Don’t Make Me GTA Your Ass – Violence and Video Games
Within the last few years, a seeming hysteria over the issue of violence and video games in today’s youth has erupted, peaking just after horrific events such as school shootings and kids killing other kids. Fingers are pointed, research is funded, and studies are conducted with results that are insignificant or questionably conclusive, making the argument that video games cause violence in children and adolescences shaky at best.
I know I’m not alone in feeling that video games have become a scapegoat for societies’ ills these days. People just don’t hurt other people because they learned it as acceptable behaviour from a game. Growing up in the school system and interacting with other human beings should, and for the most part does, discourage aggressive behaviour with social sanctions. If you hit another kid, you get stuck in the corner and no one wants to play with you, be kind and you will be rewarded with friends.
I believe society does a huge disservice to children in believing they aren’t intelligent enough to differentiate between reality and fantasy, acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. If we found documentation today of why a young gunman walked into a restaurant and injured three people that said, “my video game said it was okay”, we would assume a mental instability, not that his video game actually told him it was okay.
Dr. Craig A. Anderson, a Stanford graduate, whose recent attention to violent video games has resulted in U.S. Senate testimony, addresses and consultations to government and public policy groups, as well as several published articles in respected science journals, conducted a study with fellow researcher, Dr. Karen E. Dill in 2000.
Their study and subsequent article insinuated that violent video games, specifically DOOM, affected Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, resulting in the Columbine High School shootings in 1999.
Their study compared short-term effects of video game violence and aggressive personality and found that their experiments yielded a positive causal correlation between violent video games and aggression among a general population of freshmen students enrolled in an intro psychology class in a Midwestern college. In layman terms, this means they found that playing video games caused people to be more aggressive than those who do not play video games.
However, Dr. Christopher Ferguson in 2007, found cause to suspect the results of Anderson and Dill’s study.
“Anderson and Dill claim to offer causal evidence for the video game-aggression link. However a close read of their article suggests otherwise. The authors use four separate measures of aggression provided by a “noise blast” program (which punishes players with an irritating white noise) and find significance for only one of the four. Had the authors examined the confidence intervals around the effect size for these findings they would have found that such a confidence interval crosses zero and thus should not be considered “proof” of a positive finding.” Ferguson, 2007
He found that the Anderson and Dill study to be misleading! Ferguson also points out that the noise blast program that was used was nonstandard and therefore could have affected the outcome of the study’s findings. Ferguson, along with colleagues, conducted a similar experiment to that of Anderson and Dill, using a “standardized and reliable version of the noise blast program [and] found no relationship between violent game exposure and aggression.” Ferguson, 2007
Can it be concluded that a universal pastime foresees such an infrequent behaviour, the extreme being school shootings? Studies have shown as much as 98.7% of teens play video games, that’s a significant number. If an adolescent steals, gets into fights, murders, or gets bad grades, chances are highly likely that they also play video games, but does that create a cause and effect relationship? What about all the honour roll students, volunteers and responsible adolescences who play the same games, is there a correlation then? In my opinion, video games can’t be correlated to extreme behaviours and shouldn’t be used to placate victims of abnormal tragedies. It’s an insult to victims and gamers alike.
The Entertainment Software Rating Board has created a standard for video game rating, which can be found here so that consumers, specifically parents, can make the informed decision about a game’s content and whether it is appropriate for their child or teen. A large concern for consumers is the interactiveness of video games and the effects they can have on youths, whether aggressive behaviour in the virtual world can become a learned behaviour in reality.
Video games come with age restrictions much like all the fun things in life, however in the end, it becomes the parent’s prerogative to let their child acquire and play these games until their 18 years old. What irks me the most about the issue is that studies such as Anderson’s will be used against gamers, making a blanket statement that virtual violence will beget real violence and we will all be forced to be content playing Pong because some people just don’t want to be a parent and restrict their family as they see fit. They need the government to restrict everyone else so they don’t have to worry about it themselves. Being a responsible parent should ultimately become the conclusion to the studies and research conducted, no matter what the results or correlations. Legislators should not be a substitute for the parent.
More anti- video game-aggression link reading:
References:
Christopher John Ferguson, Ph.D.
Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D. & Karen E. Dill, Ph.D.
