one of the best articles in a long time

jaggeh

News-Medical.Net

Violent online games appear not to cause any substantial real-world aggression
Medical Study News
Published: Saturday, 13-Aug-2005
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Results from the first long-term study of online videogame playing may be surprising. Contrary to popular opinion and most previous research, the new study found that players' "robust exposure" to a highly violent online game did not cause any substantial real-world aggression.
After an average playtime of 56 hours over the course of a month with "Asheron's Call 2," a popular MMRPG, or "massively multi-layer online role-playing game," researchers found "no strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game," said Dmitri Williams, the lead author of the study.

Players were not statistically different from the non-playing control group in their beliefs on aggression after playing the game than they were before playing, Williams said. Nor was game play a predictor of aggressive behaviors.

Compared with the control group, the players neither increased their argumentative behaviors after game play nor were significantly more likely to argue with their friends and partners.

"I'm not saying some games don't lead to aggression, but I am saying the data are not there yet," Williams said. "Until we have more long-term studies, I don't think we should make strong predictions about long-term effects, especially given this finding."

Williams, a professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an expert on the effects of online video-game play. He conducted the study with Marko Skoric, a lecturer at the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Their findings appear in the June issue of Communication Monographs in an article titled "Internet Fantasy Violence: A Test of Aggression in an Online Game."

According to Williams, researchers have suspected a strong linkage between games and aggression "but, with the exception of relatively short-term effects on young adults and children, they have yet to demonstrate this link."

Williams and Skoric undertook the first longitudinal study of a game to see whether they could determine a link.

Because most video game research has been conducted in the laboratory or by observation in the field -- methods "not representing the social context of game play" -- they had their participants play the game in normal environments, like home.

The results of the new study, Williams said, support the contention of those who suggest that some violent games do not necessarily lead to increased real-world aggression. But he and Skoric concede that other types of games and contexts might have negative impacts. "This game featured fantasy violence, while others featuring outer space or even everyday urban violence may yield different outcomes."

Williams and Skoric also concede that because their study didn't concentrate solely on younger teenagers, "we cannot say that teenagers might not experience different effects."

Still, and interestingly, older players in their study were "perhaps more strongly influenced by game play and argued with friends more than their younger counterparts."

The new study involved two groups of participants: players -- a "treatment" group of 75 people who had no prior MMRPG play and who played AC2 for the first time; and a control group of 138, who did not play. The participants were solicited through online message boards and ranged in age from 14 to 68, the average age being 27.7 years.

Self-reported questionnaires were completed pre- and post-test online and included a range of demographic, behavioral and personality variables. Aggression-related beliefs were measured with L.R. Huesmann's Normative Beliefs in Aggression (NOBAGS) scale. Aggressive social interactions were measured with two behavioral questions: in the past month, did the participant have a serious argument with a friend, and in the same time period, did they have a serious argument with a spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend.

Because of the study's design, only moderate or large effects caused by exposure to the game were capable of being detected.

Today, more than 60 percent of Americans play some form of interactive game on a regular basis, while 32 percent of the game-playing population is now over 35 years of age.

Fears about the games' social and health impacts have risen with these numbers, Williams said, with politicians, pundits and media outlets fanning some of the flames.

Games are becoming increasingly violent, as shown by content analyses, Williams said. One reason is that "the first generation of game players has aged and its tastes and expectations have been more likely to include mature fair." Still, the extent of knowledge about what games do to or for people is limited, and there is "even less understanding about the range of content."

"If the content, context, and play length have some bearing on the effects, policy-makers should seek a greater understanding of the games they are debating. It may be that both the attackers and defenders of the industry's products are operating without enough information, and are instead both arguing for blanket approaches to what is likely a more complicated phenomenon."

Nor do researchers know much about the positive effects of gaming, Williams said. "Based on my research, some of the potential gains are in meeting a lot of new people and crossing social boundaries. That's important in a society where we are increasingly insulated from one another."

Some game researchers believe that video-gaming leads to substantial gains in learning teamwork, managing groups and most important, Williams said, problem solving.

"How often can someone direct and coordinate a group of eight or 40 real people to accomplish a complex task, as they do in these role-playing games? That's a real skill. Games are about solving problems, and it should tell us something that kids race home from school where they are often bored to get on games and solve problems. Clearly we need to capture that lightning in a bottle."

http://www.uiuc.edu/

what do you know, maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

weemcd

Pity for this one sound article there must be hundreds of sensationalist ones

ShiverinEskimo

Interesting alright but like it more or less said - more research is needed - especially to convince (if possible) the hard-line hiliary clinton types who simply wish all violence in interactive entertainment to be eliminated and tabooed...

Branoic

I wonder if the media know about this yet? Maybe The Sun will have it on page one *snigger*

jaggeh

the thing that stands out the most is the positive effects of games over the negative. The hopeful side of this is that these people will get further funding or spark a wave of research into games their effect on us. i can honestly say that without being able to blow things up and kill people in a virtual situation id be more likely to do it in a real situation. *eyes you all warily*

ExOffender

It's good to see more proper research being done. I do see the point that one of the researchers made, that the game in case featured fantasy violence, which I'm assuming means swords and whatnot, whereas more realistic, GTA-style violence might have a different effect. But my gut instinct (how very scientific :rolleyes: ) says that the kind of violence ain't really gonna matter. The guy goes on to say that perhaps 'games in space' or something like that would have a different effect too, which seems to me unlikely, as a lot of space games and whatnot are fantasy games with lasers instead of magic wands, etc, 'future science' replacing 'magic' as the gimmick. And tbh that comment sums up the problem with research into something like video games. In order for the research to be acceptable to the scientific community, it has to be conducted as objectively as possible. So you just don't see this kind of research done by scientists with experience and knowledge of gaming, since such a scientist would surely be a gaming fan, and hence it would be difficult to accept the findings as objective. So most of the research, from what I can make out, is being conducted by people with little to no familiarity with gaming. The researcher doesn't seem to know that if you're playing as Xanthar the Invincible on a quest for the Magic Fairy Crystal, it's the same kind of buzz you get as Colonel McBrick, battling evil Zykomorphians for control of the precious fuel-source Immodium.

It seems to me as ridiculous to link video games with violence as to link a liking for online poker with a general tendency to be a spendthrift. But the guy is right about more research needed into the effects on young children/adults. If only to cover the collective arse of the industry.

Smellyirishman

There was another great article in the recent economist. Showing how the older generation always speaks ill of the younger generations new toy. Be it rock and roll or video games.

Nowadays, everyone is OK with rock and roll (for the most part), in ~30 years when the game playing generation has completly saturated the market, we will hear none of these complaints (May hear some for extreme games, like you would hear about some metal concerts being dangereous, but in the end nobody takes that too seriously anymore).

It is the way of the world.