Psychologists publish 3 new studies on violent video game effects on youths
Selected quotes from the article follow, but read the whole thing.
The book's first study found that even exposure to cartoonish children's violent video games had the same short-term effects on increasing aggressive behavior as the more graphic teen (T-rated) violent games. The study tested 161 9- to 12-year-olds, and 354 college students. Each participant was randomly assigned to play either a violent or non-violent video game. "Violent" games were defined as those in which intentional harm is done to a character motivated to avoid that harm. The definition was not an indication of the graphic or gory nature of any violence depicted in a game.The researchers found that participants who played the violent video games -- even if they were children's games -- punished their opponents with significantly more high-noise blasts than those who played the non-violent games. They also found that habitual exposure to violent media was associated with higher levels of recent violent behavior -- with the newer interactive form of media violence found in video games more strongly related to violent behavior than exposure to non-interactive media violence found in television and movies.Discuss.The researchers were surprised that the relation to violent video games was so strong.
"We were surprised to find that exposure to violent video games was a better predictor of the students' own violent behavior than their gender or their beliefs about violence," said Anderson. "Although gender aggressive personality and beliefs about violence all predict aggressive and violent behavior, violent video game play still made an additional difference.
"We were also somewhat surprised that there was no apparent difference in the video game violence effect between boys and girls or adolescents with already aggressive attitudes," he said.
"punished their opponents with significantly more high-noise blasts than those who played the non-violent games."
So it makes them more violent... IN A GAME? I'd be super duper violent if playing a rtarded noise blaster game designed by some shit professor WHO I MUST KILLLARGHARGH.
sorry, I started thinking of Doom.
No. It was blasts at other participants, apparently through the game...but it wasn't just in a game, as you are suggesting. They also found correlation with a number of aggressive behaviors outside of the lab environment itself. I'm not saying it's conclusive. I haven't read the actual studies. But you are dismissing it far too lightly.
Spurious! Well, maybe not.
Don't know, America staunchly refuses to accept Columbine and likened videogame violence stories as statistical inevitabilities.
The positives of videogames still far outweigh those listed negatives, even if all true for me. I'll be playing them with my kids.
That's because statistics don't commit crimes, people do, and people possess free will so there's nothing inevitable about it.Originally Posted by oinkfs
Ideals are fun.
Anyone who still thinks that there is no short term desensitization to violence after playing video games, watching movies, and so forth is simply being a stubborn ass, like a five year old throwing a tanrtrum by jumping up and down while screaming "NO! NO! NO!"
Long term or society-wide effects, or extreme stuff like Columbine, is highly debatable though.
I agree, and that's pretty much why I don't pay stuff like this much mind any longer (except to the extent that it fuels anti-game moralizing or legislating.) The results of longitudinal studies on the subject would be much more enlightening.
Meh ... We're on our what, second (almost third) generation of kids that grow up with video games? If you ask me it's a bit too early to tell long term effects. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to rain on any parents parade of source material that they can cite to keep their kids off the Gameboy or DS all day.
In my day, D&D was just a mere step down from full on satanism. I remember pleading with my mom how stupid it would be for her to take my D&D books away but she did anyway. Why? Because someone then did some sort of study I'm sure. Or a TV program, or someone in politics who made a big deal about it.
I think a part of me believes that every parenting generation has a scapegoat that they use to blame bad kid behavior on. Video games happen to be the one used currently, and one day, something else will replace it. Nothing makes up for a parent sitting down and playing with your kid and teaching them what's right and wrong. With no supervision, anything can be bad for them.
Desensitization in the sense of "oh crap, another 500 people died somewhere in the world, time for breakfast" I will cop to, but I think TV news accomplishes that as well as anything.
On the other hand, I still go faint at the sight of real blood sometimes, and when anything approaching a violent confrontation develops between two people, my stomach gets all flip-floppy.
I am willing to accept on abstract grounds that videogames might be "desensitizing" me; I'm not innately opposed to the idea that they alter human behavior like any other stimuli might; but it would help if I understood precisely what that meant, or how it manifested itself.
*edit: Of course, I'm only one person and my case is by definition anecdotal anyway.
If I remember right, D&D almost made Tom Hanks throw himself off a building by teaching him that he could fly. Plus, it made him stab an accosting bum!
I'm puzzled that the short-term studies cause any surprise at all--they boil down to saying that games that cause a short-term increase in adrenaline and reward aggression cause increased adrenaline and aggression levels in the short term. Someone get a larger grant! Also, that people will frequently become abusive to each other if the experimental protocol encourages them to be--see the lovely Stanford Prison Experiment as one of the most famous examples.
Longitudinal studies would be nice, but unlikely. By the time any valuable data comes about, society will have moved on to worrying desperately about the youth impact of wetware jacks--and violent crime will be even lower than it is, but with more stories of people wondering why the world's getting so violent unlike the old days.
I bet the same conclusions of aggression could be linked to competition as well. Adrenaline does a lot of things, and a lot of things pump up your adrenaline. I was ready to be violent last night after nailing five stars on The Trooper in Guitar Hero 2. Jumping around, hooting, pumping my fist in the air! I was totally ready to go mosh!
To be fair, I did try to perform one of my D&D cleric's spells in real life once, and a demon was able to enter my body and give me infernal powers and make me kill until my mom took those books away. But that wasn't nearly as bad as the time I listened to AC/DC's "Shot Down in Flames," and then tricked a lady into taking a package for my friend the devil along with her on her trip to Scotland. I didn't even know "Shot Down in Flames" was about that, I thought it was a song about having women not like you at bars. I guess some of the song was recorded backwards and really quiet, and you know how that is. If someone tells you to do something backwards and really quiet during an AC/DC song, you're pretty much going to do it. Because not doing something AC/DC told you to do is tantamount to betraying Satan himself, who is way cooler than my dad and showed me how to mind control my teacher.
Which brings me to my second point, I used to run a daycare and I fed a lot of the children into a black gate I created using the stones and maps from Ultima 7 and made them come back as abyssal changelings who raped animals and I am sorry for that. That was wrong of me. I got the idea to do that from my commanding offalcer in the Secret Babylonian Catholic Church of Satan. Again, at the time I felt like I had to do what he said or he would melt my family with his hellpowers, but honestly I did it mostly because power is seductive and whatnot. So yeah, my bad.
While I am at it, I guess I should apologize for my part in the Columbine Massacre. I didn't go to Columbine, but I went to high school, and while I was there, I teased disturbed losers and that taught other people that it was ok to tease disturbed losers. Teasing kids relentlessly, day in, day out, when they are already having a hard enough time is just wrong. Not as wrong as the things I did when I was a direct servant of the Devil, but wrong, nonetheless. Anyways, the kids who teased Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are as responsible for the Columbine Massacre as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Everyone knows that. It doesn't mean that anyone deserved to be shot. It doesn't mean what they did was anything less than horrific. Without the constant demeaning of their worth and the suffocating harrassment, there would not have been a Columbine Massacre just the same as if those kids had not had access to firearms.
If you blame the Columbine Massacre on videogames you hide the fact that the true cause of the deaths of those kids was simply a horrific response to shameful treatment of vulnerable human beings. It wasn't right how they were treated, it wasn't right how they acted, and it isn't right to sweep under the rug the true facts of the Columbine Massacre. Those kids acted out because of the way they were treated, not because of the way they were entertained.
This is why the industry shouldn't tiptoe around these kinds of short-term studies, but embrace them, fund them, and use the findings in hype machines. There should be batteries of normalized studies of average adrenal impacts on a per-title basis, so "WWII: WWII: Company of Band of Heroes in WWII" could have a triumphant selling point of "clinically proven to cause 20% more Activation Syndrome than Grand Theft Buggy: Rumspringa Rising! -- Mayo Clinic Crossgame Study 2008"
Exactly. I wonder what would be worse for short-term aggressive behaviour, playing a violent video game for an hour, or playing a game of pickup football for an hour.
right, real blast of loud sounds. Even if it shot them in the tummy with paintballs, it's still a game, still not violence. When they have them choose to stab each other to death or not, let me know.
I think getting ethics clearance for that may be somewhat challenging.
I dont see why, because NOONE WOULD STAB ANYONE. Because games dont make people violent. agressive? maybe.
Umm... Milgram much?
If you can teach a bunch of WWII vets to electrocute people to death for not remembering the right words, you can definitely get a bunch of kids to stab one another with a bit of videogaming.
Kids should go back to playing Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, and War.
Sure, if they look at the videogame as an authority figure telling them what to do. Somehow though, I don't think that's the case.
Vets? like people who were in a WAR, trained to kill and obey authority?
Thats why little timmy will turn into manson after playing halo 2?
Interesting study - it seems like they have controlled for things like exposure to other media types.
However, if the study doesn't show any difference between the effects of T-rated games and side scrolling shoot-em-ups like Captain Bumper:
...then I have to really ask myself if what they are measuring is just a normal heightened adrenaline response that you get from *any* twitch activity, whether it's Captain Bumper, or playing tag.
Captain Bumper looks nice.
I wonder what the world would look like if all children played games where there was no competition but only cooperation, no one was allowed to play army or cops and robbers, there were no violent videogames, and games in general were completely nonviolent in the context of the definition given in the first post.
I have a feeling that the nation in question would, after a few generations, get its ass kicked economically, militarily, and culturally. Pretty much on all fronts.
Am I a bad guy if I say I want some "violence" in videgames without excessive gore and realistic death? Shooting down cartoon planes that are trying to avoid being hit seems to be something we WANT our kids to do. Isn't the purpose of games to teach children lessons about life in a controlled environment? Even Hide and Seek, according to the definition above, is a violent game, and I certain think that skill would come in handy in all sorts of situations.
I'm actually less comfortable with that. I say let 'em shoot down a cartoon plane and see it crash, and all the little charred maimed cartoon bodies and weeping families.
Then they wont want to shoot down planes.
PS-
I'm pretty sure I havent needed to fucking hide in awhile.
See, this is the problem. These studies are not claiming that video games turn you into killers. That's something video game apologists do in order to make these psychologists look stupid. Of course, video games don't directly cause you to be a killer. If they did, we'd all be killing each other. These studies point out correlation between playing and aggressive behavior.
I just don't get what the huge resistance is. yes, we should be skeptical and see if the data can be interpreted in other ways. But we readily accept that children from homes where parents fight will be taught that fighting is OK, and yet somehow we completely deny the very possibility that children might learn violence from OTHER sources, such as television, music, or video games. Rap and rock could never actually lead people to denegrate women. Violent video games could never increase aggression among those who play them. The dismissiveness doesn't make sense to me. I swear many of you think the entire attempt to research this matter is a complete waste of time and money since it is obvious there is no connection.
But if you want anecdotal evidence to match your "I'm not violent and I play video games" rebuttal, then just look at how the people on this board (and other video game boards) treat each other. Then go to a photography or knitting board and see the difference for yourself. Does it prove anything? Not exactly, but it's evidence that is at least as good as your claim that you and your friends aren't more aggressive from playing video games than you would have been without them.
I dont have any problem with it other than the problem of games possibly being treated like porn and the self censorship that might ovvur to prevent that. I have no desire for kids to play any game, or even use the internet, sidewalks, library, theaters, radios or televisions.
Keep them in theme parks and schools until they are old enough to drink and fight.
Ok, now we are in agreement. I say we build an island. Parents could have their own personal cameras to spy on their own children, as a curiosity. But interaction with society would be verboten.
And the problem I have with all of these studies, is they don't compare this to any other common childhood activity, like playing Tag, or Dodgeball, or Hide & Seek, or watching a football game, or whatever.
I mean, the study basically said "Street Fighter" and "Captain Bumper" both had the same aggression-enhancing effect on children, but when there's no context comparing that effect with other stimulus in children's lives, I don't see how they can draw any definitive conclusions.
And I'm sick of reading statements like this:
I could just as easily draw the opposite conclusion, which is that lack of adult involvement/supervision leads to negative consequences for children (like aggression) and that copious video game playing is a *consequence* of this lack of involvement, and not the sole (or primary) cause of aggression.It found that children who played more violent video games early in the school year changed to see the world in a more aggressive way, and became more verbally and physically aggressive later in the school year
I'm not saying that there isn't a causal relation - just that so called "scientists" are way too damn eager to draw conclusions that are really just their own biased interpretations of the data. Granted, my own interpretation is equally biased, but I'm not publishing it, am I?
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