An article about violence in video games, and the research that reports it.
The other day I bought the Playstation and Xbox magazines. They cost me a bomb. £5.99 they wanted for each one. That’s £11.98. I could have had adequate Oyster card fare for a few days or eaten the lovely pasta from the cafe next door to my house. But I’m not here to complain about the prices of gaming magazines these days. I am about to make some points about research.
Recently on Twitter I saw a link to an article from Gamespot (@GameSpotUK) in my timeline saying that research had been conducted showing that 7-15 year olds playing violent video games have lowered sympathy levels. The comments from readers below the GameSpot article were in their hundreds, with clearly very loyal gamers completely outraged that the suggestion of violence in video games could be linked to violence in children. One guy was even annoyed about the interruption this imposed on his own game playing, saying “anyway, keep the damn kids off of C.O.D…it ruins the game when you have some stupid kids screaming and swearing down the mic.”
I took the time to read the original study which was called ‘The Influences of Video Gaming on U.S Children’s Moral Reasoning about Violence’ by Edward T. Viera and Marina Krcmar (with a relatively small sample size of 166 respondents in Boston, MA, USA.)
They outlined that some of the problems with the study were the small sample size and model used to measure aggression levels. They used GAM (General Aggression Model) which is not a ‘perfect’ system of measurement. The games that these children were playing and cited as their favourite games were the likes of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto which are 18+ games, which has in turn, rendered this research for the Journal of Children and Media (and the time and money spent on it), somewhat redundant. 
Of course, children of this age shouldn’t be playing 18 rated games. I posted the link to the GameSpot article to the Research Through Gaming Facebook fan page I run where one fan outlined, (sarcastically) that perhaps the lowered sympathy in these children was linked to parental neglect? After all, it is clear that the parents have allowed their children to play these games regardless of the age classification, and in many cases, those parents will have bought the games for their children in the first place. However, even in this argument we have no research to prove that any correlation exists between parental ‘classification neglect’ and violence/lowered sympathy in children.
For example, my brother, at the time of writing, is thirteen and has been playing Grand Theft Auto and Call Of Duty for a couple of years now, since he was 11. He has played these kinds of games at his friends’ houses too, because they also like these games. Has C.O.D stolen my brothers’ innocence? No, not at all. He has been brought up in a household which demands he is respectful and polite, and he’s turned out to be a very sweet, emotionally intelligent young man. (Sisterly bias included).The original research brought up a few questions for me though…
Furthermore, while the Journal of Children and Media probably didn’t have the budget to take this research worldwide…but what if cultural differences make a difference? What if 7-15 year olds in Russia had a different reaction to these kinds of games that those playing in rural China? Or Rio?
Neuroscience research methods and eye-tracking could be used to register and measure what it is exactly the children find most influential within the games (not in a Clockwork Orange kind of way of course!) as another area of measurement. But when is it enough? Recently at the TDMR conference in Chicago, Lenny Murphy asked the audience to think of what it takes to be a researcher in 2011. It really is a plethora of areas used in combination. Neuroscience, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, sociology etc but it would be a bit expensive to hire someone from each speciality.It made me wonder why violent video games so popular in the first place.
Half the reason my brother and his friends play C.O.D is because of the positive status it carries. You are now ‘cool’ if you play C.O.D. Even morekudos for you if you OWN the game. (I guess the other reason they play is because it gives them time to socialise together and they don’t have to do their homework)And so, a cycle is created. The games are deemed as cool and are sold out in record times and the likes of Xbox and Playstation continue to feed the craze. For example, my brother will say his favourite games are Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, but I know they’re not. His favourite game is Super Mario 3, but he won’t admit it because it’s not ‘cool’. (Perhaps the young respondents in the study may have also been worried about their reputations too? How can we be sure these were their favourite games?)In April’s issues of Xbox and Playstation magazine (also rated 15, and for good reason) nearly every page I flicked through showed some form of violence either:
Even the front covers show depictions of brutality. The Xbox magazine shows a futuristic and very real looking soldier holding a machine gun from Crysis 2 with the tag line ‘The best-looking game on the Xbox leads the most spectacular shooter line-up ever!’ (Yay!) while the Playstation cover shows a detective looking at a dead blonde girl, with blood dripping from her mouth and her panda-eyes rolled back (although this part of the image was removed from the magazine cover sleeve).But at the end of the day, how bothered are we really? And if we are very bothered indeed, how far will we go to censor images of cruelty and aggression? This argument seems to run parallel with the ongoing debate of sexualisation in the media and its effect on young girls.
It seems the boys have violence to deal with, and girls have sex.Let’s pretend for a moment that it’s true … there is a direct and sole correlation between violent video games and violent children or children with lowered sympathy.As the age of audiences playing video games has vastly widened (children can play games on smartphones and elderly care homes are known to have Nintendo Wii’s) does this mean that you’ll be worried about the welfare of your child if granddad is due to babysit after a stint of Street Fighter? Will you worry about your judgment on the road after a lap on Gran Turismo? If the answer is no, then good on you! You know the difference between right and wrong and fantasy and reality! As my Facebook fan says “I know not to roundhouse kick a guy who’s staring at my girlfriend”.Reality and Fantasy7-15 year olds should know the difference between right and wrong/fantasy and reality and if they don’t, (or lose track, as we all do sometimes) then they should have families around them to put them on the straight and narrow.Video games continuously blur the lines between reality and fantasy. The video games we play today strive to reflect real-life scenarios (war, crime-ridden neighbourhoods) but is it this visual mimic of reality that is making the children more susceptible to copycat behaviour?
As a child, maybe about 7 or 8 years old, I used to love playing a game called Boogerman by Interplay on the NES. The point of the game was to flick bogies at the enemy and build up enough gaseous power in order to break wind so strongly, than your enemy would vanish upon receiving the blast. And yet, even at that age, I knew not to behave this way in the public arena. Children around the globe watched Tom and Jerry and played Super Mario but we knew not to bounce on people’s heads, or throw pies. If gaming and violence are linked, then perhaps the games should go retro and become animated again, so as not to avoid ‘confusion’, especially as technologies like Augmented Reality are eliminating the use for control pads, so the gaming experience becomes even more enveloping.
The ‘lowered sympathy’ study admits it could’ve been much more in depth and this highlights that we, as a research industry could do more research on research. Let’s not take results at face-value. Let’s us “but why?” and “what if?” and maybe even read up a little on what we’re researching in the first place. For instance, another study talked about in this months BBC Focus magazine tells me that popular children tend to be more aggressive (hmm, I do wonder though what came first, the aggression or the popularity?) and in another study “The Human Brain: Hard-Wired to Sin” published on the BBC Focus website, we’re told that we are ‘hardwired to be bad’ due to our medial prefrontal cortex. Violence is everywhere.
Yesterday, some poor kid got shot down the road from me in North London. As I heard this news in the background of my sitting room, I continued to make tea. To tell you the truth I didn’t even look at the screen. Am I a bad person? No. I am just desensitised to it, whether the violence is real or fake. Furthermore, Wedding Crashers was playing on the T.V the other day where Bradley Cooper punched Own Wilson in the face. Whatchagonnado? Desensitisation is the reason why the Oxfam adverts in my newspaper become more and more disturbing. They want to shock me into giving my money over. Shock me with something I may not have seen a million times before. We could learn a lesson from the violence in video games/violence in children debate, that there are many layers of research and especially with today’s technologies, we have no excuses for leaving any stone unturned.
At the time of writing, Betty Adamou was on the programme committee for ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions 2011, as the younger ever committee member.