There is a ton of research out on the effects of video games and children. Frankly, reading this sort of research bores me to death. I wish they had a video game app that explained the effects. One author caught my attention. Agne Suziedelyte has written a working paper entitled "Can Video Games Affect Children's Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills."* I had hoped I could breeze through it and give a quick summary here. That is not so likely! She has managed to complicate the thing in a rather serious effort.
In fact, I have been reading this article and then rereading it. There are a couple of reasons this merits attention. The first reason relates to the broad claim that "There is no evidence that video game playing increases aggressiveness in children." (pg. 3) In general such broad statements should be taken with a grain of salt. This is research speak and can be unintentionally misleading. This sort of statement usually means that the research that has been done is correlational. Correlational means there is a connection but it hasn't proven which causes the other. It's kind of a chicken and egg which came first sort of thing. A statement like this one, can make it sound that there is no relationship between violence and video games. That seems unlikely. Bushman, B. and Anderson C. wrote in 2002 (*2) that "players who had prior experience playing violent video games responded with an increased level of aggression when they encountered confrontation."
The question is, why would anyone make a broad claim that "there is no evidence of video games increasing violence?" Well, it just means that researchers need to do a lot more work to really understand the impact video games do have. That is a warning to us all. These video games are common and there is a lot of peer pressure out there to buy the lastest offering from Playcenter Five, or to buy the new best Murderer's Creed edition. ( Please excuse the made up names!) That doesn't mean that the games are safe. There is also no evidence that sticking your hand in a toaster causes redness. We do know that burning yourself causes redness. I just don't believe that anyone has actually selected a sample of children and a control group to study sticking hands into toasters. That would be cruel.
The second reason for looking closely at this paper is because this paper comes out of the School of Economics and not the Psychology Department. I don't know what prompted this Doctoral Student in economics to study video game violence. The more I dig in to this article, the more I respect the rigor of her methods. It does make sense for this to be an economics study. You can bet that video games are big business. Forbes magazine(*3) quotes DFC Intelligence (a research firm) as estimating that the "worldwide video game industry will reach 70.1 billion dollars by 2015." Do you think that big business might like to have some research saying there is no proven causality between video games and violence or that there are positive impacts of video games?
I'm not suggesting any sort of evil conspiracy. I am just saying that 70.1 billion dollars is a lot of money. It wouldn't be surprising if someone who makes their income slicing their piece of the (video game) pie might want to protect that income from research that would hinder sales. Research that suggested that video games cause children to be more violent could be problematic.
The bottom line is this. Before you fork out 40$ a game for Christmas gifts for your kids, take time to ask yourself if you will really monitor their use and play? Will you really set and follow through with limits? If you will, okay maybe this gift is right for you and your family. If you won't, I would recommend Santa and his elves should find something else to put under the Christmas tree.
*Suziedelyte, Agnes. Australian School of Business Research Paper No. 2012 ECON37, reprinted from the Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection: http://ssm.com/abstract=2140983)
*2 Bushman, B. and Anderson C.(2002). Violent Video Games and Hostile Expectations: A Test of the General Aggression Model. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 1679-1686
*3 Rishe, Patrick. Trends-in-the-Multi-Billion Dollar Video Game Industry: QA With Gaming Champ Fatality, Forbes, 12/23/2011.
No comments:
Post a Comment