I don’t think most of the researcher’s make a distinction between aggressive behavior and rough play. When I was a kid, I used to hang around with a group of about 5 other kids from 2nd grade thru high school. We were not aggressive, but we used to beat the tar out of each other in a fun, good-natured way. And every time we a saw a kung-fu movie, we couldn’t wait to try out those moves on each other. (Cuts and sprains often resulted).
I’m sure these researchers would say that the kung-fu movies inspired and increased our aggressive behavior. And they’d be right. But , years later, we are all peaceful, responsible adults. We were not warped by our entertainment.
I agree there are some frightening things done by some kids that have gotten a lot of play in the media. But to blame video games, or movies and TV, or whatever the flavor of the week is, is just scapegoating.
As a Gen-Xer who’s grown up with video games, I can’t see the correlation.
My friends and I always knew that the games did not represent reality and that trying in real life to do some of the things we could do in games could seriously hurt someone (or ourselves). If anything I always found the more violent games as a great way to work off some anger and teenage angst.
I think the increased teenage violence today is more likely a cause of the increased media. It is less an increase in the incidents than it is an increase in how wide an audience the stories reach. For example several years ago, my senior homeroom teacher’s husband went postal and shot several people in a bowling alley. The story was just barely mentioned on CNN. Nowadays it would have reported for at least 24hrs.
Any violence involving children, whether they are the cause or the victims, always makes the national news. I think children are more likely to be influenced by the news than by video games. Someone should do a study on how the incidents of school violence have risen since the media coverage of Columbine.
My 2cents,
Chrisbar
Okay, I have a lot of problems with the article that Redheadedokie provided a link to. And this is a really long post, because I’m really ticked. So run upstairs and go to the bathroom before you settle down to read this.
(Okie, let me say right away that it’s not you that I’m ticked off at, it’s the so-called “researchers” who dump this sort of crap on the Great American Public every day.)
In short, this is not a serious study, it actually doesn’t prove a thing, and Okie shouldn’t get her panties in a bunch over it, okay? I’m glad you’re a responsible mom, sweetie, but these folks are just out for the quick publishing kill, the media sound bite, the 2-minute spot on “Good Morning America” and the book tour.
First of all, the researchers used a TINY group of people as a sampling base. One study involved 227 people, the other had 210. This is a miniscule pool of people from which to extrapolate answers. Most serious researchers, when doing a study, will ask hundreds, even thousands, of people, over a period of years, before they even think of publishing their results.
Then those results are subjected to what’s called “peer review”, in which other researchers in the same field of study try to reproduce the results the first group got. If they can’t reproduce those results, then they publish papers to the effect that “we tried to reproduce those results and we couldn’t.” Other people try, too. Eventually, when enough other researchers have tried to reproduce the results and have come up empty, the scientific community collectively comes to the conclusion that the first researchers’ theory was bushwah, and they throw it out.
Conversely, of course, if the results ARE reproducible, then they all hold a big party with champagne and celebrate the fact that the borders of scientific knowledge have been pushed back just a tiny bit.
Okay. Just got a little sidetracked there. So, these people didn’t survey enough people to begin with, and then the questions they did ask weren’t really applicable. That is, they weren’t the sort of questions that are actually going to prove anything.
Second problem: they asked only college students. Right off the bat, that’s already going to be a skewed sample group. “Only people between the ages of 18 and 21, who have enrolled in college.” To make a true statistical base, they would have had to include 18-to-21 year olds from the complete socio-economic spectrum.
Third problem: I’m assuming that since these researchers are from Iowa State University, the college students in question were also attending Iowa State. So we have a further skew, “college students in the American Midwest”. I don’t want to make any dangerous, possible non-PC characterizations about inner-city blacks and Hasidic Jews not attending Midwestern universities, but…
Do you see how all this is breaking down? The answer to the question, “Do video games cause teen violence?” depends on who you ask. (whom) These researchers didn’t ask enough people, in a wide enough sampling base, to be able to come up with any useful answers.
But there’s more.
They began by asking the students “about their delinquent behavior” during the past year. How many of them do you suppose are going to give a truthful answer? “Yeah, I broke a ninth-grader’s nose last week.” So they’re all going to go into the study with the appearance of being, by their own testimony, more or less non-violent. On the other hand, it’s quite possible that there are college kids out there who would thoroughly enjoy tweaking the researcher’s nose by saying, “Oh, yeah, man, I’m one bad dude…” and telling him a Tall Tale about breaking a ninth-grader’s nose last week.
Okay, so basically all of these Midwestern college kids admit that they play video games. That statistic itself could certainly be off, but I’m not going to quibble with it.
But notice in passing how this sentence in the article is written, so as to name the two non-violent games first, and to put the “violent” game, Mortal Kombat, last. That way it sticks in your head better. (I should mention that this kind of article is usually written and submitted by researchers themselves, to whatever wire service or features syndicate or news agency they’re interested in having publish their “results”. The wire service or whoever usually just checks the basic facts to make sure it isn’t a total hoax, and then they post it. In this instance it was to Reuters Health, which is a wire service . Yahoo just picked it up off the wire and put it up on their website.) So they’ve slanted their own article to start convincing you, the reader, that “video games cause teen violence.” (Of course, their two opening paragraphs already did that to a certain extent, preparing the ground, but now we’re talking about the actual “data”!)
So their “data”, for this first study, amounts to the fact that “students who said, ‘yeah, I’m a pretty aggressive person’ were more likely to play Mortal Kombat, than students who said, 'no, actually, I’m not a very aggressive person.” Well, gloriosky! What in the world does THAT prove? Precisely nothin’. Just that some people would rather watch Mario jump over the duck than watch blood spurt. It just proves “different strokes for different folks”. It does NOT prove that “playing Mortal Kombat makes a college student say, ‘Yeah, I’m a pretty aggressive person’.” And it certainly doesn’t prove that playing Mortal Kombat MAKES a college student a more aggressive person. Re-tards. I never even took a class in statistics, and even I know that.
And then the researchers waffle their way out of saying anything that “peer review” could nail them to the wall with, by concluding,
Again, re-tards. The two sentences immediately preceding this dollop of moldy tapioca pudding were EXPRESSLY designed to make you, the reader, think otherwise (here they are again, for you to look at):
They’re just playing mind games with you here. It’s bushwah.
Okay, here’s the second study.
[quote]
However, the second study linked video-game violence with immediate increases in aggression. Anderson and Dill had students play either a violent game (Wolfenstein 3D) or a nonviolent game (Myst), and let the students believe they were playing against an opponent in another cubicle. After completing the video game, participants played a competitive-reaction game with their imagin
And then I realized that it sounds like I’m kind of proving their point, with my boxing analogy. If I just spent an hour boxing, I’m more likely to punch somebody out, than if I just spent an hour meditating.
But I think you have to look at the KIND of person who would choose boxing over meditating, who would choose squash over checkers. The kind of person who would prefer boxing is also the kind of person who would punch you out for stepping on his toes.
So I don’t think it follows that you can blame boxing for the fact that the guy got his lights punched out. He might have gotten them punched out even if I had never studied boxing, if I were the sort of person who punches people’s lights out.
If teens already have violent tendencies, violent video games will just enhance them. But if they’re pretty normal kids, Mortal Kombat isn’t going to make them take Daddy’s rifle to school.
But, FWIW, I think real little kids, like younger than teens, don’t have any business playing Mortal Kombat. My 13-year-old talked me into renting it for Playstation, just out of curiosity, and after half an hour he was sated. He was fascinated at first by how gross it was, but ultimately it just wasn’t as much FUN as Crash Bandicoot Warped or Spyro 2. It’s just another shoot-em-up.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
I can only speculate, but I would say that if you’re immersed in a culture which sends messages that violence is normal, you are more likely to turn violent when a number of factors come together. Of course the average person will not be influenced significantly, but violent movies, video games, and/or the presence of real guns can inspire or reinforce violent tendancies that would otherwise remain more latent. There’s always a few guys who will take the idea of shoot-em-ups a little too seriously and go looking for the opportunity to “prove themselves”.