Video Games: Not Bad For You

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This is a sad day for self-righteous politicians, religious tight-asses and conservative cultural monitors. A new study calls bullshit on the connection between video game violence and real violence. Christopher Ferguson, a professor in the Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice at Texas A&M International University, looked at 22 years of clinical studies on the effects of video games and found them seriously flawed.

"It is not hard to 'link' video game playing with violent acts if one wishes to do so, as one video game playing prevalence study indicated that 98.7 percent of adolescents play video games to some degree," [Ferguson] writes, "However, is it possible that a behavior with such a high base rate (i.e., video game playing) is useful in explaining a behavior with a very low base rate (i.e., school shootings)? Put another way, can an almost universal behavior truly predict a rare behavior?"

The reasoning is so obvious it’s almost dumb. Gaming is a 30-year-old, multi-billion dollar industry, and has survived for so long and accumulated so much money because video games are so popular that they're ubiquitous. Yeah, a couple of school shooters played video games. They probably watched television and ate at McDonald’s too.

The supposed proof that video games cause violence is sourced in a year 2000 study by Iowa State University researchers Karen Dill and Craig Anderson. It was the first behavioral study of the correlation between video games — Anderson referenced it as a cornerstone in the 2007 study that seems to now be the Bible for anti-video game crusaders.

The study was strikingly weird. Two hundred or so college-age students, who either identified themselves as veteran violent game players or not, were split into two groups,. One played the snooze fest, puzzle game Myst while the other group played the ancient, first person shooter Castle Wolfenstein. Afterwards, members of the two groups competed in a timed contest where the winner could hit the opponent with “noise blasts.”

The Wolfenstein crowd rocked the noise blasts longer and louder, and the researchers concluded that they were therefore more prone to violence, ignoring how, violence aside, the games require vastly different modes of thinking. Myst requires players to think carefully and analytically. A fast, first person shooter game like Wolfenstein requires much quicker, more reactive thinking.

Anyway, Ferguson says, the whole noise blast thing didn’t prove anything about video games leading to violence.

Ferguson says that the Anderson and Dill study when inspected closely actually supports the exact opposite of the publicized findings that video games don’t correlate to aggressive behaviors in players.

Four measures of aggression were used the Anderson and Dill study, provided by a “noise blast” program that wasn’t standardized. According to Ferguson, the fact that the study authors only found correspondence to one of the measures and the confidence measures around the effect size for the findings actually crosses zero and can’t be considered proof of a positive finding.

A similar study by Ferguson et al using a standardized version of the “noise blast” program found no relationship between violent games and aggression.

In an "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"-worthy twist for the family values crowd, families themselves were found more likely to cause violence than video games.

What was found from these study reviews was that once predication of family violence was eliminated by players of violent video games, there is no correlation between the two.

In other words, gamers who play violent video games are more likely to be aggressive due to family violence than by playing video games.

Despite the study, video games are likely to continue getting blamed for youth violence. This week Douglas Gentile, an Iowa state researcher who’s worked extensively with Craig Anderson, released a study that asserts a correlation between video games and violence.

But more importantly, video games are a deliciously easy target. There’s no NRA for Halo players — actually, a truly valuable study of video gamers would investigate whether or not they vote. But it’s unlikely that a gamer bloc could put numbers that match old people, the demographic most and large scared of technology and young people.

Currently, Washington politicians are riled up about the ESRB rating system. The video game rating system, Democratic and Republican legislators say, is too vague to protect our nation’s innocent little children. Not to be too much of a wise ass, but there’s still a massively unpopular, costly war going on, right?

The uproar revolves around Manhunt 2, a game that features gruesome decapitations, rape, dismemberment, and encourages violent homophobia and fratricide.

Oh, no, wait, sorry. It doesn’t. The first three things in that list are from a Shakespeare play. The last two were from the Bible.

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