Two Studies Suggesting a Link Between Violent Video Games, Real-Life Behavior Have Been Retracted (qz.com)

Keith Collins reports via Quartz: In the first three months of 2017, academic journals retracted two papers that suggested a link between violent video games and real-life behavior. The first, entitled "Boom, Headshot!" was published in the Journal of Communication Research in 2012 and, after years of controversy, retracted last January. That study looked at the "effect of video game play and controller type on firing aim and accuracy," and found that playing first-person shooter games can train a player to become a better marksman in real life. Patrick Markey, a psychology professor at Villanova University, found some inconsistencies in the data published in the study. In January 2015, he and a colleague alerted Ohio State University, where the authors of the paper conducted the research. The lead author of the study, psychology professor Brad Bushman, emailed an official at OSU a month later, suggesting the allegations were part of a smear campaign against him and his co-author, according to Retraction Watch. Last January, the Journal of Communication Research retracted the paper. Bushman had agreed to the retraction, and began an attempt to re-do the original study with a larger sample size. A paper published in Gifted Child Quarterly in 2016, authored by Bushman and three others, caught the attention of Joseph Hilgard, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. The paper had studied the "effects of violent media on verbal task performance in gifted and general cohort children," and found that when children watched a violent cartoon for 12 minutes, their verbal skills dropped substantially for a temporary period. What surprised Hilgard most, according to an interview with Retraction Watch, was the sheer size of the effect. Hilgard said that OSU, Bushman, and others he spoke with about the study were helpful and forthcoming, but could not provide information on the study's data collection process. The author who collected the data, it turned out, lived in Turkey and fell out of contact following the recent coup attempt. Last week, Gifted Child Quarterly retracted the paper.

Comments

I still don't 'get' realistic war simulations.

[Qbertino]

Link or not, I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death. Also I really don't get why male teenie fantasies have to evolve around the closest approximation to real war we can produce. Battlefield 1 was the pinnacle: Celebrating the massakre that WW1 war as something enjoyable left an awkward taste behind. Yes, the GFX were aweseome and I'm sure the leveldesign and the gameplay were top notch. ... But why again do we have to simulate and fetishize real war as close as possible?

I read an article about a scandinavian dad who had exact same discussion with his teenage boys. He made an agreement with them: They would travel to israel and talk with israeli and hamas veterans and visit the places where they hang out and tell their stories. After that, the boys could play whatever they chose to. ... Smart dad. I don't know how that turned out though.

I do get Unreal Tournament CTF, Tribes CTF, Xonotic CTF and Quake 3 Arena CTF. Bouncing around through space with teleporters, strange gaming levels and respawning instantly once your fragged and shooting bizar weapons that don't exist in the real world is all-out fun. And the direkt link to violence I don't see in both cases. ... I do get stress and anxiety issues when playing these games for an extended period of time though.

Re: I still don't 'get' realistic war simulations.

[nitehawk214]

Playing paintball is a more realistic war simulation than Battlefield 1.

Maybe it's the anti-gaming people that are the ones that need to get out of their basements.

Re:I still don't 'get' realistic war simulations.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a kid(I'm 49) I use to play with GI Joe dolls and army men. In fact I still have my original GI Joe toys packed away somewhere at my parents house. There were no video game systems then yet we still played war. The bad guys were Nazis and my friends and I got to be heroes. I use to build tanks and airplanes out of Lego and play space battles and crazy adventures where things would "blow up". As a father I use to take my boys out twice a month and go play military simulations using Airsoft guns before I became disabled. In fact playing Airsoft is whole lot closer to real then any computer game or movie. Airsoft battles can be very intense when the BBs start flying in all directions and people are yelling.

It's very normal for a boys to do such things and a few girls as well. It is exciting and thrilling and we get to be heroes and kill the bad guys. I see nothing wrong with how I played as a boy nor do I have a problem with it now as a father and a former Airsoft player.

Re:I still don't 'get' realistic war simulations.

[ckatko]

You don't get it mostly because you're an idiot. :P

You know what men like? COMPETITION. You know what those games represent? COMPETITION. They have "hunting". They have gathering resources.

Quake 3 isn't about killing people. It's about winning a game. (Notice I said "Game" and not "Video game".) An abstract game where people don't actually die. It's NO different than playing tag. No different than playing cops and robbers. The robbers "compete" to FLEE, and cops "compete" to CATCH.

When someone in Quake 3 dies, there is no family crying. There is no funeral. There is no sadness. You just respawn.

Men naturally (that is BIOLOGICALLY) create hierarchical systems, and then compete within those systems for the top. Men compete in chess. Men compete in drag racing. Men compete in soccer. Men. Compete. It's a biological need. And only in the last couple decades where we've forgotten 95% of "what it means to be a man" is this a remotely novel concept.

Now, contrast this with war and, accidentally, some modern games. Google the death scenes in Dead Space. They're horrific. I can't play those games without intentionally desensitizing myself--and I don't want to. They're graphic. They're horrible. I don't want to watch my guy, screaming and crying out for help, as his spine is ripped out from his living body by a monster. We're heading fast for the uncanny valley and past it, where we're no longer shooting at 2-D sprite monsters going "ugh." every time they get hit, and heading for realistic looking pain and suffering. When you can actually empathize with simulated pain and suffering, that's no longer a abstracted "game" like cops-and-robbers. It's a simulation. And we SHOULD be super-careful about letting our kids play that.

Re:Male hero fantasies

[nedlohs]

Probably true. I find it particularly curious that violence in movies and games is more acceptable than sexuality. Decapitate someone in a movie and you might get a PG-13 rating. Show a breast and you go straight to rated R. Very odd.

I don't think that's universal. Different societies have probably developed different views...

But sexuality being considered worse for children to view than violence makes some sense. Violence is outside of the everyday experience for most people, while sex isn't.

That makes violence more comfortable for parents - they can after all just say it's just fantasy in the real world you will be hurt or dead on the receiving end and in prison on the handing out end. Whereas, sex is uncomfortable to talk about for many people (the very people movie ratings are made for). Possibly because they don't want their child doing it now but do in fact want their child to do it later - so they don't want to call it "bad" but also don't want to call it "awesome".

Most people are never going to find themselves using their very particular set of skills to hunt down and murder the kidnappers of their child. Most people will engage in sexual activity at some point in their lives. One is clearly fantasy (especially to the target of movie ratings), one is reality and thus,more difficult to deal with.

At least that's the armchair analysis I pulled out of me ass...