's referring to the well-known fact that Valve is less capable of counting to 3 than Arthur, King of the Britons, is.
You're exactly right that those things have nothing to do with games. People have been failing out of school for a long, long time, for reasons that had nothing to do with video games. In fact, of my high school friends circle, the people who failed out were the ones who weren't hardcore video gamers. They instead "partied themselves out" the old fashioned way, with women and alcohol.
"So in summary psychos play video games. Video games don't make you psycho."
I approve this message, at least pslytely.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
It isn't only about money.
Due to the insane blame culture is US society, there is a LOT of parents that think whenever their little darlings do something bad it must always be someone elses fault, and video games have always been an easy target.