Videogame Violence: A Fair and Balanced Study?

Thomas MacDonald — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:26:18 -0500

We’re at a point in history when, if gamers are to maintain credibility, we need to acknowledge both the good and bad in our passion. Grand Theft Childhood ($25, Simon & Schuster) by Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson is a fair and comprehensive study of games and violence, and we would do well to pay attention to its conclusions.

The good: After thorough research, the team utterly dismisses the outrageous claims about games inspiring real-life violence. For example, gaming gadfly Jack Thompson states outright that since Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho played Counter-Strike in high school, the game was responsible for the acts he committed: “These are real people that are in the ground now because of this game. I have no doubt about it,” Thompson explained. Kutner and Olson, as well as the Virginia Tech Review Panel and the FBI, are having none of it, stating there is no linkage between criminal violence (particularly school shootings) and violent games.

The bad: There is a correlation between middle school children who play violent, M-rated games and actual antisocial behavior. These kids aren’t carjacking old ladies, pistol whipping store clerks, or defeating alien invaders with any greater frequency than their peers, but they tend to “act up” more, get in trouble in school, fight, and disrupt class.

Kutner and Olson refuse, however, to make a conclusion about which direction that cause/effect relationship travels. Are aggressive kids drawn to M-rated games, or do the games make them aggressive? Even with their large data set, Kutner and Olson are reluctant to blame games as the sole factor that affects children’s behavior. Logic dictates that no 13-year-old should be playing Grand Theft Auto, the most played game among boys (and the second most played among girls, who preferred The Sims by a slimmer-than-expected margin), simply because they’re not psychologically equipped to parse the violent, amoral, and satiric elements of the series.

Grand Theft Childhood is a refreshing mixture of hard science and common sense. I approached this study expecting more heat than light and came out illuminated. It’s going to be a vital element in the upcoming debates as politicians attempt to score points by cracking down on violence in gaming.

Game Theory: Grand Theft Childhood?

Thomas MacDonald — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:32:04 -0500

Have you heard the one about the 3,500 research studies that show a positive relationship between media violence and violent behavior? It’s an old cudgel often used to bludgeon the gaming industry in the debate about violent games.

It also turns out to be a complete fabrication. Those 3,500 studies simply don’t exist. In extensive research for their own study, Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson (founders of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital and professors at Harvard Medical School) searched the available literature and found only about 300 studies on this topic. In their new book, Grand Theft Childhood, Kutner and Olson conclude that most of the previous studies were either inconclusive or flawed, with none providing the smoking gun linking media violence and real-world violence in an incontrovertible cause-effect relationship.

They decided to go looking for the link themselves and created what is arguably the most far-reaching and thorough study yet. The results may not be what either side of the debate wants to hear, but after reading their results, it’s hard to deny that Kutner and Olson’s report is scrupulously fair—and that it’s a bombshell.

They begin by making the crucial distinction between youth violence, which they define as an attack on a person or thing with the intent to injure or break it, and the less easily defined aggression, which includes antisocial behavior, bullying, and delinquency. Their research reveals two key facts that are relevant to the debate.

First, there is no link between young people who play violent games and actual violence. In fact, as gamer culture has grown, incidents of violent crime have dropped significantly. They also debunk the myth that school shootings such as the ones that took place at Columbine (blamed on Doom) and Virginia Tech (Counter-Strike) were caused by games. Instead, they learned that Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho didn’t play games in college, which tallied with one of their more interesting discoveries: Kids who don’t play games are the social outcasts and misfits. Games help kids fit in and form relationships.
Their study did, however, find a connection between aggression and violent games, and we’ll explore that in more detail next month.

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is an editor at large for Games magazine.

Maximum PC video game violence RSS Feed

Videogame Violence: A Fair and Balanced Study?

Game Theory: Grand Theft Childhood?