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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.
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.
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.
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
You are welcome on my lawn.
...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?
-Styopa