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Video games research project still open
gporter333
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi everyone!
This is a follow-up post to my initial forum thread earlier this year regarding our video game use online survey.
Many thanks to all the gamers who have taken part in our survey so far - we have had an excellent response internationally to the project and some very constructive feedback from the gaming community.
We would just like to say that the survey remains open to any video game users who have not yet taken the survey.
For those of you who are new to the project, this is a large survey by the University of Sydney, Australia. We are investigating patterns of video game use, with a particular interest in the concept of excessive video game use.
If you’d like to take part, please follow the link below to our website:
http://www.nepean.med.usyd.edu.au/research/psych.php
(The survey can be found at the top right corner)
Alternatively, if you would like to learn more about our research, have a look at a recent interview with me by the Australian PC magazine ‘Atomic’:
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?CIID=104069
Thanks again!
-Dr Guy Porter
Clinical Associate
The Faculty of Medicine
University of Sydney
Australia
For:
A/Prof Vladan Starcevic
Discipline of Psychological Medicine
University of Sydney
Australia
This is a follow-up post to my initial forum thread earlier this year regarding our video game use online survey.
Many thanks to all the gamers who have taken part in our survey so far - we have had an excellent response internationally to the project and some very constructive feedback from the gaming community.
We would just like to say that the survey remains open to any video game users who have not yet taken the survey.
For those of you who are new to the project, this is a large survey by the University of Sydney, Australia. We are investigating patterns of video game use, with a particular interest in the concept of excessive video game use.
If you’d like to take part, please follow the link below to our website:
http://www.nepean.med.usyd.edu.au/research/psych.php
(The survey can be found at the top right corner)
Alternatively, if you would like to learn more about our research, have a look at a recent interview with me by the Australian PC magazine ‘Atomic’:
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/article.asp?CIID=104069
Thanks again!
-Dr Guy Porter
Clinical Associate
The Faculty of Medicine
University of Sydney
Australia
For:
A/Prof Vladan Starcevic
Discipline of Psychological Medicine
University of Sydney
Australia
gporter333 on
0
Posts
It's academically irresponsible to affirm things that are correct?
If you want to make a case that they don't cause as much aggressive behavior as similar media, fine. But come on, anything and everything that increases adrenaline flow and stimulates the body is going to cause more aggressiveness. I don't know that there's anything you could even quote saying otherwise.
I absolutely reject clinical studies on media effects. They're flawed at the core. I guess that's what comes from having an European degree on media studies. Psychologist studying media reek of neoconductism to me. It's just the way I've been brought up.
But, seriously, you can't prove or disprove causation on media effects through statistical data. Just can't be done. The process is far too complex for that. Too many unmeasurable elements. How do you define aggression? How do you define a perception of violence? Are you hooking up your subjects to apparatus to determine their anxiety levels? Are you surveying them about their perception of the violence? We don't even understand how humans process communication. We don't know how we're affected by messages. Heck, we don't even know how we decode signs and symbols.
It's just so stupid. Morality codes are driving scientific studies, now. It's tantamount to researching if blacks have a tendency to violence in a racist culture. It's downright unethical, no matter what the results are.
Let's be fair here. A survey asking about an instinctual biological response isn't going to prove jackshit one way or the other. And that goes triple when you're going out of your way to flood the sample population with people who clearly want the result to turn out a certain way.
I reject that it's instinctual and I reject that it's biological.
All Hail High Gnomelord Twiggybottoms.
They get there through sports, too, and nobody is studying their correlation to violence and mental disorders. Or sex. Is sex making you drive carelessly? Do we study that? Do you step on it more the days you had a quickie in the morning?
And they wear off really fast, as with sports and sex, so as long as you're studying mid to long term effects, you should treat videogames as any other form of media. That is, unless you can bring up definite proof, and I'm talking full body of research here, that shows a clear diference in the effect of gaming as opposed to the effects of other types of media. Of course, for that you'd need valid research on the effects of media, which might prove to be a problem, since there's not even a consensus on what kind of media reserch is valid research.
I repeat my point: we don't know how communication works, biologically, so we're not equipped to pass scientific judgement on the effects of media. Let's take this process one step at a time, shall we?
I don't know. Set the scene, am I doing both at the same time?
3DS: 1607-3034-6970
Indeed correlation is very different from causation. Claiming casuality using evidence just from an online survey is certainly unlikely to be accepted by the research community. There are so many variables and bidirectional effects, etc.
I'd just like to emphasize that this survey is primarily concerned with the concept of 'excessive' use of video games, not the effects of video game violence. We have already published a paper on the issue of violent video games - please see the interview I had with 'Atomic' magazine for details.
How are you getting controls, getting 100 non-video gamers to answer that same poll?
Re the bolded:
Bass, Marth A., Wendy K. Enochs & Ro Dibrezzo (2002) Comparison of two Exercise Programs on General Well-Being of College Students Psychological Reports, Vol. 91, No. 3, Part 2, 2002 pp. 1195-1201
(This study is notable because it is in the psychological statistics course im doing at the University of Sydney, and is an example of a bad study. Ie a study with a lot of holes in it. See we get taught to spot them.)
Brandon, J. E. & Loelin, J. M. (1991) Relationship of fitness to depression, state and anxiety, internal health locus of control, and self control. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 73, 563-568.
If you want more, just ask, I'll give you the references.
They do not study sex because you cannot ethically randomly assign people to conditions when you involve sex. Objection denied.
We do know how communication works biologically. We know how all the senses send information to the brain. We know which parts of the brain deal with the different senses and how they interact with the various cortex in the brain. We know how the brain makes sense of that information.
We know down to the atomic level how every neuron, axon, hillox, soma, myelin, dendrite, terminal button, synapse and neurotransmitters work.
Incidentally, do you mean internally valid studies, or studies which lack external validity. This is important, as each of these definitions has various sub sets of validity which need to be addressed. A good study, such as one being undertaken by a university that also teaches students exactly how to analyse a study to find all of it's holes and weaknesses, will do it's best to control for or at the very least mention these effects.
Fuzzy don't worry, nothing coming out of USYD is going to establish causality from a correlation if the statistics course I'm doing there right now is an indication of the standards. The lecturer is very....precise, in the good way.
So I say "we don't know how communication works biologically and you come back with brain chemistry?
I rest my case.
I mean, if you're making that logic jump you're not even talking about the same process I'm talkiing about. These people are, however, attempting to study the process I'm talking about, despite having defined it wrong.
Communication is a social process. It's not individual. You (we) have no idea of the biological implications of ideology, of exposure to advertisement, of having grown up on a positive environment. Since you (not we) don't want to address that there's a social interaction element at work, that culture is relevant here, you stick to statistics, you study responses and do all kinds of "black-box" conductist crap.
If there's a correlation between the people who admit to playing too much and depression and stress symptoms, then there is a correlation between people who admit to playing too much and depression and stress symptoms.
Good work. You want to call that internal validity, be my guest.
But that explains what, exactly?
If you haven't defined your object of study properly, then what good is validity? What act is being performed when playing a videogame? Is it experiencing a discourse, taking part in an activity? Both? What's a person that's playing too many videogames actually doing? Is there a message in a videogame? Is "videogame" a unit? How are we defining it? Do the subjects of the universe know what our definition is? They're only asking about the "type of games you play the most", then providing a list of genres. What is a genre? What's action/adventure? Do the subjects in the universe know the difference?
Man, there's so much conceptual shaky ground behind this study I can't believe they even put it together in the first place.
Which, since you want to go all epistemological on me here on Penny Arcade, probably also means there's no way to prove any kind of external validity at all.
I'll tell you what these studies do achieve, though. They grab headlines. They get waved in front of people's noses when in need to justify political action. I was offered in my university an internship doing research on media and children. The idiots actually wanted me to count the instances of cursing and similar stuff during daytime TV, then intended to refer the raw data to political instances funding the project and present that as a study.
I calmly refused to take part, explained to the people involved that I questioned the rigor of a study that was giving "alcohol abuse" points to cooking shows using wine as an ingredient and walked away.
You know when I next heard of the lousy "study"?
Headlines.
In short, methodology doesn't guarantee success, nor does it clear you of all further responsibility.
You want social psychology.
Oh well there's plenty of those studies too.
Wanna talk about that then?
Wait
Man you haven't even read the damn interview.
Dr Portman mentions your objections.
Go and read it, then come give me your dribble. He specifically mentions there not being any good studies and the need for one's that do.
Basically, he says "The current studies suck. We should create better ones that conceptualise better and control for possible extraneous variables."
Also you don't know what you are talking about at all. I'm being taunt, currently, that the statistics is meaningless without context.
Most of our marks are coming from being able to accurately conceptualise, put in context and derive meaning from the statistical test. If we just put there's a correlation we fail. There's nothing to that. It's just a number. In addition, we are taught the exact things you complain about....what is the conceptualisation of this? Can it be conceptualised differently? How does this change the data? Does it mean something? Is this a good way to think about it? Does it relate to anything outside the study, or is it just a highly rigorous laboratory experiment that couldn't be replicated in real world conditions?
Every single one of your objections is something I am being taught about.
The numbers is basically meaningless. You can't do a study without theory. A journal article needs to thoroughly back up it's reason for existence. It has to carefully indicate what it is talking about, what the results might mean, what they might NOT mean, any possible confounding variables or problems that other research might be able to clarify. And at NO POINT does any psychological study ever say "We have proved x." And huge importance has been drilled into me from the first year of my course, that you have to conceptualise your variables carefully. Does it make sense based upon previous literature and knowledge? All of which, I might add, have taken this careful approach?
Mate, you are hopelessly ignorant of how the science of psychology actually works, it's pretty telling.
You are railing at witchdoctors in front of a general hospital. Australia is not the states, and USYD is one of the top research universities in Australia.
I'm curious as to how external factors are taken into account and weighted. I'm feeling helpless and concerned about the future, as well as being stuck living with my parents at 23, not because I like to play counterstrike, but because I'm out of a job. Given that the new wave of recent college graduates pushed the unemployment rate to 5.5% I'm hardly alone in that circumstance and, if anything, I'm probably the worse off thanks to my sector being architecture. Greenspan kept interest rates at unreasonable lows for far to long to bring about an 'end' to the bear market in 2003 sparking the construction bubble. Now that its burst and we've entered a new bear market the number of billings in my field are at record lows. Well, that concerns me and certainly can be correlated to any number of anxiety or other related issues which my playing of video games in no way effects. That is a significant external factor that can in no way be represented and simply would not exist were I gainfully employed.
It's history, you have to look at the social context in which the study took place.
For example, the australian government sent out a bunch of "talk to your children about drugs" flyers right. And then they wanted to evaluate how well it was doing? Only they did the evaluation right after a bunch of australian citizens were caught smuggling drugs into bali, the "Bali 9" incident.
And as she said, you can bet parents are talking to their kids about drugs when something like that happens. They might not have even opened the government packets.
Actually here's an amusing external validity example I remember:
Back in 1930's bumfuck time, in America they did a big political survey right. And they predicted one side would win by a landslide. But the other side won by a landslide. Turns out they'd surveyed people with telephones and cars. In 1932. Back then, people with telephones and car were generally well off/rich. And such people tended to vote for the side predicted to win in a landslide (the ones who actually lost) (I've forgotten which party was which because it's late and I'm not being exammed on that example ;P ).
But hey, psychologists NEVER look at shit like that right? We never get taught how to account for such variables. Like ever. And if we do, it's faulty. Ask Noel. He knows.
Wait, doesn't the fact that my objections are being addressed prove I know what I'm talking about?
I'm pretty sure it does.
However, I'm also pretty sure that the fact your teachers are teaching you that set of pitfalls doesn't mean they're not falling in them.
Take this line from that (barely one page long) interview:
"Video games (particularly the current generation of games with realistic graphics) have simply not been around long enough to study properly"
Here we go, first conceptual simplification.
"Realistic graphics" are implied there to have a bigger impact on their violence and games studies than abstract representations.
How so? I mean, do we have data that supports that visual representations of violence have a bigger impact than aural, literary representations? Is that what the study is about or is that just taken for granted?
Socially, culturally, taken for granted.
What drives you more to aggression, gangsta rap or classic rock? What do scientists think? What do studies about it say in the 1950s? and the 1990s? Are you going to claim right here and now that all your epistemological crap is not affected by cultural environment? And I don't mean of the subjects, I mean of the researchers.
Look, I'm sure they do this with the best intention. Certainly they've thought about what variables needed to be included. I'm just saying they're going about it wrong. There's always a relevant variable they've missed, because they're studying a social process.
I'm say there's no amount of variables that can provide valid results under these circumstances. As I said, it's Borges' map. By the time you've allocated every relevant variable, you'll have a model of the planet's whole damn culture. In all honesty, if you pull that one off, I know a few pundits who'd be glad to take a peek.
But hey, what do I care? I bet they're good teachers, let them do their research, I don't care. If only I didn't have to read about their results on the press, later on.
Yes. So as I said. You mean social psychology. That massive branch of psychology devoted to the study of how an individuals thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by others.
Here's the part that might interest you.
Cultural and Attributional Tendencies.
Just how much is what they've observed of people socially transcendant across culture? Is it mostly relevant to western culture? do you observe the same social phenomenon in asia? different sub cultures?
Yep. Looks like we do think about it. Again a field of study going back to before world war 2.
In fact quite a famous social study was on how far people will go if ordered by an authority figure.
Oh and your data on violence....welp yeah been done.
For example, the most famous, and the start of hundreds of replication studies:
Bandura in 1963 did a study that compared the impact of both live and televised exposure to children of adults agressively interacting with a surrogate doll called a bobo doll. (This doll looked nothing like a human, it was basically some blobs stuffed with rag)
Guess what? Kids who watched the adult messing up the doll, were more likely to miss up the doll themselves....and were more likely to play aggressively with other children, in both live and tv performances.
Here you go:
Bandura, A., Ross, D. & Ross, S. (1963b). Vicarious reinforcement and imitative learning. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 601-607.
I know I know. That's a bit artificial. Go look up the hundreds of other replications out there in more realistic environments. Also I hate to say it, but look up vicarious reinforcement and imitative learning on wikipedia. I just checked and it's actually pretty accurate in this case. Might as well clear up a bit of ignorance while I'm at it.
In any case, you did ask for abstract. I'm pretty sure a couple of blobs stuffed with rags is abstract.
Oh wait, you meant for tv media! Here is a comprehensive review of the the decades of research since 1963, in juicy bite sized review from all for you:
Bushman, B.J., & Huesmann, L.R. (2001). Effects of televised violence on aggression. In D.G. Singer & J.L. Singer (Eds.), Handbook of children and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Paraphrase for you!
"These studies consistently demonstrate that exposure to TV and movie violence increases the likelihood of physical agression, verbal aggression, aggressive thoughts, and aggressive emotions in both children and adults"
(Emotion reference!)
Anderson, C.A, Berkowitz, L., Donnerstein, E., Huseman, L.R., Johnson, J.D., Linz, D., Malamuth, N.M., & Wartella, E. (2003). The influence of media violence on youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4(3), 81-110.
Here's a neat one that is relevant!
Buchman, B.J., & Huesmann, L.R. (2001) Media violence and the American public: Scientific facts versus media misinformation. American Psychologist, 56, 477-489.
Ooooooooh. Better not believe those news reports after all eh.
Mate....you take a comment in an interview and turn it into your entire post. You generate an implication entirely out of your own prejudice.
That's all you have left.
Yes, it does show you don't know what you are talking about when it comes to criticising psychologists. Trust me mate, we are doing that already, we are taught to criticise ourselves more harshly than your little splash of cognitive irritation. They've been doing it for decades and they're very good at it. An entire fifth of my first year course in first semester was on logic and concepts in psychological language. Right from self evident all the way up to where you are talking about. There's a third year course on it, should I choose to take it, a whole course devoted to your "beef" with psychology, where they examine it in create detail with respect to how it applies to psychology.
You are prejudiced. You do not have enough information about the field you are criticising to formulate a rational opinion. Sure you know what you mean conceptually. Who gives a shit, I don't care if you know that. Yay for you.
You are however, criticising my chosen field and waving around a giant bat of stupidity and ignorance. In that sense you are off your rocker. Keep on wailing about issues that don't exist Noel.
I'm sure you will continue. You'll find some mythical hole to pick, some little conceptualisation issue I haven't linked a study for yet and claim victory. I'll just have to go find it I guess.
I can continue all day. I have decades of research and data at my fingertips. All I've seen you do is wail about rejecting facts.
I'm not exactly sure what constitutes excessive - this is the purpose of our project - to try to work this out.
I think that it's rather hard to 'talk down' to anyone on this forum - so much heated and intelligent discussion going on!
The use of the word 'excessive' is, I agree, less than ideal. However, we are trying to avoid the word 'addiction' with all its negative connotations. A small minority of gamers may play so much that it leads to 'real world' problems - this could be conceptualized as 'problem use', which again is a more politically correct / euphemistic term. Our project is really exploratory. Unfortunately I can't reveal the underlying methodology (such as use of controls, etc) as this is against the ethics requirements and could cause bias in the sample.
I think the debate on this forum is a microcosmic reflection of the debate by the wider research community on the same topic(s). Yes, psychological research has abundant difficulties (or 'challenges' - depending on whether you see the metaphorical glass as half full or half empty). One of the biggest difficulties for me as a clinician is translating the results of studies into clinical practice - even the best studies with fairly concrete outcome measures (such as drug trials) can be interpreted in so many different ways. More often than not we rely on clinical experience rather than 'evidence-based' medicine.
However, this doesn't mean that we should give up on psychological/psychiatric research!
Sometimes psychology is a bit slow. This is due to the politics of journal publishers, who will generally only accept significant results for publishing.
The media reports are from journalists who want to sell papers/get viewers. That's all the media IS, and they have a hugely significant systemic bias to everything they report.
If you see a study reported in a newspaper or on the news, then you are right to be suspicious if the sources are not listed and you can't follow the trail to examine the study. In such a case, you just outright ignore it. It's not verifiable, so they fail and get ignored.
However, this does not mean that all psychological research is like those news reports. Psychological research gets published in academic and scientific journals, not newspaper headlines.
Noel is right to ignore them, he's just wrong to generalise it to the whole discipline, which is why I got annoyed. There's a lot of "research" that happens that never gets published in a journal, or if it does, it's not a peer reviewed journal.
I mean, sometimes the peer review system doesn't work, but if that study that slipped through happned to be "significant" in some way, you can bet it's going to suddenly come under a lot of scrutiny it will not survive.
The problem here is you seem to assume I despise psychology, social or otherwise, and that I'm claimng there's no room for research in the field in it.
Not true.
I'm merely criticising the form of psychological research that goes out there, sets a number of variables, tracks them and claims that that's a study on a subject without bohering to present even a theory on the connection of those variables. As we all agreed before, looking for correlations on arbitrary psychological variables. I'm questioning the use of researching like that, I'm questioning it's applications and its rigor.
You were quoting studies on violence before and you did just that yourself. No attempt to determine what process is taking place, merely stating that allegedly scientific fact: put the kids in front of the violent behaviour, produce a statistically relevant more violent behaviour. What you don't seem to understand is that you're not proving anything by quoting studies in an argument when my objections are about method and principle.
That's determined nothing of worth about pretty much anything. It's not applicable. It's of just as much worth as locking kids up in isolation to find out if they develop their own language.
For the record, I didn't sit at home and develop my own caveats about the (very white anglo saxon) branch of psychology that is infatuated with its own epistemological approach to research. I did develop them while studying with, you know, actual psychologists. Brilliant ones, at that. Of course, I come from a background in semiology, not psychology, so this might be a problem of perspective.
The most important part of my post is the end, but you focus on the rather unimportant studies I posted.
They're not important, I only put them there because you keep stating things that are wrong. You say "where is the data?" well there it is or "it's a cultural assumption" when it's not. This is a very, very simple behavior. Will a kid hit a doll more if it sees someone else do it. The answer is yes.
Is this generalisable outside this experiment? Not really.
The kind of research you mention, where they don't bother to outline a theory? Yeah that's not scientific research. That's a bad study, and I wouldn't recognise it as research, or associate it with psychology. You do, and this is what I disagree with. It is not psychology. If you call it psychology, I have to assume you are considering all psychology to be like this, to use these bad methods and thoughtless principles. They do not.
The problem is that up until this post you just made, your language was extremely general and unclear and I couldn't get a grip of exactly what your beef was. You sure sounded angry though. Perhaps you should have just been this clear from the start.
There are some fields in psychology I disagree with, in that they tend to heavily operationalise what they are dealing with. It is a limitation of the fact they are using the scientific method borrowed from the more materialistic sciences. The key is that they recognise it, keep it in mind, and always try to think of ways to produce better variables. They also don't ever claim anything as directly causal or fact.
There is no problem with the science of psychologies principles or methods. There IS a problem with the kind of unthinking research you are describing....but that's bad research, and it's not psychology.
A good study will have a solid theory behind it that justifies why it's being run. The studies are nothing without the concepts and the theory.
But really the problem is just that you sounded like an unintelligent, angry angry man until you finally pulled together a coherent post. Be nice if you did that in the first place Noel.
Yeah me too. Before I didn't think I played to much, but now....
I dont' mean to get this started again from the top, but I do find funny how you jumped to the conclussion that I was despising the whole field by despising the ones that practice it in a bad way. I wonder if that's just a reaction to you seeming to know and esteem the authors of this particular piece of research here or something all psychologists develop out of insecurity on the merits of their discipline.
OK, so I overreacted, but bad science pisses me off, big time. Mostly because anything wrapped around a lab coat gets a free pass on media, more so if it's related to a political or moral struggle. This is just that, plus it's walking a conceptual and methodological minefield. I don't think it's a good idea.
Then again, if I had expressed things that way we wouldn't have had to make an effort to defend our positions and find a reasonable middle ground, right?
I do have a ptoblem with your last post, though. Bad science and no science aren't the same thing. It's science if it's presented as science, even if it's not properly done, and bad science flows to the public in its extremely abridged version, where the differences aren't apparent. The community is responsible for its aberrations, always.