Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

A few weeks ago, Jack Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV, “the gravest assault upon our children in this country since polio.”  This is pretty standard for Thompson, a Florida lawyer who has spent his life crusading against violent video games and all the evils that (he claims) they bring with them. Watch in wonder as, less than two days after the Virginia Tech shooting, Thompson rattles off a string of false and unsupported assumptions about the gaming habits of the shooter. I would be remiss if I didn’t also point you, briefly, to the Janet Reno thing.

Thompson’s views, while eccentric in presentation, are not particularly outlandish. Lots of people believe that video games can make people more violent, more capable of killing. Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman founded a whole research institute around the concept, and has likened video games to “murder simulators” for at least the last decade.

From a research perspective, the question is not whether violent video games can turn a person into a violent criminal. Given the millions of people who play violent games and the handful of crimes that are purported to have been influenced by them, it’s impossible to draw a line from one to the other. Rather, researchers ask a broader question: Does prolonged exposure to violent video games increase aggressive thoughts and actions in the real world?

Research that directly addresses this question essentially began with the work of Craig Anderson and Karen Dill in a study that, ironically, was conducted at the same time that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were planning the infamous Columbine High School shooting.  Anderson and Dill’s study was a one-two punch, consisting of a survey that compared respondents’ video game habits to markers of aggressive personality, as well as an experimental section that tested the effects of brief exposure to violent video games on the players’ thoughts and behaviors.  The study found that, indeed, there seemed to be a connection between playing violent games and having a more aggressive personality, and that playing a violent game quantifiably increased a person’s aggression.  This study has set the tone for the lion’s share of research in this area, with most studies adopting some variation of survey research and live experiment, and finding similar results.  Some in the field are confident enough to call the debate settled.

Things are rarely “settled” in academia, however.  A new wave of research is reviving the debate, and it shouldn’t be hard to see why.  Taken at face value, Anderson and Dill’s study would seem to support a link between violent video games and aggression. Face value is, of course, very attractive, and this study is one of the most heavily cited in the field. It’s even shown up on Slate.

A more careful look at the paper reveals troubling methodological problems.  For instance, while their survey asked questions about aggression and video game playing, it omitted questions about family life, peer groups, and exposure to real world violence, all of which have been shown to contribute to aggressive behavior.  The experimental section of the paper also has its flaws. Myst and Doom were the games of choice, probably because they both utilize a similar first-person perspective. But Doom and Myst differ in more ways than their violent content. For instance, Myst is entirely self-paced, and thus pressure-free. Doom, even independent of its violent content, is a significantly more fast-paced, competitive experience. Without accounting for these factors, Anderson and Dill’s video game findings are extremely questionable, and the field has not resolved these problems in the intervening years.

Take a more recent study by researchers at Kansas State University, grippingly titled, “Longer You Play, the More Hostile You Feel”.  Participants played a violent video game while periodically answering a brief questionnaire on aggression.  Sure enough, aggressive thoughts seemed to increase with play time, confirming the murder simulator hypothesis.

However, while play time seemed to exert mild effects on aggression, the type of controller used to play the game, either a standard gamepad or a gun-shaped controller, had a far stronger effect.  Additionally, each individual survey consisted of just three questions.  A three-item questionnaire is hardly reliable in the scientific sense, and it requires an impressive suspension of disbelief to suppose that such a survey could gauge a person’s thoughts and emotions in any meaningful way.  This study has only shown, if anything, that holding something shaped like a gun exerts strong effects on aggression, nothing more.

It is generally a bad sign when a scientific question is stuck in the same methodological quagmire for ten years.  Fortunately, a new vein of research is demonstrating that video games really do affect our brains, but in a positive way.  In Grand Theft Childhood:  The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, Drs. Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson deflate the popular myth of video game as murder simulator, and go on to show that the game world can provide a real refuge for the socially disadvantaged.  Work by Christopher Ferguson at Texas A&M International University suggests that the data from the early aggression studies do not hold up under more rigorous statistical tests.  Work at the University of Rochester shows that people who play video games, even relentlessly violent ones like Call of Duty, are strengthening their cognitive and visual abilities.  For instance, while it has long been established that men are better than women at rotating objects in their heads, research shows that even brief exposure to video games can make women as skilled at this as men.

Violent video games are here to stay.  By harping on the video game bogeyman, Jack Thompson, David Grossman, and others do nothing but distract the public from real issues like negligent parenting and gun control (or the lack thereof), while clogging the courts with frivolous lawsuits.  Worse, the science simply doesn’t support the idea that video games are a real danger.  Contrary to the notion that violent video games prime our children to become super-predators, it seems they can have beneficial effects on mental health.  Good thing, too.  Grand Theft Auto IV sold over half a billion dollar’s worth of copies in its first week alone.

See also: VG Researcher Blog, GamePolitics