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Violent video games do not cause aggressionNo evidence, academic report suggests
By Lester Haines → More by this author
Published Monday 15th August 2005 12:10 GMT
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The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has weighed into the ongoing polemic regarding a possible link between violent video games and "real-world aggression".
The Uni says the findings of the first long-term study into exposure to video games and subsequent stroppy behaviour may be "surprising", given that they show "robust exposure to a highly violent online game" did not cause any substantial increase in said aggression.
The findings will indeed suprise attorney Jack Thompson who has vowed to prove the link between Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and the 2003 murder of two police officers and a civilian police worker in Fayette, Alabama.
As we recently reported, after being arrested for the triple homicide, 20-year-old perpetrator Devin Moore was alleged to have said: "Life is a videogame. Everybody has to die some time." Moore is known to have spent many hours playing GTA:VC, dubbed a "murder simulator" by Thompson.
Thompson declared: "Moore rehearsed, hour after hour, the cop-killing scenarios in that hyper-violent video game. The makers, distributors, and retailers of that murder simulator equipped Moore to kill as surely as if they had handed him the gun to do it. Blood is on the hands of men in certain corporate board rooms from Japan to New York."
While the eventual outcome of Thompson's campaign in uncertain, the Illinois findings will do little to further his cause. Report lead author Dmitri Williams said researchers found "no strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game", referring to Asheron's Call 2 (AC2) which guinea pigs played an average 56 hours over the course of a month.
Williams explained: "Players were not statistically different from the non-playing control group in their beliefs on aggression after playing the game than they were before playing." He added: "Nor was game play a predictor of aggressive behaviors. Compared with the control group, the players neither increased their argumentative behaviors after game play nor were significantly more likely to argue with their friends and partners."
Williams did, however, warn: "I'm not saying some games don't lead to aggression, but I am saying the data are not there yet. Until we have more long-term studies, I don't think we should make strong predictions about long-term effects, especially given this finding."
In fact, the issue is rather more complicated than critics and defenders of video games might suggest. Williams noted: "This game featured fantasy violence, while others featuring outer space or even everyday urban violence may yield different outcomes."
Williams admitted that because the test didn't centre solely on younger teenagers, he could not say that "teenagers might not experience different effects", while noting that "older players in their study were "perhaps more strongly influenced by game play and argued with friends more than their younger counterparts".
Williams summarised: "If the content, context, and play length have some bearing on the effects, policy-makers should seek a greater understanding of the games they are debating. It may be that both the attackers and defenders of the industry's products are operating without enough information, and are instead both arguing for blanket approaches to what is likely a more complicated phenomenon."
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's findings appear in the June issue of Communication Monographs in an piece entitled "Internet Fantasy Violence: A Test of Aggression in an Online Game". ?
Methodology
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's test was conducted as follows:
The new study involved two groups of participants: players ? a "treatment" group of 75 people who had no prior MMRPG [massively multiplayer online roleplaying game] play and who played AC2 for the first time; and a control group of 138, who did not play. The participants were solicited through online message boards and ranged in age from 14 to 68, the average age being 27.7 years.
Self-reported questionnaires were completed pre- and post-test online and included a range of demographic, behavioral and personality variables. Aggression-related beliefs were measured with L.R. Huesmann?s Normative Beliefs in Aggression (NOBAGS) scale. Aggressive social interactions were measured with two behavioral questions: in the past month, did the participant have a serious argument with a friend, and in the same time period, did they have a serious argument with a spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend.
Because of the study's design, only moderate or large effects caused by exposure to the game were capable of being detected.
Source:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/15/video_games_and_aggression/
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No strong link seen between violent video games and aggression
Results from the first long-term study of online videogame playing may be surprising.
Contrary to popular opinion and most previous research, the new study found that players' "robust exposure" to a highly violent online game did not cause any substantial real-world aggression.
After an average playtime of 56 hours over the course of a month with ?Asheron?s Call 2,? a popular MMRPG, or ?massively multi-layer online role-playing game,? researchers found ?no strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game,? said Dmitri Williams, the lead author of the study.
Players were not statistically different from the non-playing control group in their beliefs on aggression after playing the game than they were before playing, Williams said.
Nor was game play a predictor of aggressive behaviors. Compared with the control group, the players neither increased their argumentative behaviors after game play nor were significantly more likely to argue with their friends and partners.
?I'm not saying some games don't lead to aggression, but I am saying the data are not there yet,? Williams said. ?Until we have more long-term studies, I don't think we should make strong predictions about long-term effects, especially given this finding.?
Williams, a professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an expert on the effects of online video-game play. He conducted the study with Marko Skoric, a lecturer at the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Their findings appear in the June issue of Communication Monographs in an article titled ?Internet Fantasy Violence: A Test of Aggression in an Online Game.?
According to Williams, researchers have suspected a strong linkage between games and aggression ?but, with the exception of relatively short-term effects on young adults and children, they have yet to demonstrate this link.?
Williams and Skoric undertook the first longitudinal study of a game to see whether they could determine a link.
Because most video game research has been conducted in the laboratory or by observation in the field ? methods ?not representing the social context of game play? ? they had their participants play the game in normal environments, like home.
The results of the new study, Williams said, support the contention of those who suggest that some violent games do not necessarily lead to increased real-world aggression.
But he and Skoric concede that other types of games and contexts might have negative impacts.
?This game featured fantasy violence, while others featuring outer space or even everyday urban violence may yield different outcomes.?
Williams and Skoric also concede that because their study didn't concentrate solely on younger teenagers, ?we cannot say that teenagers might not experience different effects.?
Still, and interestingly, older players in their study were ?perhaps more strongly influenced by game play and argued with friends more than their younger counterparts.?
The new study involved two groups of participants: players ? a ?treatment? group of 75 people who had no prior MMRPG play and who played AC2 for the first time; and a control group of 138, who did not play. The participants were solicited through online message boards and ranged in age from 14 to 68, the average age being 27.7 years.
Self-reported questionnaires were completed pre- and post-test online and included a range of demographic, behavioral and personality variables. Aggression-related beliefs were measured with L.R. Huesmann?s Normative Beliefs in Aggression (NOBAGS) scale. Aggressive social interactions were measured with two behavioral questions: in the past month, did the participant have a serious argument with a friend, and in the same time period, did they have a serious argument with a spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend.
Because of the study?s design, only moderate or large effects caused by exposure to the game were capable of being detected.
Today, more than 60 percent of Americans play some form of interactive game on a regular basis, while 32 percent of the game-playing population is now over 35 years of age.
Fears about the games? social and health impacts have risen with these numbers, Williams said, with politicians, pundits and media outlets fanning some of the flames.
Games are becoming increasingly violent, as shown by content analyses, Williams said. One reason is that ?the first generation of game players has aged and its tastes and expectations have been more likely to include mature fair.?
Still, the extent of knowledge about what games do to or for people is limited, and there is ?even less understanding about the range of content.?
?If the content, context, and play length have some bearing on the effects, policy-makers should seek a greater understanding of the games they are debating. It may be that both the attackers and defenders of the industry?s products are operating without enough information, and are instead both arguing for blanket approaches to what is likely a more complicated phenomenon.?
Nor do researchers know much about the positive effects of gaming, Williams said.
?Based on my research, some of the potential gains are in meeting a lot of new people and crossing social boundaries. That's important in a society where we are increasingly insulated from one another.?
Some game researchers believe that video-gaming leads to substantial gains in learning teamwork, managing groups and most important, Williams said, problem solving.
?How often can someone direct and coordinate a group of eight or 40 real people to accomplish a complex task, as they do in these role-playing games? That's a real skill.
?Games are about solving problems, and it should tell us something that kids race home from school where they are often bored to get on games and solve problems. Clearly we need to capture that lightning in a bottle.?
Source:
http://www.physorg.com/news5758.html
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Study: Games do not unequivocally correlate to violence
By Ken Fisher | Published: August 15, 2005 - 10:05AM CT
The debate over the role video games play in promoting violence reached a more dignified level with the publication of a new study that poses problems for those who want to make facile correlations between video games and violence. Internet Fantasy Violence: A Test of Aggression in an Online Game (Williams, D. & Skoric, M.) [PDF] is the first long-term study of the affects of a video game on players' aggressiveness, measured according to sociological standards (particularly, the Normative Beliefs in Aggression scale, or NOBAGS). The study saw "no strong effects associated with aggression," and even provided the basis for questioning just who it is that is most affected by so-called "violent video games." The method of analysis precluded the detection of "small effects."
The study was comprised of a test group of 213 participants, of which 75 logged an average of 56 hours in a single month playing Asheron?s Call 2. The remaining participants formed the control group. The study's lead, Dmitri Williams of the Speech Communication department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that the players showed no more aggressiveness than the control group's non-players.
The study looked at two aspects of aggression: the acceptance of violent behaviors among the test subjects, and the potential increase of violent behaviors on the part of those subjects. The test subjects were all new to the world of massive online role playing games (referred to in the study as MMRPGs), although some had played other sorts of video games before. While Williams and his team are careful to note that this study does not indicate that other games can't possibly have negative affects on gamers, the study was designed to test a threshold of violence that is statistically significant in the world of gaming.
The study tested for the effect of a particular kind of content that is substantially more violent than the average video game and should have more effect, given the highly repetitive nature of the violence. To make an analogy to television, this study took individuals who watched a wide range of television content and asked them to watch a large dose of known, violent fare. The results show that the exposure to this violent game exceeded their prior exposure, but more importantly, this exposure was much more violent than the average across the universe of content. In keeping with the analogy, this would be the equivalent of having television viewers displace most of their regular viewing with only strong violence and having the new total number of hours go up.
The 213 participants (167 male, 45 female, 1 "unstated") that were involved in the study had a mean age of 27.7 years, spanning 14 to 68 (!). The participants were primarily white and male (85% and 84% respectively), educated, and "middle class." The study noted that while it was not possible to measure "small effects," a population that would be appropriate for that determination would likely not change the results in any significant manner.
One thing about the study that immediately jumped out at me was the observation that "older participants in the experimental group were perhaps more strongly influenced by game play and argued with friends more than their younger counterparts," and that they were "overall less likely to report aggressive cognitions and
behavior." Could it be that the Concerned Parents and Politicians Everywhere? are seeing the violence in video games largely on account of their own dispositions toward the games? The possibility cannot be ruled out. On the other hand, the researchers said that studying the MMRPG realm couldn't provide a full picture, because few adolescents play those games, as the mean age of the study clearly shows.
Of course, the study does not provide a definitive answer to the issues. Longer periods of playing time than one single month would be needed, and the population study, while robust, would be more convincing with greater numbers. Nevertheless, the picture revealed by Williams et al. should complicate the rhetoric of the opponents of adult-themed gaming, although one must always keep in mind the way an ostrich reacts to problems. One very important point remains, however:
Thus, if the content, context, and play length have some bearing on the effects, policy-makers should seek a greater understanding of the games they are debating. It may be that both the attackers and defenders of the industry?s various products are operating without enough information, and are instead both arguing for blanket approaches to what is likely a more complicated phenomenon. Researchers can play an important role by refining our gross-level understanding of violent game effects into something more rigorous.
So, at the very least, this study is proof of the fact that talking about what "violent video games" "do" to "gamers" is a gross generalization, and will always call for a critical eye. The situation is considerably more complex, and further study?not grandstanding?is needed in the public discourse.
Source:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050815-5205.html
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There is more proof video games DO NOT cause violent behavior than proof that they do. Similar to how not all guns are used in murders, not all ATVs are used to blaze new forest trails etc etc
-DallanC
