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New Book Cuts Through Violent Video Game Myths
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Mar 07, 2008 06:08 PM
from the with-a-giant-sword dept.
from the with-a-giant-sword dept.
Terry Bosky suggests a recent interview from Game Couch with one of the authors of an upcoming book which fights the "myths and hysteria" surrounding violent video games. Dr. Cheryl K. Olson explains how many of the studies linking aggression with video games were flawed or misguided, and she discusses some of her own findings. Quoting:
"Until now, the most-publicized studies came from a small group of experimental psychologists, studying college students playing nonviolent or violent games for 15 minutes. It's debatable whether those studies are relevant to real children, playing self-selected games for their own reasons (not for cash or extra credit!), in social settings, over many years. But media reports and political rhetoric often ignore that distinction. Also, the most-published researchers have built their careers around media violence. Their studies were designed under the assumption that violent video games are harmful, which dictated the questions they asked and how they framed their results. Media violence is just a small part of what we do, so we could look at the issue with fresh eyes and no agenda."
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Maybe I read that wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe I read that wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Maybe I read that wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Maybe I read that wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
So more trustworthy for you to consider.
It's one of the things you really want to look for when folks start flinging studies around: who do they work for? Would you trust as accurate a study funded my Microsoft that says that 5 of 6 dentists prefer to use Windows, or would you be more likely to trust as accurate a study funded by some independent group?
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Re:Maybe I read that wrong (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Maybe I read that wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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And then compare it to just one of our major cities...
It's freaking obvious to anyone who has paid any attention over the last 50 years... social darwinism. Launch the greediest of your society to the top (yay US!). That's just how the rules work in this country. Fuck your neighbor, and if anyone touches my useless shit I'll kill all y
Re:Maybe I read that wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
They don't have an agenda
Are you sure? Because when I googled for "Cheryl K. Olson," the first hit I got [pmusa.com] showed that she is on the payroll of Big Tobacco [pmusa.com]. She has also been a "strategic communications consultant" for Big Pharmaceutical and Big Media. I haven't found anything (yet) to indicate that she's on the gaming industry's payroll, but her history reads like that of a professional shill, not a dispassionate scientist.
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Re:Maybe I read that wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
He got various questionnaires from the various political parties.
This is the same question on both parties questionnaires, but notice the difference in how its worded -
* Do you believe in the killing of unborn children?
* Do you believe you have the right to tell a women whos been raped that she has to carry to term the resulting fetus?
You don't think that the questions they ask about violence in video games might be just a little skewed?
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Re:Maybe I read that wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Unless, that is, some people reach puberty while still in the womb. I know slashdot has a lot of people still living in their parents' basements, but that's a bit much. If you're 18 and still living in the womb, then yes, I support killing you.
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Those are NOT the same questions! (Score:5, Insightful)
* Do you believe you have the right to tell a women whos been raped that she has to carry to term the resulting fetus?
There are lots of unborn children who are not being carried by rape victims.
The whole problem with the 'abortion debate' is that the extreme participants argue under the assumption that if you are not universally pro-life, you must be pro-abortion, and if you are not universally pro-choice, you must be pro-government-control of bodies.
That's not the way reasonable people think.
I think abortion is bad *AND* I think the government telling a woman what to do with her body is bad.
On top of that, I realize that not all abortions are equally bad - aborting a one-cell fetus is not even in the same realm of bad as aborting a 38-week-old fetus. And telling a woman who is pregnant as a result of sex she agreed to have that she can't have an abortion is not as bad as telling a woman who never consented to the sex that led to pregnancy that she can't have an abortion.
Now, there is going to be a lot of variance in where most reasonable people decide the 'badness' of allowing women to choose to abort their pregnancies is less bad than forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. Most reasonable people are going to agree that the death of non-differentiated fetuses is a very small amount of bad. And most reasonable people are going to agree that the death of a fetus that is, but for a few inches of position, about to be a live birth as extremely bad. So most REASONABLE people support *BOTH* abortion *AND* limits on choice.
6 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Abort if you want.
38 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Sorry, too late.
A debate about whether abortion is OK or not is stupid. A debate about government intervention in a woman's choice is stupid. There is no debate - both are bad. The debate needs to be about at what point a woman's control of her body is outweighed by the interests of the fetus.
So back to your original questions:
#1) Sometimes.
#2) Sometimes.
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aaargh. (Score:5, Funny)
WHAT?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously, folks, it's about damn time someone stepped up to the 'personal responsibility' plate and didn't get hit in the head by the ball (man, I pwn'd that metaphor). I grew up in the age of violent video games, as did most people here... come on, this website's name involves SLASHING people. My favorite movies growing up were Beverly Hills Cop and Aliens (I was all of six years old for those), and not once did I feel the urge to be more violent, or to shoot anyone. I thought "Wow, those movies are an awesome escape from boring reality. I'm gonna go read some Calvin & Hobbes now, maybe eat a cookie."
Yes, this is anecdotal, but if ten million people have (and apparently do) have similar anecdotal stories, that adds up, and this book is just the long-overdue sober second look at a popular, convenient myth.
PS: Jack Thompson needs to be clubbed with this book.
Re:WHAT?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
That populist sentiment misses a lot of the point of that kind of research. It may not have much to do with "banning" anything at all, but, for example, giving parents information that will help them decide if and when to bring videogame consoles into the home, or whether someone who is having trouble with violent behavior should be advised to stay away from videogames. That research is worthwhile even if there isn't a direct public policy connection.
I'm all in favor of the more nuanced view of the topic of media effects on behavior, and I think the authors of this book are right on. But the old canard of "what about personal responsibility?" strikes me as anti-intellectual crankiness.
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Re:WHAT?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
But how come it's only ever the "unpopular things" that are questionned as to whether they affect behaviour - fictional violence, video games, rock music, Marilyn Manson, porn?
No one questions the violence in religious texts when it turns out a murderer was obsessed with the Bible or killed someone because "God says so". Unless they're a pagan or satanist, in which case, it's back to the "unpopular things" which must be banned again.
I've nothing against providing parents with information, but note that people do use these claims to ban things, even for adults. I think "personal responsibility" is a valid response when the claim put forward is that media alone can turn people into violent criminals.
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My son's favorite driving game is Carmageddon. Do I think he'll be a bad driver? No.
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When I got dumped several times, I didn't lash out.
When I got fired because someone ELSE was stealing money, I didn't even raise my voice.
When I got hit by a car, I didn't get angry.
Tell me again what my 'emotional brain' is learning?
An accurate sampling? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not versed in acceptable survey sampling standards, but given the 100's of 1000's (if not millions) of gamer-kids all across the country, this seems small to me. Just an uneducated observation....
Re:An accurate sampling? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:An accurate sampling? (Score:5, Informative)
You're being to simplistic -- the sample size needed for good predictions isn't directly related to the total number of gamers. The size of the sample needed is related to error introduced by the measures used and the phenomenon measured. If you have a robust methodology, you may need only a few subjects. If there are huge errors introduced by your methodology (political polling is a good example of this), you may need thousands of subjects.
I didn't read the article (this is slashdot, after all...), but any good psychologist would include statistics indicating the probability that the results were caused by error or random chance, usually this number should be very low, 5% or lower. See the wikipedia article on P-values [wikipedia.org] for more on this.
But to answer your question: many psychological experiments are done with a much smaller number of subjects (50 or so), and get very low P-values. The effect being tested here may be harder to reliably measure, but the sample size is also pretty large. So there's no reason to think that 1,200 is too low, unless the stats say otherwise.
-Esme
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Re:An accurate sampling? (Score:5, Interesting)
IANAS (I Am Not A Statistician), but this is the situation as I understand it.
Suppose I have a room with a hundred people in it. Some of them are mathematicians, whose noses I've blackened with a magic marker. Everybody is wearing red rubber clown noses. Your job is to snap enough noses that you have a reasonable estimate of what proportion of them are mathematicians. Let's say you check five people, and two have smudgy noses. That gives you an estimate of 40%, but it's not very reliable, so you continue checking until you have snapped 50 rubber noses, and found twenty mathematicians. Now you're pretty confident the ration is about 40%, right?
Now suppose there were a thousand people in the room. You're a bit less confident in your 40% effort, but you're still almost as confident. But look: increasing the sample by a factor of ten made you a LOT more confident; increasing the population by a factor of 10 makes almost no difference (at least with these numbers; a 1 in 50 result would be a different kettle of fish).
Samples over a certain range get rapidly better -- much faster than linearly, and then they kind of run out of steam because they can't really get much better or they'd be perfect. The upshot is that for many experimental designs you aren't much better off having 500 subjects over having 50, whether the population you are sampling is 10,000 or 100,000,000. In fact you might be worse off it the population size is, say, 500 -- at least if you are interested in gaining any insights about your null hypothesis.
It's a good thing too. If you think about it, if you do something like a drug trial with a hundred or so subjects in it are supposed to stand in for all of the 6.7 billion people on the planet.
In any case, I'm always a bit skeptical when I see studies with sample sizes in the thousands. It's not financially efficient to conduct real studies this size, so they tend to be hashing together data from sources collected for other purposes. Such studies have their place, of course. They also have their limitations.
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I am a researcher in this field (Score:2, Informative)
Now, before you naysayers get your panties in a bunch, keep in mind, we are professionals. No one in my group had any agenda apart from doing good research.
Re:I am a researcher in this field (Score:5, Insightful)
"Sure," says I, "When I get bacon delivered through my second-story window fresh off the flying pig."
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I see this sort of thing all the time.
I'm sure our AC would be glad to give us some referenes to published studies, if you promi
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And your control group included kids running around outside playing Cowboys & Indians and Cops & Robbers, too... right?
What about the programmers? (Score:2, Insightful)
People are always concerned about what the effects of playing violent video games might be, but nobody seems to question whether there are any undesirable effects of programming these games. I imagine that a programmer, stressing out to meet the game's shipping deadline in the face of a show-stopping heisenbug somewhere in the code, might be more inclined to do something violent during a particularly frustrating midnight debugging session, such as take the computer up to the roof of his company's 12-story o
It is very hard to gague cause and effect (Score:2, Insightful)
If people who watch R-rated games tend to be more violent than those who don't, are the movies making them more violent than they otherwise would have been? Maybe, but determining a "yes" or "no" answer is far from easy and far from certain.
Its just something (Score:2, Insightful)
That gives lazy politicians something to do! Lets save our children from the violent video games! Instead of, oh, I dunno, managing tax reform, social problems, basically stuff you were elected to do.
Violent media has been around since the dawn of time, in the form of TV, books, sports etc etc etc. Its not going anywhere, kids, so don't worry about it. Wherever there is a market, the product will get served.
But... but... but... (Score:2)
Won't somebody think of Jack??????????
Alright, I admit it! (Score:3, Funny)
A word about studies and bias (Score:4, Insightful)
That's OK. that's why studies are done open, done many times, and looked at.
Certainly who sponsored the study is something to look at, but it doesn't automatically mean the study is flawed. It's especially important when a study goes against previous studies.
So stop with the 'study is biased ' crap. Of course it is. Look at the result and see if it skewed the data, or id the study used bad techniques.
For the topic at hand, It is clear that violent games have a short term effect.
Adrenalin, acting out violent behaviors are all common to some degree.
It will go on for as long as the adrenalin is their system, and/or until it stops being funny.
I think there can be a point where the game can cause problems. We're not there it technologically, but it doesn't mean we won't cross the threshold.
If someone had a holodeck, could playing war games cause someone to be shell shock? desensitize someone to violence? I don't know and i hope not. That doesn't mean we shouldn't study it.
AND NO AGENDA (Score:3)
It is in the summary, we need to look at the issue with NO AGENDA.
Be honest, how many of us does that rule out?
If have undergo military training in the past, and looking back, I know that through carefull management of my emotions I was being trained to be a killer. I really didn't notice it at the time, but training like that is designed to make you feel part of a group and you want to protect and fight for that team and kill those who are not in the same colors.
So I KNOW you can be manipulated.
Are claims that violent games decensitize you to violence then really that odd?
I noticed something, the same people who scream that goverments are training killers are the same who say that violent games have no influence on people. The two don't add up.
Any normal person can be influenced by media. A simple experiment, play the theme from love story and the theme from jaws over the same scene, wanna bet you look at each clip with a different heart rate?
But it doesn't really matter if the influence is there or not, first we got to accept that scaremongering politicans and selfish players are NEITHER suited to give an unbiased opinion on this subject. What next, we ask smokers about the danger of smoking or the tobacco industry? No, we ask doctors who are supposed to start each study with an open mind.
It is sad to see so clearly that this hasn't happened when it comes to games BUT this by no means proof that games are harmless. We really need independent study in this area AND then IF games are shown to have an influence, ask ourselves wether the influence is worth basic freedoms. For instance, we know drinking is bad for you, but we still allow it.
risk of desensitization? (Score:4, Insightful)
Today, video games look pretty much like video games. You can tell you are not watching something real, though single-player COD is getting pretty photo-realistic. Flying bodies, spurting blood. But it's still cartoonish. Cartoonish enough that you know it's a game.
What happens when the game becomes indistinguishable from reality? When it becomes photo-realistic? We know that people can become desensitized to stimuli by constant exposure.
If we had games that simulated warfare like, say, a "holodeck", would there be any debate as to the harmful effects it would have on the psyche of the players? Would we not see traumatic stress issues?
If you agree that we would see such problems with hyper-realistic games, then I think it is reasonable to debate and discuss what happens as we approach that level of realism. At what point does the game become realistic enough to start being harmful?
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Between space invaders and today's 3d there has been the time where blood could be drawn but mostly wasn't. Designers weren't using random color as soon as xevious, around '82. Drawing blood was technically possible and in topic in commando or green beret. And it would have impressed people, because we were impressed by VG graphics. We were impressed by marble madness fake 3d, or pole position fast sprites. Also, Video games were politically incorrect at least with leisure suit larry. It's not a matter of "we would have done it if we could".
Do VG mirror society or influence it? I guess it's kind of a feedback loop.
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Space invaders (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting that you mentioned space invaders. From wikipedia:
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On Killing (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe ten years ago, I read On Killing [amazon.com], written by a psych professor at Westpoint, the U.S. Army Academy. The book was not about video games: it was a study of how the U.S. Army had successfully changed its effective fire ratio from 10% in WWII to over 90% in the Vietnam war, and how those 80% who got psychologically "tricked" into killing people they weren't prepared to kill were the ones who got extremely ill after the war. These people were trained to easily go past the non-violence barrier that most people have.
There is, however, a short chapter near the end of the book where he warns that the elements FPS games are functionally equivalent to the training methods the Army used,teaching players to go across that barrier, too.
Whether you agree or disagree, he still knew a lot about war and psychology.
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That's David Grossman, a first-rate demogogue of the post-Columbine era. Essentially all of Grossman's points are refuted by simply looking at a graph of violent crime rates plotted against the release of major "violent" (sic) video games. My favorite illustration is this one [photobucket.com] (89 KB
Re:On Killing (Score:5, Insightful)
The psychology of war has little to do with the physionomics of war. FPS games nurture the mental aspect attached to the physionomics of warfare - that's it. And while being an aspect of combat, it is far from the core basis of combat.
Psychology deals with the understanding of actions taken during war by the entities who participate. It addresses the mental state of participants pre, and post, participation in wartime activities.
Physionomics investigates how FPS games influence the mental awareness, and possibly the acuity, of recognizing multiple threat targets - and driving engagement until all threats have been negotiated.
The concept of how someone feels about killing another is distinctly removed from how someone recognizes an element they need to kill. Look at the psychology of serial killers.
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Re:who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I saw this with the UK Government in its plans to criminali [slashdot.org]