New Study Which Made 90 Adults Play 'GTA' or 'The Sims 3' For At least 30 Mins Every Day For 2 Months Finds 'No Significant Changes' in Their Behavior (arstechnica.com)

A new, longer-term study of video game play from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Germany's University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf recently published in Molecular Psychiatry found that adults showed "no significant changes" on a wide variety of behavioral measures after two straight months of daily violent game play. From a report: To correct for the "priming" effects inherent in these other studies, researchers had 90 adult participants play either Grand Theft Auto V or The Sims 3 for at least 30 minutes every day over eight weeks (a control group played no games during the testing period). The adults chosen, who ranged from 18 to 45 years old, reported little to no video game play in the previous six months and were screened for pre-existing psychological problems before the tests. The participants were subjected to a wide battery of 52 established questionnaires intended to measure "aggression, sexist attitudes, empathy, and interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs (such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness, risk taking, delay discounting), mental health (depressivity, anxiety) as well as executive control functions." The tests were administered immediately before and immediately after the two-month gameplay period and also two months afterward, in order to measure potential continuing effects. Over 208 separate comparisons (52 tests; violent vs. non-violent and control groups; pre- vs. post- and two-months-later tests), only three subjects showed a statistically significant effect of the violent gameplay at a 95 percent confidence level.

Comments

Wrong testing methodology

[humankind]

I'm not concerned with video games changing peoples' behavior, turning normal people into psychopaths.

What I would like to see studied, is the potential for video games to make psychopathic and sociopathic people more efficient in their anti-social abilities.

For example, I don't think playing ultra-realistic first person shooters will necessarily make anyone want to go out and shoot someone, but it seems to me, if you're a psychopath and you're into those games, they can train you to be a much more efficient psychopath when it comes time to assaulting a school or public place.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[gurps_npc]

That is quite honestly ridiculous. Most video games are not based on real world physics in part because real world physics is boring. Who wants to play a game where you have to carry all the bullets you fire? Nobody wants to reload that often.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not only that, it's testing a claim no one is making.

The question that we need to ask ourselves is if violent video game playing by young children and young adults affects their development. And there's a lot of signs that it does: that it desensitizes them to violence, that it makes them more willing to hurt and kill.

And, as you point out, there's also the open question of how violent video games affect people with mental illnesses.

This study is meaningless. It answers a question no one asked. With the explosion of school shootings, we should be asking ourselves "what's changed?" and one of the obvious answers is the increasing violence and realism of video games.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[Anonymous Coward]

That is quite honestly ridiculous. Most video games are not based on real world physics in part because real world physics is boring. Who wants to play a game where you have to carry all the bullets you fire? Nobody wants to reload that often.

You sound like a person who hasn't actually played a FPS game in at least two decades.

FPS games today thrive on realism, from the weapons used to the world maps modeled to exacting standards of accuracy. Movement is not as accurate (people don't run and jump everywhere) but there's more realism than you think.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[Junta]

The realism of aiming with a mouse or worse yet, a joypad.

Even in Oculus touch games that have you actually 'aim', generally there's a lot of auto-aim going on.

No, the games are designed for people to have fun and *feel* like they are better than they are (because requiring the same precision as real world would just be tiresome).

They are designed to *seem* real but not at all be useful.

Re: Wrong testing methodology

[c6gunner]

With the explosion of school shootings, we should be asking ourselves "what's changed?" and one of the obvious answers is the increasing violence and realism of video games.

ShanghaiBill does an excellent job of debunking the idea that school shootings are on the rise, but, even if we were to pretend that they are actually on the rise in the USA, your conclusion is retarded. Violent and realistic FPS games don't magically stay confined within your borders. People all over the world play them. Unless you're claiming that school shootings are on the rise around the globe it's idiotic to conclude that games are the reason.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[guruevi]

Not quite realistic though. The physics and graphics improved but you almost always play a superhero space-marine bullet-sponge with near perfect aim and no issues of bodily function, exhaustion or ill effects from environment, exposure or combat.

A true combat simulator would be boring and 99% of people wouldn't make it 5 minutes into the first fight (if one even popped up). Unlike what most people believe, firing a fully automatic weapon is hard, expensive and requires a lot of training, even a handgun is hard to accurately use repetitively and anyone with an ounce of actual police or military training would be taking you out before you even empty your clip.

That's also why most of these 'school shooters' generally already have $10k+ worth of guns, had used and trained on them extensively and why even one guard or police officer, trained in close quarter combat in the school would stop them dead in their tracks.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[humankind]

Good. So, you're only worried about that 1% of the population that are psychopaths.

That's a strawman argument as well as a false dichotomy. I said no such thing.

But you illustrate in your misdirected reply, the problem with these studies, as others have pointed out. They provide an answer to a question, a premise that virtually nobody buys into -- an extreme position that suggests merely playing a FPS can turn somebody into a psychopath. I don't know anybody making such claims. Nobody thinks playing GTA is going to make someone run out and car-jack somebody or pistol-whip a hooker.

The real deeper issue is, do these ultra-realistic games de-sensitize people to inhumane and immoral behavior?

And are there some people who are "at risk" being subjected to this media?

I find it amusing that, for example, it's considered inappropriate to say "fuck" on tv or show someone genitals -- because presumably that might influence certain types of people in an anti-social way, but you can shoot someone in the head and spew a catchy one-liner and it's no big deal?

So it's not that if you see boobs on tv, you're going to rape someone, but there is a premise that if sexualization in certain circumstances is presented in an inappropriate way, it can negatively influence certain types of people.

PS - It sounds like you want to criminalize being a psychopath.

There you go again, arguing with a strawman that in no way represents any argument I made.

The truth is, being a psychopath can be a criminal act. It depends upon the nature of the behavior, but generally speaking, if you're doing something psychopathic, it might be criminal. If you have psychopathic tendencies.... I think there needs to be ways for people to ID these traits and give these people some sort of therapy. Psychopathy is a potentially dangerous condition. Don't you agree? This doesn't mean I want to lock psychopaths up. I'm all for civil rights and the law. But we as a society need to do a better job of self-policing and providing therapy for people who need it.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[clovis]

I've seen numerous such studies since the 1980's back it was said the violent TV shows were making kids be violent.
I don't know why anyone would spend money on looking at changes in adults for these kinds of things.

The studies that I find are meaningful look for changes and differences between individual children rather than average changes for the groups as a whole.
Correlation studies of groups of people for this topic are not interesting because it's the aberrant individuals that are the problem, and the ratio of healthy to aberrant buries the problem when large group studies are done.
Marginally increasing aggression in healthy people makes no difference to society, but increasing violent tendencies in a schizophrenic American teenager can (has) create a huge problem.

People vary greatly, and what I find interesting is how violent TV and games affect those people who already show disturbing tendencies.
It appears to me that studies show most (i.e healthy) kids are not affected or only slightly affected by such shows and games.
But studies that seek (or control for) kids already showing violent tendencies do show significant effects.

Re: Wrong testing methodology

[chadenright]

Terrorists train with actual rifles. Furthermore, twice as many terrorists in the US were home-grown right-wing extremists as were islamic jihadis between 2008 and 2016, and six times more terrorists were right-wing extremists than left-wing extremists in the US.

The data suggests that it's not the jihadis that are the problem, and it's not those darn "liberals," it's the nazis and the KKK who are more effective at killing Americans than anyone else.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[rtb61]

I have never ever heard of gamers who play 30 minutes a day, I have heard of gamers who would play 30hours a day if they could. 30 minutes a day of gaming does not a gamer make. I would start at about 4 hours per day as a minimum, at least 3 days out of 5days. Than compare the differences in physiological state between playing GTAV mulitplayer and Sims 3 casual. I would defy researchers to not come up with huge differences in psychological state, between deep exposure to the two.

Want realistic tests, do eight hours a day for a month and then check the difference for during and after, psychological and physiological, this with a controlled diet.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[Sigma 7]

And there's a lot of signs that it does: that it desensitizes them to violence, that it makes them more willing to hurt and kill.

Pretty sure there's a video game called "Real Life" that does even more desensitization, especially in sections where children get forced into violent situations, and getting punished for it. If only said game received the same type of regulations that conventional video games receive.

With the explosion of school shootings, we should be asking ourselves "what's changed?" and one of the obvious answers is the increasing violence and realism of video games.

If the increasing violence/realism of video games was the issue, why is said explosion mostly contained in the USA? That may be an obvious reply, but it isn't the obvious answer.

One important thing that did change was that Obama was president for 8 years, and people somehow became upset with that. The other change is the following president saying "fake news" more often than a broken record, along with a rise in what amounts to a populist party.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[allcoolnameswheretak]

Well, there was that infamous opening scene in a Call of Duty game that invited you to gun down civilians in an airport as an undercover agent who had infiltrated a terrorist group.

I really hated that scene, not just because it was tasteless, but because the game prevented you from doing the right thing and saving those people - shooting any of the terrorists would fail the mission. And the terrorists would uncover your identity and kill you at the end, no matter what you did.

The entire thing felt like a cheap excuse to let the player run amok and indiscriminately murder people in an airport.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[AmiMoJo]

The nature of school shootings has changed. Used to be more disputes between individuals ending with someone getting shot, now there are more mass murders by people with severe mental illnesses.

Re:Wrong testing methodology

[AmiMoJo]

The other interesting question that is being largely overlooked is if gamer culture is being used as a gateway to extremism.

If you look at a Venn diagram of hardcore gamers, incels, red-pillers and the like there seems to be some overlap. Leaked emails from Brietbart show that Milo Yianoppolis was groomed for that role, before he self-destructed.

There has been some study of it, e.g. the book Kill All Normies.

Flawed study?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying violent games lead to violent behavior, but their study seems kind of flawed in that the idea behind the claim is that violent games during childhood development desensitizes the child to violence, leading to them being more inclined to resort to using it down the road. That's nowhere near the same thing as claiming fully developed adults playing violent video games will start becoming violent themselves.

Re:Flawed study?

[fluffernutter]

I came here to post just this. They completely missed the whole 'developmental phase' aspect. It's hard to tell exactly what they were trying to prove with this actually. Perhaps how much money they could raise for a totally useless study.

behavioral changes

[PopeRatzo]

When I played GTA V, it took a lot less than 2 months for me to start acting like my hero, Trevor Philips. I don't know what it was about that guy, but I found him a rather touching tragicomic character.

The scene after he gives Patricia Madrazo back to her Mexican gangster husband after kidnapping her and he's driving away from the exchange and "If You Leave Me Now" by Chicago starts playing in the car had me laughing and crying at the same time. Except for the credits sequence in Saints Row IV, I don't think anything in a video game has ever affected me so profoundly.

https://youtu.be/bPADGxsf8a8

i play GTA 5 often

[FudRucker]

i mostly ride the motocross bike around the mountains & desert for fun, i love bikes but damn near killed myself on one so i dont have a bike in the real world anymore so i pretend to ride on GTA5 i play it about an hour a day, sometimes a little more, sometimes less, plus i can be a bad boy and make the cops chase me around, its easy to lose em on the dirt bike in the mountains & desert, sometimes i get away sometimes i get killed, but its just a video game fantasy, its not real life, i know i could never get away with that in the real world, i would be dead or in prison

Proxy for Culture of Violence

[mentil]

Pointing the finger at violent video games/media is really shorthand for a broader concern: a culture which excuses or promotes violence. This culture is so pervasive in the USA (even outside of media) that a little extra exposure likely makes no significant difference, particularly since most violent games have little or nothing to say on the value of violence in society.

I suspect a larger effect would be found if subjects were made to either listen to NRA Radio for 30 minutes every day for two months, or to listen to a comparable anti-violence media source (sorry can't think of a good one right now) the same amount. I'm not putting the blame solely on the NRA, it's just a good example of a steady drip of new info that can be consumed for 30 minutes each day; a gangsta rap Spotify playlist might have the same effect.

Re:Proxy for Culture of Violence

[mentil]

I was talking more about gang-bangers than mass shooters; no psychopathy is required. Insisting that psychopathy IS required, and normal psychology means someone is nonviolent, contributes to the problem. Indeed violence has gone down, but that's apparently a regression to the mean, with a prior outlier created by TEL pollution. Presumably, intelligence improved in the lowest percentiles, which I suspect led to increased resistance to the culture of violence. If the culture creates an impulse to commit violence, then impulse control would be the mitigating factor, and higher intelligence means better impulse control.

Dupe

[neoRUR]

This study is so good they did it twice..
https://games.slashdot.org/sto...

Max Planck is normally pretty serious science...

[argStyopa]

...but it's hard to take this one seriously.

Sample size of 90.
Adults.
Playing 30min/day for 2 months?

Jesus, you could probably smoke CIGARETTES for 30min a day for 2 months and not see an impact.

Or was this 'study' intended to disprove the videogame/behavior link?

I really hate to say it...that's 3% of millions

[holophrastic]

3 of 90 is over 3% of a very huge population of millions and millions and millions of gamers. It the study's anywhere near predictive, that's a lot of damage.

I hate to say it because I spend a lot of time playing violent video games. And hey, no one's accusing me of very overly calm or patient. I'm certainly sexist, and I'm certainly not whatever interpersonally competent is.

Do I get to blame the games?

I've always wanted to be a member of the 1%. I suppose being a part of the 3% is pretty close.

Re:1 in 30 at risk

[humankind]

So, about 3% of people can have effects from consuming violent media... so only 10 million Americans are at risk.

This should now be the canned response from the media whenever there's a school shooting:

"This mass murder is not statistically relevant given that so many other kids are not shooting up schools."

This is a useless study

[jd]

Let's say that there's a genetic contribution to the issue of game violence affecting people. Let's say 1 in 100 are affected. A study of 90 people has an excellent chance of only looking at those who wouldn't be affected.

Let's say it takes 8 hours gaming a day - fairly typical for serious gamers. Half an hour will show nothing.

No, you start by finding those who purport to be affected, then look to see what makes them abnormal, neurologically and genetically. You then create a hypothesis that some permutation of these factors is relevant.

You then conduct a study to determine rarity, then a third study of sufficient size to guarantee a statistically significant number of interesting people are present.

In this study, you measure traits, then assign each person a UUID. It has to be double blind. They don't know what you're measuring, the observer doesn't know who had what traits.

Your hypothesis is that those who are vulnerable will show neurological changes as predicted. You do not rely on self-reporting other than to get the initial candidates, nor do you ever rely on psychology.

This is how you tell who is affected, how and why.

It's expensive, but you do this once and not once every few weeks. This strategy of producing the illusion of work actually costs more in the long run and answers nothing.

Actually no there isn't

[aepervius]

there's a lot of signs that it does: that it desensitizes them to violence

Actually no there is no evidence of such a thing. Please cite your evidence. My evidence is that in spite of having so many violent video game over 20 years, violence among young adult and kid either reduced or stayed stable. e.g. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/... in this case totasl youth crime in canada sink quicker than general crime https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/... if violent video game had any impact, you would expect a rise somewhere between 2000 and 2015 when video game spread started to peak up for youth, you would not expect to drop it now that it is even more widespread. So what is your evidence that youth are desensitized by violence ? Because they certainly commit less crime today, kinda strange for people desensitized ? Or maybe you were spouting belief based on no evidence. Just sayin'.

The REAL Danger of Video Games

[sycodon]

Trying to play GTA on a sub par machine with glitchy internet connection resulting in missed scores, choppy graphics and terrible audio.

Now THAT'S enough to turn someone in a Mass Shooter.