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The difference being that the effect of climate change is large enough to drive urban planning in coastal cities. Whatever the effect of violent videogames, it's small enough that no one will even attempt to make predictions about the behavior of large cohorts based on videogame consumption. When an effect is that small, we should put it in the "who cares?" column and move on.
Parents of children with other risk factors or adults themselves with other risk factors.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Except climate change hasn't been over-exaggerated and used as a talking point to try to stifle free expression. It has a massive impact that is readily observable and undeniable. Even if you accept that video games cause aggression, as noted, it's a very small increase over base measurements, Now, I've noticed that a lot of posters seem to be confusing aggression with violence when they are two different animals, which seems to me to be a fallacy.
1) The evidence that violent video games cause both aggression (aggressive feelings, cognitions, and speech) and violence (physical attempts to harm another human being) is solid.
The opposite position - that video games do not cause violence - is heterodox and is a tiny minority viewpoint. Most of the research that claims to disprove a causal connection comes from a handful of researchers, some of whom are extremely vocal.
Feral is the resident expert on the subject and he seems pretty clear about it
Video games CAUSE people to physically attempt to harm other human beings
hence I'm surprised there aren't spikes in violent assaults after a new GTA game comes out
Art can inspire people to action, but that doesn't mean it's noticeable action.
I mean, there are folks on this forum who have expressed feeling levels of aggression that they feel are abnormal and unwanted after having certain experiences in some games. Sometimes these experiences aren't even triggered by something that you'd intuitively think of as something negative (which is why I do not like the APA's special focus on violent content & gore; I know of many games that entirely lack those things and yet invoke a lot of anger from players when certain game states happen).
Rather than just ignoring this, if we actually study it and pinpoint the underlying cause(s), this could lead to better direction in game design, methods to help people de-stress or otherwise mitigate the impact of the game, etc.
The difference being that the effect of climate change is large enough to drive urban planning in coastal cities. Whatever the effect of violent videogames, it's small enough that no one will even attempt to make predictions about the behavior of large cohorts based on videogame consumption. When an effect is that small, we should put it in the "who cares?" column and move on.
Parents of children with other risk factors or adults themselves with other risk factors.
From the APA summary you provided:
Research has identified a number of risk factors for the development of aggression, including factors at the level of the individual (e.g., aggressive traits), family (e.g., low socio-economic status, harsh discipline practices), peers (e.g., peer rejection) school (e.g. exclusionary disciplinary practices), and neighborhood or community (e.g., poor urban settings) (e.g., see Bushman, 2013). Children who experience multiple risk factors are more likely to engage in aggression (...) Most of these factors were not tested in the meta-analyses we reviewed because an insufficient number of studies as included these other aggression risk factors.
I take this to mean that there is insufficient research into whether a videogame-aggression link is more significant in the presence of other risk factors, or indeed how it relates to those factors, to make a judgment. Is that wrong?
Additionally, it's hard to see how such a finding, if true, could be useful, since the type of parent described by these risk factors is not likely to take parenting advice about violent videogames.
Additionally, it's hard to see how such a finding, if true, could be useful, since the type of parent described by these risk factors is not likely to take parenting advice about violent videogames.
In the current cultural climate, yes. But this is why the hope would be that such studies and their widespread acceptance might change the cultural climate.
People used to think it was alright for their children to smoke cigarettes, for example. This is now a fringe position.
Except climate change hasn't been over-exaggerated and used as a talking point to try to stifle free expression. It has a massive impact that is readily observable and undeniable. Even if you accept that video games cause aggression, as noted, it's a very small increase over base measurements, Now, I've noticed that a lot of posters seem to be confusing aggression with violence when they are two different animals, which seems to me to be a fallacy.
1) The evidence that violent video games cause both aggression (aggressive feelings, cognitions, and speech) and violence (physical attempts to harm another human being) is solid.
The opposite position - that video games do not cause violence - is heterodox and is a tiny minority viewpoint. Most of the research that claims to disprove a causal connection comes from a handful of researchers, some of whom are extremely vocal.
Feral is the resident expert on the subject and he seems pretty clear about it
Video games CAUSE people to physically attempt to harm other human beings
hence I'm surprised there aren't spikes in violent assaults after a new GTA game comes out
Art can inspire people to action, but that doesn't mean it's noticeable action.
Not every work is The Jungle.
violently harming other humans is noticeable action
it should be born out in the statistics somewhere if video games are like smoking but for violence
I read an interesting article recently reflecting on the Brevik shootings in Norway. One of the author's suggestions was that video gaming did not prompt the act, but that games made it easier for the shooter to enter the mindset of a killer, similar to how the US Army switched to man-shaped targets in order to desensitize soldiers to the act of shooting another human.
I read an interesting article recently reflecting on the Brevik shootings in Norway. One of the author's suggestions was that video gaming did not prompt the act, but that games made it easier for the shooter to enter the mindset of a killer, similar to how the US Army switched to man-shaped targets in order to desensitize soldiers to the act of shooting another human.
He entered the mindset of a killer by othering the children he was killing and thinking of them as subhuman
You know what I think would make an interesting experiment, and would be conceptually easy to do?
Take a game like Call of Duty, something on the high end of the realistic-graphic-violence spectrum. Then make a mod of the game that is basically an art resources swap to make it completely nonviolent. Make it like a water balloon fight between kids in jaunty, colorful environments.
You'd then be testing identical games worth identical play mechanics, both equally competetive. The only difference would be the violence involved.
If the violence is the dominant factor in the increase in aggression, then yours expect to see a discrepancy in the results. If there's no discrepancy, that would seem to indicate that the correlation between violence and aggression isn't necessarily the violence itself.
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I don't think it's the violence, I think it's the conflict: either a difficult game where it's player versus the game or basically ANY competitive multiplayer activity. But we know that competitive activities cause aggression, even when you aren't participating but you're just invested in them (see: post game riots for sports)
anecdote lol, but Mario Kart makes me angrier than Hatred
Hatred is a game about murdering civilians, I've played it, it is profoundly boring
Mario Kart is a game with cartoon characters and colored shells and is responsible for one of only two times I've thrown a controller in rage
violently harming other humans is noticeable action
it should be born out in the statistics somewhere if video games are like smoking but for violence
In which statistics? The behavior was born out of multiple instances (in fact, every instance) where a controlled experiment was done to measure the effect, if any. The effects are also reproducible by anyone who follows the same procedures.
Part of the reason I brought up smoking & cigarettes is that, if you don't control for other factors, tobacco's impact as a carcinogen is also not noticeable as a general statistical trend. You can't look at overall cancer rates from when tobacco products first became a heavily commercialized industry to today and find a strictly upward trend (likewise with climate change; you have to control for other effects that impact global temperatures before you can identify the CO2 trend).
This was, in fact, the arguments used by tobacco proponents when they were suggesting that the carcinogenic nature of cigarettes was overblown.
Video games do not 'make you violent'. That's an oversimplification of the issue, and isn't what the APA claimed. Violent video games increase the likelyhood - the risk - that you will engage in aggressive behavior after you're done playing. If your lifestyle has you at low risk for aggression anyway, then playing a violent video game probably isn't going to cause you do something violent. If your lifestyle has you at high risk for aggression, playing a violent video game is not going to help & is probably not a good idea.
Except climate change hasn't been over-exaggerated and used as a talking point to try to stifle free expression. It has a massive impact that is readily observable and undeniable. Even if you accept that video games cause aggression, as noted, it's a very small increase over base measurements, Now, I've noticed that a lot of posters seem to be confusing aggression with violence when they are two different animals, which seems to me to be a fallacy.
1) The evidence that violent video games cause both aggression (aggressive feelings, cognitions, and speech) and violence (physical attempts to harm another human being) is solid.
The opposite position - that video games do not cause violence - is heterodox and is a tiny minority viewpoint. Most of the research that claims to disprove a causal connection comes from a handful of researchers, some of whom are extremely vocal.
Feral is the resident expert on the subject and he seems pretty clear about it
Video games CAUSE people to physically attempt to harm other human beings
hence I'm surprised there aren't spikes in violent assaults after a new GTA game comes out
Art can inspire people to action, but that doesn't mean it's noticeable action.
Not every work is The Jungle.
violently harming other humans is noticeable action
it should be born out in the statistics somewhere if video games are like smoking but for violence
do you think this is a a question someone will just answer and you will come back with "AHA BUT LOOK AT THE CRIME STATS"? are you just baiting answers or do you honestly care to learn more about the phenomenon and studies?
also you realize who gets arrested and charged for a crime is not cut and dry, there are a ton of variables (including, as this year has shown us, the color of your skin/where you live) that go into whether you will ever be caught for becoming criminally violent/aggressive, arrested, charged, etc
also note that not all aggressive actions are criminalized, in fact most aren't
Except climate change hasn't been over-exaggerated and used as a talking point to try to stifle free expression. It has a massive impact that is readily observable and undeniable. Even if you accept that video games cause aggression, as noted, it's a very small increase over base measurements, Now, I've noticed that a lot of posters seem to be confusing aggression with violence when they are two different animals, which seems to me to be a fallacy.
1) The evidence that violent video games cause both aggression (aggressive feelings, cognitions, and speech) and violence (physical attempts to harm another human being) is solid.
The opposite position - that video games do not cause violence - is heterodox and is a tiny minority viewpoint. Most of the research that claims to disprove a causal connection comes from a handful of researchers, some of whom are extremely vocal.
Feral is the resident expert on the subject and he seems pretty clear about it
Video games CAUSE people to physically attempt to harm other human beings
hence I'm surprised there aren't spikes in violent assaults after a new GTA game comes out
Art can inspire people to action, but that doesn't mean it's noticeable action.
Not every work is The Jungle.
violently harming other humans is noticeable action
it should be born out in the statistics somewhere if video games are like smoking but for violence
do you think this is a a question someone will just answer and you will come back with "AHA BUT LOOK AT THE CRIME STATS"? are you just baiting answers or do you honestly care to learn more about the phenomenon and studies?
also you realize who gets arrested and charged for a crime is not cut and dry, there are a ton of variables (including, as this year has shown us, the color of your skin/where you live) that go into whether you will ever be caught for becoming criminally violent/aggressive, arrested, charged, etc
also note that not all aggressive actions are criminalized, in fact most aren't
So video games ARE causing people to violently harm others, but video game players aren't being arrested for it?
I'm not arguing with a causal link to aggression, I've understood for a decade that existed, but it exists with football and basketball and competitive scrabble too. It's only a problem for unbalanced people who are already on a knife's edge if you catch them at the wrong time, just like it is with those other things.
I'm talking specifically about Feral's claim that video games cause people to violently harm other people
override367 on
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
The caveats at play here--we're not sure which part of the game causes aggression, aggression is not violence, violence is not crime, etc--seem to point to the conclusion that there is barely any information here, let alone actionable information. It doesn't seem like crime rates or worldwide aggression levels would change significantly were violent video games to vanish without a trace.
You know what I think would make an interesting experiment, and would be conceptually easy to do?
Take a game like Call of Duty, something on the high end of the realistic-graphic-violence spectrum. Then make a mod of the game that is basically an art resources swap to make it completely nonviolent. Make it like a water balloon fight between kids in jaunty, colorful environments.
You'd then be testing identical games worth identical play mechanics, both equally competetive. The only difference would be the violence involved.
If the violence is the dominant factor in the increase in aggression, then yours expect to see a discrepancy in the results. If there's no discrepancy, that would seem to indicate that the correlation between violence and aggression isn't necessarily the violence itself.
@Arch did already link to a study, which does strongly suggest that violent content itself is a factor (...I do have to give it the benefit of the doubt because I can't afford to buy it right now, but the abstract covers the gist of it).
This doesn't, however, tell us if violence is the sole factor, and I suspect that it isn't.
Except climate change hasn't been over-exaggerated and used as a talking point to try to stifle free expression. It has a massive impact that is readily observable and undeniable. Even if you accept that video games cause aggression, as noted, it's a very small increase over base measurements, Now, I've noticed that a lot of posters seem to be confusing aggression with violence when they are two different animals, which seems to me to be a fallacy.
1) The evidence that violent video games cause both aggression (aggressive feelings, cognitions, and speech) and violence (physical attempts to harm another human being) is solid.
The opposite position - that video games do not cause violence - is heterodox and is a tiny minority viewpoint. Most of the research that claims to disprove a causal connection comes from a handful of researchers, some of whom are extremely vocal.
Feral is the resident expert on the subject and he seems pretty clear about it
Video games CAUSE people to physically attempt to harm other human beings
hence I'm surprised there aren't spikes in violent assaults after a new GTA game comes out
Art can inspire people to action, but that doesn't mean it's noticeable action.
Not every work is The Jungle.
violently harming other humans is noticeable action
it should be born out in the statistics somewhere if video games are like smoking but for violence
do you think this is a a question someone will just answer and you will come back with "AHA BUT LOOK AT THE CRIME STATS"? are you just baiting answers or do you honestly care to learn more about the phenomenon and studies?
also you realize who gets arrested and charged for a crime is not cut and dry, there are a ton of variables (including, as this year has shown us, the color of your skin/where you live) that go into whether you will ever be caught for becoming criminally violent/aggressive, arrested, charged, etc
also note that not all aggressive actions are criminalized, in fact most aren't
So video games ARE causing people to violently harm others, but video game players aren't being arrested for it?
Feral can speak more to the study and why he made that statement, but it's asinine to say that if someone harms someone else they will immediately be arrested and if arrest stats don't reflect increases after GTA comes out then the premise is disproven
You know what I think would make an interesting experiment, and would be conceptually easy to do?
Take a game like Call of Duty, something on the high end of the realistic-graphic-violence spectrum. Then make a mod of the game that is basically an art resources swap to make it completely nonviolent. Make it like a water balloon fight between kids in jaunty, colorful environments.
You'd then be testing identical games worth identical play mechanics, both equally competetive. The only difference would be the violence involved.
If the violence is the dominant factor in the increase in aggression, then yours expect to see a discrepancy in the results. If there's no discrepancy, that would seem to indicate that the correlation between violence and aggression isn't necessarily the violence itself.
I have no idea if you're being completely serious, or being a bit coy about it. But assuming it's the former...
We have almost literally just created that game.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I'm not arguing with a causal link to aggression, I've understood for a decade that existed, but it exists with football and basketball and competitive scrabble too. It's only a problem for unbalanced people who are already on a knife's edge if you catch them at the wrong time, just like it is with those other things.
It's reasonable to assume that a more violent sport like full contact football would probably impose more risk than violent video games (though we don't know for sure, and knowing would involve investigating, and doing so without a preconceived bias as to what you'd want the outcome of a study to show).
But violent games clearly show a larger risk factor than less violent sports like billiards or baseball.
And to say that because an given activity isn't a problem just because it's unlikely to provoke you to do something heinously violent, I think, is a mistake. Suppose that playing a particular game makes you unpleasant with your spouse or children after you finish playing it. Is this not problematic on some level?
It seems rather minor to focus on video games if they are but one of many contributing factors in aggressive behavior.
For instance, if a kid is acting up because his family is poor, his mom's an alcoholic, he plays violent video games, and his father left when he was three, telling him to cut out the video games seems like telling an overweight person to stop putting so much ketchup on his triple whopper.
I'm not arguing with a causal link to aggression, I've understood for a decade that existed, but it exists with football and basketball and competitive scrabble too. It's only a problem for unbalanced people who are already on a knife's edge if you catch them at the wrong time, just like it is with those other things.
It's reasonable to assume that a more violent sport like full contact football would probably impose more risk than violent video games (though we don't know for sure, and knowing would involve investigating, and doing so without a preconceived bias as to what you'd want the outcome of a study to show).
But violent games clearly show a larger risk factor than less violent sports like billiards or baseball.
And to say that because an given activity isn't a problem just because it's unlikely to provoke you to do something heinously violent, I think, is a mistake. Suppose that playing a particular game makes you unpleasant with your spouse or children after you finish playing it. Is this not problematic on some level?
Why do sports games sometimes end with large riots and even at a "good" one there will be lots of post game fights but video game events of equal size pass without incident
It seems rather minor to focus on video games if they are but one of many contributing factors in aggressive behavior.
For instance, if a kid is acting up because his family is poor, his mom's an alcoholic, he plays violent video games, and his father left when he was three, telling him to cut out the video games seems like telling an overweight person to stop putting so much ketchup on his triple whopper.
But the APA isn't even making that recommendation. They're identifying a risk and demonstrating that the science is sound. The only recommendation they have is that perhaps games should have gore options so that some people can opt out of graphic depictions of violence, which makes sense independent of games being risk factors to violence anyway.
Also, yes, it doesn't help to put ketchup on your triple whopper. This is true despite it also being true that a triple whopper is a poor choice of food to begin with.
I'm not arguing with a causal link to aggression, I've understood for a decade that existed, but it exists with football and basketball and competitive scrabble too. It's only a problem for unbalanced people who are already on a knife's edge if you catch them at the wrong time, just like it is with those other things.
It's reasonable to assume that a more violent sport like full contact football would probably impose more risk than violent video games (though we don't know for sure, and knowing would involve investigating, and doing so without a preconceived bias as to what you'd want the outcome of a study to show).
But violent games clearly show a larger risk factor than less violent sports like billiards or baseball.
And to say that because an given activity isn't a problem just because it's unlikely to provoke you to do something heinously violent, I think, is a mistake. Suppose that playing a particular game makes you unpleasant with your spouse or children after you finish playing it. Is this not problematic on some level?
Why do sports games sometimes end with large riots and even at a "good" one there will be lots of post game fights but video game events of equal size pass without incident
I don't know, if I'm honest. I suspect it has to do with the size of the sports scene vs the size of the eSports scene and the cultural significance that sports have taken-on vs the still-largely-fringe space that eSports currently occupies. Also, I suspect that the abundance of alcohol among spectators at sports events & the association with sports events and pub crawls is a factor.
It doesn't seem to take into account unpublished works at all, nor does it control for any other factors like gender or socioeconomic factors
I'm going to have to actually read each of the 31 studies in their meta analysis aren't I
Here's hoping they're not as laughable as the one the APA did that was in my psychology textbook (which showed a clear bias against video games). I hope they're as good as Kutner & Olson's work where they actually followed the lives of real children and measured who is more likely to actually have problems (they found that kids who exclusively played violent games or kids who played no games at all were more likely to have problems)
It doesn't seem to take into account unpublished works at all, nor does it control for any other factors like gender or socioeconomic factors
I'm going to have to actually read each of the 31 studies in their meta analysis aren't I
Here's hoping they're not as laughable as the one the APA did that was in my psychology textbook (which showed a clear bias against video games). I hope they're as good as Kutner & Olson's work where they actually followed the lives of real children and measured who is more likely to actually have problems (they found that kids who exclusively played violent games or kids who played no games at all were more likely to have problems)
...Why is it a selling point to you if a meta-analysis also uses studies that haven't passed through the peer review process?
Criticism of the lack of diversity among study subjects is totally reasonable, but again, the APA itself levels this criticism and has directed future researchers to include more diverse subjects in their experiments.
With Love and Courage
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Apothe0sisHave you ever questioned the nature of your reality?Registered Userregular
Is a turn based violent video game going to show the same results as an action/twitch based game?
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
You know what I think would make an interesting experiment, and would be conceptually easy to do?
Take a game like Call of Duty, something on the high end of the realistic-graphic-violence spectrum. Then make a mod of the game that is basically an art resources swap to make it completely nonviolent. Make it like a water balloon fight between kids in jaunty, colorful environments.
You'd then be testing identical games worth identical play mechanics, both equally competetive. The only difference would be the violence involved.
If the violence is the dominant factor in the increase in aggression, then yours expect to see a discrepancy in the results. If there's no discrepancy, that would seem to indicate that the correlation between violence and aggression isn't necessarily the violence itself.
I'm willing to bet that you could bring a group of test subjects to a frothing rage with only a standard deck of playing cards and a set of rules carefully constructed to contain as much bullshit as possible.
You know what I think would make an interesting experiment, and would be conceptually easy to do?
Take a game like Call of Duty, something on the high end of the realistic-graphic-violence spectrum. Then make a mod of the game that is basically an art resources swap to make it completely nonviolent. Make it like a water balloon fight between kids in jaunty, colorful environments.
You'd then be testing identical games worth identical play mechanics, both equally competetive. The only difference would be the violence involved.
If the violence is the dominant factor in the increase in aggression, then yours expect to see a discrepancy in the results. If there's no discrepancy, that would seem to indicate that the correlation between violence and aggression isn't necessarily the violence itself.
@Arch did already link to a study, which does strongly suggest that violent content itself is a factor (...I do have to give it the benefit of the doubt because I can't afford to buy it right now, but the abstract covers the gist of it).
This doesn't, however, tell us if violence is the sole factor, and I suspect that it isn't.
The end of that abstract makes it sound as if the measure of that aggression might be limited to "used a weapon in the video game more often." Which is... not convincing.
Aside from that, yeah, that's exactly the kind of study I'm talking about.
Though I do wonder if "more blood" is necessarily a good measure. The amount of blood in an MK game is so excessive as to be cartoonish and doesn't exactly lend itself to realism.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I kind of assume that the researchers aren't so derpy that their sole criteria would be limited to, "Uses in game weapon more often," and that this was just one of many notes that was made during observation.
I'm not sure that realistic vs unrealistic volumes of blood is relevant to the question of whether or not more gore provokes a stronger aggressive response. There are expectations people have that tie violence together with unrealistically gratuitous depictions of blood, limbs, organs & bones flying all over the place.
I kind of assume that the researchers aren't so derpy that their sole criteria would be limited to, "Uses in game weapon more often," and that this was just one of many notes that was made during observation.
I have had to deal with enough professional and well-funded studies that use lol-are-you-shitting-me methodology that I am not prepared to take this on faith.
I have seen a study from a pretty goddamn major university using federal grant money that used a survey on race in San Francisco, in fucking Chinatown, to draw conclusions about Hispanics using racial/ethnic categories of "black", "white", and "other".
I have seen shit that'll turn you white. And then misleadingly poll you about it.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I kind of assume that the researchers aren't so derpy that their sole criteria would be limited to, "Uses in game weapon more often," and that this was just one of many notes that was made during observation.
I have had to deal with enough professional and well-funded studies that use lol-are-you-shitting-me methodology that I am not prepared to take this on faith.
I have seen a study from a pretty goddamn major university using federal grant money that used a survey on race in San Francisco, in fucking Chinatown, to draw conclusions about Hispanics using racial/ethnic categories of "black", "white", and "other".
I have seen shit that'll turn you white. And then misleadingly poll you about it.
Okay; well I bought the damned thing anyway (I feel it's really unfair to put these papers behind paywalls, but whatever. Also this was probably not a good idea, but whatever).
So, methodology:
Trait aggression. The Buss and Perry (1992) Aggression Questionnaire was used to measure trait aggression. This is a 29-item questionnaire which asked participants to respond to various questions on a 1 (not characteristic of me) to 5 (extremely characteristic of me) Likert Scale. A sample item included, ‘‘Once in awhile, I cannot control the urge to hit another.’’ The total range for this scale was 29–145 and certain items were reverse coded, such that higher scores were indicative of higher trait aggression. The reliability for this scale for the current study was acceptable (a = .79). Aggressive feelings/thoughts. Hostility can be conceptualized as a feeling and a thought internal state variable within the GAM. Therefore, hostility served as both a thought and a feeling. The State Hostility Scale (Anderson, Deuser, & DeNeve, 1995) was used to measure state hostility. This is a 35-item questionnaire which asks participants to respond on a 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) Likert Scale. The possible range for this scale is 35–165, with higher scores being indicative of higher state hostility. Sample items include, ‘‘I feel furious’’ and ‘‘I feel mean.’’ The reliability of this scale for the current study was acceptable for both times this scale
was administered (a = .84 for baseline and a = .94 for post-video game).
Aggressive behaviors. Aggressive behaviors were measured by using the ratio of total weapon time to total game playing time in the game. We justified this measure as a gauge of aggressive behavior two ways. The first is that the participants got to choose how long they wanted to use the character’s weapon. All participants were told that the use of the weapon causes more damage. If they decided to use the weapon more, that suggests that they want to cause more damage to their opponent, which fits with the operational definition of aggression. Therefore, the number of seconds spent with their weapon and the time each round was played was recorded, with a higher ratio of time with a weapon being indicative of aggressive behavior. Second, past research has used other such measures to assess aggressive behavior (Anderson & Morrow, 1995; Lin & Lepper, 1987). Although this is not an overt measure of aggressive behavior (like the CRT), this measure is not confounded by demand characteristics because the participants do not know that the amount of time using the weapon is an important variable.
Physiological arousal. Heart rate was the measure of physiological arousal. The device (produced by Tanita) instructed users to place their right index finger on a sensor and take a reading three times and then average them to get a reliable reading.
Demographics. A demographic questionnaire was used to assess participant’s age, gender, ethnicity, and year in school. Further, questions were used to assess the video game experiences, such as the number of hours spent playing video games weekly, whether or not they have played the game used in the current study, and if they own a video game system.
Suspiciousness questionnaire. A suspiciousness questionnaire was implemented to determine if the participants knew the purposes of the study before they were debriefed. Two questions asked participants to write down if they were aware of the true purposes of the experiment or if they had any indication of the experimental goals during the study. No participants were excluded from the main analyses because of their knowledge about the exact variables of interest.
...So, okay: the 'aggressive behaviors' part of the experiment is fucking ridiculous, but in a way that I can understand someone who has never played a video game before & is ignorant of certain play principles would make that mistake (...again, I wish experts from the APA would consult with experts in game design. Then shit like this would probably not happen).
The rest of it seems really sound, however, and typical of researchers using GAM guidelines. On this basis, it's probably safe to dismiss the claims of increased aggressive behaviors without necessarily dismissing the claims of increased aggressive thoughts.
Wow, though. 'Aggressive behaviors were measured by using the ratio of total weapon time to total game playing time in the game. We justified this measure as a gauge of aggressive behavior two ways. The first is that the participants got to choose how long they wanted to use the character’s weapon. All participants were told that the use of the weapon causes more damage. If they decided to use the weapon more, that suggests that they want to cause more damage to their opponent, which fits with the operational definition of aggression.'
That's like giving a baseball player a choice of how long their team gets to stay at bat and rating them as "competitive" because they said "Well uh, all the time then".
Winning is sort of the point, idiots.
-edit-
Also: lol@ "Past research has used other such measures to assess aggressiveness"
I'm glad at least some of their research was not clownshoes. See, I am very sympathetic to claims of gaming violence having effects on people. It makes sense, intuitively. But all the research I look at seems to herpderp their way through key elements of methodology or analysis.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
You know what I think would make an interesting experiment, and would be conceptually easy to do?
Take a game like Call of Duty, something on the high end of the realistic-graphic-violence spectrum. Then make a mod of the game that is basically an art resources swap to make it completely nonviolent. Make it like a water balloon fight between kids in jaunty, colorful environments.
You'd then be testing identical games worth identical play mechanics, both equally competetive. The only difference would be the violence involved.
If the violence is the dominant factor in the increase in aggression, then yours expect to see a discrepancy in the results. If there's no discrepancy, that would seem to indicate that the correlation between violence and aggression isn't necessarily the violence itself.
@Arch did already link to a study, which does strongly suggest that violent content itself is a factor (...I do have to give it the benefit of the doubt because I can't afford to buy it right now, but the abstract covers the gist of it).
This doesn't, however, tell us if violence is the sole factor, and I suspect that it isn't.
The end of that abstract makes it sound as if the measure of that aggression might be limited to "used a weapon in the video game more often." Which is... not convincing.
Aside from that, yeah, that's exactly the kind of study I'm talking about.
Though I do wonder if "more blood" is necessarily a good measure. The amount of blood in an MK game is so excessive as to be cartoonish and doesn't exactly lend itself to realism.
A friend at ISU was actually building a mod for this exact study. But in the meantime he got offered a job in non-academic position so he put it on a back-burner, I don't know how far along he got with it. Another friend is planning on experimenting with older games like Unreal Tournament where he can use console commands to switch between differing FoVs to see if that might have some effect on players. Funnily enough, there were some studies that showed that not showing consequences of violent acts (blood, long-term damage) actually may decrease people's perception of violence as dangerous. All those people getting knocked out left and right in movies have made a lot of people see blows to the head as less harmful than they actually are.
I still have to go through the entire meta-analysis (if I ever actually get to it, I've been swamped with other things lately), but are desensitization to violence or decreased empathy mentioned in any way? Most of the research on video games I read was connected primarily to those two traits and not on increased occurrences of violent behaviour itself.
I'm willing to bet that you could bring a group of test subjects to a frothing rage with only a standard deck of playing cards and a set of rules carefully constructed to contain as much bullshit as possible.
Since I just posted on the Hearthstone thread regarding this, I may as well post here, too. I played GoW multiplayer for some time. It is a "violent" game, its a common occurrence to instagib people with a shotgun. Didn't feel anything special, a game is a game. Losing with bullshit hands in Hearthstone, though, makes me want to kick my screen. I don't think aggression is necessarily connected to "violent" games, maybe competitive games, maybe frustrating experiences in games. But this happens with a lot of things in life.
And this also presents a reason why research into videogames and aggression is going to have inconsistent results while people keep obsessing about what's represented on the screen instead of gameplay elements. You can grab a beer, a snack and go on a murdering rampage in GTA and be perfectly relaxed. You can play a game of LoL which is hardly graphic or violent and be angry for the rest of the evening.
Representation of violence is not the problem (if it's worth even calling it that, nobody speaks about banning little league because kids get angry), it's competitiveness and frustration, as it's found in other human realms of experience.
We may reach the conclusion that GTA is perfectly fine but we should keep kids from playing Hearthstone if we go down this road :P
Just because you and your friends don't "feel anything special" doesn't mean that this is generally true, though. I think your point about not focusing too exclusively on presentation is a valid one, but excluding presentation outright because of anecdotal evidence is rather shaky. I'm sure there are people who are highly functioning habitual users of cocaine; doesn't mean that there may not be certain noteworthy problems associated with coke habits.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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Parents of children with other risk factors or adults themselves with other risk factors.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Art can inspire people to action, but that doesn't mean it's noticeable action.
Not every work is The Jungle.
Rather than just ignoring this, if we actually study it and pinpoint the underlying cause(s), this could lead to better direction in game design, methods to help people de-stress or otherwise mitigate the impact of the game, etc.
Pretending it doesn't happen is foolish at best.
From the APA summary you provided:
I take this to mean that there is insufficient research into whether a videogame-aggression link is more significant in the presence of other risk factors, or indeed how it relates to those factors, to make a judgment. Is that wrong?
Additionally, it's hard to see how such a finding, if true, could be useful, since the type of parent described by these risk factors is not likely to take parenting advice about violent videogames.
In the current cultural climate, yes. But this is why the hope would be that such studies and their widespread acceptance might change the cultural climate.
People used to think it was alright for their children to smoke cigarettes, for example. This is now a fringe position.
violently harming other humans is noticeable action
it should be born out in the statistics somewhere if video games are like smoking but for violence
He entered the mindset of a killer by othering the children he was killing and thinking of them as subhuman
see: ISIS, the nazis, all of human history, etc
Take a game like Call of Duty, something on the high end of the realistic-graphic-violence spectrum. Then make a mod of the game that is basically an art resources swap to make it completely nonviolent. Make it like a water balloon fight between kids in jaunty, colorful environments.
You'd then be testing identical games worth identical play mechanics, both equally competetive. The only difference would be the violence involved.
If the violence is the dominant factor in the increase in aggression, then yours expect to see a discrepancy in the results. If there's no discrepancy, that would seem to indicate that the correlation between violence and aggression isn't necessarily the violence itself.
anecdote lol, but Mario Kart makes me angrier than Hatred
Hatred is a game about murdering civilians, I've played it, it is profoundly boring
Mario Kart is a game with cartoon characters and colored shells and is responsible for one of only two times I've thrown a controller in rage
In which statistics? The behavior was born out of multiple instances (in fact, every instance) where a controlled experiment was done to measure the effect, if any. The effects are also reproducible by anyone who follows the same procedures.
Part of the reason I brought up smoking & cigarettes is that, if you don't control for other factors, tobacco's impact as a carcinogen is also not noticeable as a general statistical trend. You can't look at overall cancer rates from when tobacco products first became a heavily commercialized industry to today and find a strictly upward trend (likewise with climate change; you have to control for other effects that impact global temperatures before you can identify the CO2 trend).
This was, in fact, the arguments used by tobacco proponents when they were suggesting that the carcinogenic nature of cigarettes was overblown.
Video games do not 'make you violent'. That's an oversimplification of the issue, and isn't what the APA claimed. Violent video games increase the likelyhood - the risk - that you will engage in aggressive behavior after you're done playing. If your lifestyle has you at low risk for aggression anyway, then playing a violent video game probably isn't going to cause you do something violent. If your lifestyle has you at high risk for aggression, playing a violent video game is not going to help & is probably not a good idea.
do you think this is a a question someone will just answer and you will come back with "AHA BUT LOOK AT THE CRIME STATS"? are you just baiting answers or do you honestly care to learn more about the phenomenon and studies?
also you realize who gets arrested and charged for a crime is not cut and dry, there are a ton of variables (including, as this year has shown us, the color of your skin/where you live) that go into whether you will ever be caught for becoming criminally violent/aggressive, arrested, charged, etc
also note that not all aggressive actions are criminalized, in fact most aren't
So video games ARE causing people to violently harm others, but video game players aren't being arrested for it?
I'm not arguing with a causal link to aggression, I've understood for a decade that existed, but it exists with football and basketball and competitive scrabble too. It's only a problem for unbalanced people who are already on a knife's edge if you catch them at the wrong time, just like it is with those other things.
I'm talking specifically about Feral's claim that video games cause people to violently harm other people
@Arch did already link to a study, which does strongly suggest that violent content itself is a factor (...I do have to give it the benefit of the doubt because I can't afford to buy it right now, but the abstract covers the gist of it).
This doesn't, however, tell us if violence is the sole factor, and I suspect that it isn't.
Feral can speak more to the study and why he made that statement, but it's asinine to say that if someone harms someone else they will immediately be arrested and if arrest stats don't reflect increases after GTA comes out then the premise is disproven
Come on man
I have no idea if you're being completely serious, or being a bit coy about it. But assuming it's the former...
We have almost literally just created that game.
It's reasonable to assume that a more violent sport like full contact football would probably impose more risk than violent video games (though we don't know for sure, and knowing would involve investigating, and doing so without a preconceived bias as to what you'd want the outcome of a study to show).
But violent games clearly show a larger risk factor than less violent sports like billiards or baseball.
And to say that because an given activity isn't a problem just because it's unlikely to provoke you to do something heinously violent, I think, is a mistake. Suppose that playing a particular game makes you unpleasant with your spouse or children after you finish playing it. Is this not problematic on some level?
For instance, if a kid is acting up because his family is poor, his mom's an alcoholic, he plays violent video games, and his father left when he was three, telling him to cut out the video games seems like telling an overweight person to stop putting so much ketchup on his triple whopper.
Why do sports games sometimes end with large riots and even at a "good" one there will be lots of post game fights but video game events of equal size pass without incident
But the APA isn't even making that recommendation. They're identifying a risk and demonstrating that the science is sound. The only recommendation they have is that perhaps games should have gore options so that some people can opt out of graphic depictions of violence, which makes sense independent of games being risk factors to violence anyway.
Also, yes, it doesn't help to put ketchup on your triple whopper. This is true despite it also being true that a triple whopper is a poor choice of food to begin with.
These guys have clearly never played Bloodbowl. A more rage inducing video I've yet to encounter.
I don't know, if I'm honest. I suspect it has to do with the size of the sports scene vs the size of the eSports scene and the cultural significance that sports have taken-on vs the still-largely-fringe space that eSports currently occupies. Also, I suspect that the abundance of alcohol among spectators at sports events & the association with sports events and pub crawls is a factor.
It doesn't seem to take into account unpublished works at all, nor does it control for any other factors like gender or socioeconomic factors
I'm going to have to actually read each of the 31 studies in their meta analysis aren't I
Here's hoping they're not as laughable as the one the APA did that was in my psychology textbook (which showed a clear bias against video games). I hope they're as good as Kutner & Olson's work where they actually followed the lives of real children and measured who is more likely to actually have problems (they found that kids who exclusively played violent games or kids who played no games at all were more likely to have problems)
...Why is it a selling point to you if a meta-analysis also uses studies that haven't passed through the peer review process?
Criticism of the lack of diversity among study subjects is totally reasonable, but again, the APA itself levels this criticism and has directed future researchers to include more diverse subjects in their experiments.
Or
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
The end of that abstract makes it sound as if the measure of that aggression might be limited to "used a weapon in the video game more often." Which is... not convincing.
Aside from that, yeah, that's exactly the kind of study I'm talking about.
Though I do wonder if "more blood" is necessarily a good measure. The amount of blood in an MK game is so excessive as to be cartoonish and doesn't exactly lend itself to realism.
I'm not sure that realistic vs unrealistic volumes of blood is relevant to the question of whether or not more gore provokes a stronger aggressive response. There are expectations people have that tie violence together with unrealistically gratuitous depictions of blood, limbs, organs & bones flying all over the place.
I have had to deal with enough professional and well-funded studies that use lol-are-you-shitting-me methodology that I am not prepared to take this on faith.
I have seen a study from a pretty goddamn major university using federal grant money that used a survey on race in San Francisco, in fucking Chinatown, to draw conclusions about Hispanics using racial/ethnic categories of "black", "white", and "other".
I have seen shit that'll turn you white. And then misleadingly poll you about it.
Okay; well I bought the damned thing anyway (I feel it's really unfair to put these papers behind paywalls, but whatever. Also this was probably not a good idea, but whatever).
So, methodology:
...So, okay: the 'aggressive behaviors' part of the experiment is fucking ridiculous, but in a way that I can understand someone who has never played a video game before & is ignorant of certain play principles would make that mistake (...again, I wish experts from the APA would consult with experts in game design. Then shit like this would probably not happen).
The rest of it seems really sound, however, and typical of researchers using GAM guidelines. On this basis, it's probably safe to dismiss the claims of increased aggressive behaviors without necessarily dismissing the claims of increased aggressive thoughts.
Wow, though. 'Aggressive behaviors were measured by using the ratio of total weapon time to total game playing time in the game. We justified this measure as a gauge of aggressive behavior two ways. The first is that the participants got to choose how long they wanted to use the character’s weapon. All participants were told that the use of the weapon causes more damage. If they decided to use the weapon more, that suggests that they want to cause more damage to their opponent, which fits with the operational definition of aggression.'
*facepalm*
That's like giving a baseball player a choice of how long their team gets to stay at bat and rating them as "competitive" because they said "Well uh, all the time then".
Winning is sort of the point, idiots.
-edit-
Also: lol@ "Past research has used other such measures to assess aggressiveness"
So... yeah. They are possibly all this clueless.
I'm glad at least some of their research was not clownshoes. See, I am very sympathetic to claims of gaming violence having effects on people. It makes sense, intuitively. But all the research I look at seems to herpderp their way through key elements of methodology or analysis.
I still have to go through the entire meta-analysis (if I ever actually get to it, I've been swamped with other things lately), but are desensitization to violence or decreased empathy mentioned in any way? Most of the research on video games I read was connected primarily to those two traits and not on increased occurrences of violent behaviour itself.
Or maybe a typical game of Risk
And this also presents a reason why research into videogames and aggression is going to have inconsistent results while people keep obsessing about what's represented on the screen instead of gameplay elements. You can grab a beer, a snack and go on a murdering rampage in GTA and be perfectly relaxed. You can play a game of LoL which is hardly graphic or violent and be angry for the rest of the evening.
Representation of violence is not the problem (if it's worth even calling it that, nobody speaks about banning little league because kids get angry), it's competitiveness and frustration, as it's found in other human realms of experience.
We may reach the conclusion that GTA is perfectly fine but we should keep kids from playing Hearthstone if we go down this road :P
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods