by: Colleen Hannon (Momgamer) Do Violent Videogames really make kids violent? Colleen Hannon, our own Momgamer (no relation) takes an in-depth look at how the media interprets the data. This article is still relevant, but it’s based on an article Newsweek no longer has online. We’d love to say they retracted it in embarrassement. . . but we can’t. 

Newsweek heralded a new study that claims to prove that violent videogames make children aggressive or “violent”. However, a closer examination of the study, and of the article itself, is important to understanding what’s really going on here.

Like most mainstream coverage of videogames, there are two real problems. We have the study (and the others like it), and we have the articles themselves. Taking that and people’s misuse of the study results for their own ends adds up to an expensive boondoggle that is getting in the way of intelligent policies about media for children.

The Study

In this particular case, the study has holes you can drive a truck through:

• 44 subjects is an absurdly small sample. Especially for the wide-reaching effects they’re claiming.
• The double-blind methodology they used is biased towards finding results. It assumes from the get-go there’s something out there to find. In a case like this where you’re trying to discover if something exists that’s a no-no.
• There’s no comparison to a kid doing anything else. Maybe jumping rope has the same effect?
• It doesn’t take individual preferences into account – some kids like bright shiny things, but some would be scared by them. Maybe that result doesn’t mean he’s “desensitized”. Maybe he doesn’t like war games or racing games with a lot of virtual grease monkey features. When you’re testing for emotional response, this stuff matters.
• The study didn’t test for how long the changes lasted after they stop playing.
• The study didn’t test them before they played the game so we don’t know what their brain looked like before.

There is a huge amount of misunderstanding as to what an fMRI test actually shows. Here is a great overview of what they’re actually looking at with some great linked sources available at the bottom. Basically, something that causes neurons to fire in the brain causes a change in blood-flow in that area. That change in blood flow is what the fMRI picks up. That’s all.

What change is indicated by that shade of orange over there? We don’t know. It doesn’t see the neurons themselves, and there’s no real indicator what different levels mean. And since we really don’t know what the different changes mean, any change in the scans at all indicates a “positive” result to this study.

fMRI is not as accurate at physical mapping as other techniques. You are not getting pinpoint accuracy as to the exact placement of the change. The margin of error is quite wide in the scale of measuring exactly which neurons in a living brain are firing. Especially if you’re linking your results to those obtained by other methods. If they were nauseated by the violence rather than excited by it and the locations for those things are in close enough proximity in the brain, the scan results would still display it as the same exact change.

And to top it off, no one has ever managed to map the data in these studies to real world behavior in any person of any age.

Add that all up and you don’t get science or even truth; you have a recipe for a self-fulfilling prophecy someone spent a lot of money for.

I wish we’d get a real study of this topic that is conducted in a rigorous manner, and in such a way that it’s results give parents some solid information. How about comparing a game to reading a happy little book or doing something else. Would having them read “The Velveteen Rabbit” cause a change? What about reading a Superman comic? What about Shakespeare? Watching a cartoon? Or what about watching a real news report about a crime? How about a compare and contrast between a war movie and a war videogame? What about a videogame with a knife weapon and holding an actual knife? As long as this type of thing is taking up budget space I don’t think we’re going to see it.

The Article

Now onto the Newsweek article itself. It’s an interview conducted with the head researcher on the project. The questions are quite awful. It’s quite clear the writer had some opinions on the subject. You can read it for yourself from the link at the top so I’m not going to pick it apart point by point here. My personal favorite is the one suggesting that no one buy their kids games for Christmas or Chanukah just based on this study. Don’t believe me? It’s the last question in the article.

I was impressed with the researcher’s answers in many respects. You could see he was trying to make it clear just what he was doing and not try to make too much stew out of one puny little oyster. But the writer was having none of that. The writer wasn’t asking him detailed questions about the study. He was asking him how the ratings system works. If you want to know about that, I’d suggest going to http://www.esrb.org.

That picture at the top really sets it off perfectly with the mom worriedly leafing through the game cases with her nine-year old child in the background with the toy gun. If I didn’t know that game she’s frowning at was the squeaky clean, E-rated Kirby’s Air Ride for the Gamecube I might be on the warpath like this writer so clearly wants.

The Costs and Other Agendas

It hits you right in you very own personal pocketbook.

The study doesn’t have a specific cost listed, but renting the time for the scanning hardware and the support staff (if they’re not buying it outright) alone is very expensive. One source I found priced just the fMRI testing itself at $500 an hour, plus the salaries of the staff to run it. Then add in 3 years worth of the researcher’s salary and all his assistants. He is a professor of radiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. This is a public university, so the citizens of his state are paying for this.

This one article isn’t that big a deal, right? I wish. It’s not alone, and the effect doesn’t stop once it gets pushed off the homepage. This article will get cited in other papers or picked up by the newswires, and because Newsweek is the source it won’t get the scrutiny it’s pathetic attempt at analysis and reporting deserves. Other sources like England’s Daily Mail has another article on this same study here. England has their own set of localized cases where someone blames a highly publicized, brutal crime on a video game, too. And true to form it’s dug up again there at the bottom.

Other articles are written and it just keeps growing. And it will get passed around from pundit to preacher to teacher until it ends up being cited supporting some idiotic policy handed down from on high regarding videogames.

Then it gets better. Lawmakers jump in. Some staffer in Congressman So-and-So’s office does the math on the demographics of the sources and factors in the election year, and this source times the number of other articles out there who are touching on the same topic in a similar fashion. He gets to the total at the bottom and it all adds up to this issue being a hot button item his boss needs to get in on for his campaign. Then we start getting legislators trying to suck up votes by appearing to care drafting stupid legislation in a form that’s already been judged unconstitutional in 12 states.

That legislation that comes out of this is expensive, too. Even if it doesn’t pass you’re still spending their salary and those of their assistants to craft it and the committee members and their staffs to debate it and if it gets to the floor we’ve got the whole bloody legislative body. If it gets passed, let’s add the costs of the inevitable court challenge that will fail just like it has 12 times before now. Illinois is looking at a $510,000 judgment against them for the other side’s legal fees in their failed attempt to regulate games. Michigan, Washington state, and others are all having to pay up. We could be doing something useful with that money. Illinois and Michigan are both facing budget problems already that this certainly isn’t helping.

When a real problem (like the overloaded foster care system) doesn’t get the effort and money spent on it to fix it, you get to pay the court costs and costs of incarceration for the kids who fall through the cracks or commit crimes that would have been prevented by intervening in the larger causes. Kids don’t get into crime because they saw it on TV; they get into it because no one cares and they don’t get to see any better because no one paid attention to them on any level.

Let’s take a high profile case. Devon Moore was picked up by police after being involved in a car theft and during booking grabbed a policemen’s gun and shot three of them. Florida lawyer Jack Thompson used this case as a banner to try to blame the videogame Grand Theft Auto for the crime. He claimed the boy was programmed by playing the game to kill. It didn’t work – he’s on death row in his state for the crime.

Let’s look at this defense. He played hundreds of hours of GTA before he was 17. Those lawyers would have you blame the game. Countless people have gotten up on their soapbox blaming the game. One group has been suspiciously silent, though. I want to know where the people who should have been monitoring what that boy played and what he was doing for those hundreds of hours are. We have Jack-o going on all channels about GTA, no one likes to mention that boy was abused and bounced between 21 homes before he was six-years-old and spent the rest of his adolescence in various foster homes (source: see here). No one was stumping for sweeping changes and funding increases for foster care in their campaign messages this last time around. We had Rick Santorum whacking wrestlers in the mouth and trying to pass legislation for yet more studies like this.

And speaking of Mr. Thompson and his ilk. There is a cottage industry out there of professionally outraged groups. Their entire reason for existence is to be outraged about videogames, and to get money to convince you they’re right in being outraged. I’m not suggesting that this particular researcher has an agenda, but this isn’t his only study. See a study he released in 2004 here. But I do know that his previous study was funded by The Center for Successful Parenting. Right there on their homepage it states, “Video violence is harming our kids. Your child may already be ‘gamewashed’.” Yeah. That’s a recipe for a clear and balanced agenda for this discussion. And that study was designed much the same way as the one I’m going on about here.

Other groups, like Mediawise, seem to exist solely to fund founder Dr. David Walsh’s own research studies with many of these same flaws built into them. Oh, and to keep him funded for the next 10 years.

If you are a game-aware parent and you care about your kids see and hear, it’s a real fight to get straight answers. And if you’re in the industry yourself you get angry when they publish these things. Like when you’re interviewed for an article then totally ignored for a sensationalist piece of crap that makes people think strangers and child predators can get to your child via their Nintendo DS in a public place (see this). Or when Dr. Dobson or one of his cronies has gone off and called games a tool of the Devil again and a gal you know from church stops you in the coffee line to use this garbage science and his blinkered moralizing on you as a club. Every year you read that link to some annual think tank justification-for-their-existence report masquerading as truth about games and you have to climb those same worn steps to your soapbox again and you are gritting your teeth before you even type the title on the top of the page.

What Do We Do?

There are issues with people’s perception of gaming that do need to be addressed.
–Parental education; someone needs to be giving them solid guidelines on how to deal with their kid’s media consumption of all types.
–Parental involvement; they need to be paying attention to what their children are doing and it’s not just at the end of a controller.
–Social problems and crime; many ills in our society are being blamed on videogames with no demonstrated evidence they are the actual cause while properly documented causes are going unresolved.

This type of study and this type of article does nothing to help any of that. It spreads dis-information, and it does it in such a way that it actually gets in the way of the real issues that need to be addressed. It also provides fodder for certain people and their shortsighted moralistic agendas. It’s not just touchy-feely social stuff. It costs you personally every day, whether you play videogames or not.

If that makes you want to join in this fight, then go for it. This is a big windmill. Pick your line to charge in on and point that lance wherever you wish. They’re all over the place. If you just want to watch, that’s fine too. But watch actively. Study up when someone throws this sort of thing at you. Look into it.

Those think tanks, lawyers, doctors, and politicians are right about one thing. Our children’s well-being is at stake. But we need the truth. We need real facts, and we need them now so we can have wise rules about media consumption in our homes. And along with that truth, this web of lies and ambitions cannot continue to drive our public policy.

Tags: Misc