Reflections on Week 15: Violence in Video Games

Why I Don’t Trust Studies About Violent Video Games

Anything we read this week that calmly responds to negative claims made about violence in video games just seems like common sense to me so I'm not sure there's much more for me to add. Jenkins writes that “the overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure.” And besides that, violent video games are meant to be played by older people rather than young children. The National Institute on Media and the Family found that kids know more about ESRB ratings than parents, making it clear that concerned parents should use the ratings guide to evaluate the content of their kids' games.

I would, however, like to point out how ridiculous it is to do a study where one group of kids is given a commercial video game to play while another group is given a game about cancer and manage to conclude with a straight face that video games about cancer lead to “significantly higher gains in cancer knowledge” than games that are not specifically created to be about cancer. Gee, I wonder if they were surprised by those results. How am I supposed to take studies about video games seriously when the procedures and used systems of measurement are ludicrous to me? How do you seriously measure things like “aggression” anyhow? And how does one feel knowledgeable about the effects of violence in video games when many researchers are probably bent on believing them to be inherently good or evil even as they design their studies?

There was an article in The Onion a while back with the headline “Wii Video Games Blamed For Rise In Effeminate Violence” that makes fun of the current moral panic about violence in games:

“According to the American Psychological Association, prolonged exposure to cutesy video-game violence can increase aggressive frolicking and angry fluttering in children. Paula Greer, co-chair of the APA Committee on Violence in Video Games and Interactive Media, warned that Wii games reward players for explosive girly behavior rather than enforcing proper negative social consequences.”

Won't someone think of the children?


Violent Video Games in a Post-Columbine World

Blaming the Wii for so-called “girly behavior” makes as much sense to me as blaming violent games for school shootings, but people do try to make the connection. Even before anyone knew who Seung-hui Cho was, anti-videogames lawyer/crusader Jack Thompson was a guest on TV news networks as a "school shootings expert." He twists research findings to make it seem like violent video games are how school shooters “train” themselves on gun use. Even after it was proven that Seung-hui Cho did not play video games while in college, Thompson continues to blame games for what happened and in this video he stretches his arguments so thin that not even news anchor Chris Matthews can take him seriously anymore. After the NIU shooting, Thompson went on the news and said the exact same things, though afterwards no evidence of video games was found in Kazmierczak's life.

When I think of people who cite anti-gaming statistics, I think of Jack Thompson. But he's on a pretty far end of the spectrum and I doubt most people are aligned with him. I usually don't talk to people about video games unless they play them too, so I wish I could talk to anti-games people just to know what they personally believe. I'm guessing it all comes down to believing kids are sponges who can't judge the content they're bombarded with as good or bad, similar to what Sternheimer said about the decontextualization of violence in media-effects research and the assumption that children are passive consumers. But considering the growing number of people who enjoy video games in the world, I'm not too worried about the issue right now. It might be a while (as even younger candidates like Obama like to use video games as a metaphor for underachievement), but eventually there will be a moral panic about some other thing and I'll be playing video games with my kids. Including the violent ones, when they're old enough.