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Two Studies Suggesting a Link Between Violent Video Games, Real-Life Behavior Have Been Retracted (qz.com)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.
I do think videogames are still too one-dimensional in dealing out death.
And why the hell would you just single out video games. Been to the movies in the past century? How about television? Death is part of our culture, rightly or wrongly.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Violent media is not, however, "violence". There is a difference between "depiction of violence" and "violence".
There is little doubt that experiencing or witnessing acts of violence can engender future violent behaviour - that this is traumatic, but the claim that the same trauma can be engendered by fictionalized depictions of violence is dubious at best.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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...