Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

[Reach]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

Also, reach, maybe I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that r = .19 accounts for square root of .19 percent variability, which is actually more than 4.something % variability. You probably meant to write this for r = .15.

IU already made a post about this, but somehow it seems to have disappeared...

You don't take the square root. The degree of variability accounted for is described by R^2. r=0.19 r^2=0.036, so 3.6% is accounted for.

squaring the number would give you 40 something % actually...lol.


Which means 96.4% of variability in violent children has not been accounted for...which is exactly why I don't really buy this too much. There could easily be another variable contributing to far more than 3.6%, which would make it unfair to put a blame on videogames.

[Windscarredfaith]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

That's so effed up. ='(

[insanefreddy926]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

Hey, take a look at this: http://gamerevolution.com/features/v...and_videogames

[CrimzonRain]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

I think that violent video games keep people off the streets that would otherwise have an urge to kill--where they can instead kill in a video game

[MixMasterLar]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

When you say "all", it's a word that means "every single one"

Why did you say "all" if you even had a personal example proving it's not "all". There's a word for this kind of situation. It's "most".

You're right.

[tsugomaru]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

I think that violent video games keep people off the streets that would otherwise have an urge to kill--where they can instead kill in a video game

As previously said, there is more than one solution for this, but did it work is the question.

~Tsugomaru

[slipstrike0159]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

I think that violent video games keep people off the streets that would otherwise have an urge to kill--where they can instead kill in a video game

Not everyone lives in a ghetto area where being outside is a bad thing. Chances are, if kids are outside more then they will be healthier. You cant automatically assume that because they are outside that they will eventually get bored and want to kill someone.

[CrimzonRain]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

Well.. what Im trying to say is that if kids could get their aggression out by killing people in video games, its more likely that they wont want to kill anyone in RL cause of stress or w/e

[Cavernio]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

Heh, my math skills suck :-p. I knew that, I really did! I'm also lazy and didn't see a confidence interval.
I've seen plenty enough journals say they've found something in their abstracts, but when you actually read the article, you see something which makes what they say they found much less meaningful.

[Squeek]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

THEY'RE FINALLY BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND! THIS IS AMAZING!

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/17/attorney-general-counsels-parents-to-read-esrb-ratings/

This was from three weeks ago. The Utah Attorney General made this ad to encourage parents to read the ESRB ratings and actually take part in their children's lives.

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/12/07/clinton-and-lieberman-make-nice-with-esrb-why/

This is going to happen today. Two of the biggest names in politics who used to attack video games as the cause of all crime among children (albeit the fact that there is very little compared to previous years) are going to make a public announcement with the ESA and the ESRB today at 3:00. I really wish I could be at home to see this.

Anyway, this seems like a strange time to post this, but here's the finished essay.

Violence in Video Games
With the current surge of parents and lawmakers fuming over protecting children from violence at an early age, it is easy to pinpoint certain activities that could lead children down a life of crime. The most obvious answers are where the children grow up and how the people around them live their daily lives. However, those who seek to protect children have reached a little further than that in order to snuff out violence at as early an age as possible. Not long ago, the game of dodge ball was banned in numerous schools across the country for being too violent. Only recently though were more extreme versions of schoolyard bans, like a Boston school banning the game of tag (MSNBC). To some, it seemed obvious that the next target would be video games such as Grand Theft Auto. However, to only focus on video games as the sole responsibility for isolated incidents involving serious crimes among children such as school shootings is to ignore all other factors at work within this debate and blame the publishers or creators of the games instead. Those involved in debates over these games are pointing the finger at the wrong entity to take responsibility for allowing children to be exposed to violent video games, misunderstanding what is considered “violence” in video games and other forms of media, and failing to discover the source of the false concerns brought up within the debates.

When any trouble occurs in this country, the citizens will always look for the source of the problem and attempt to remove it. This is the only way to make sure it does not happen again, after all, so it is a fairly efficient means by which to take action. However, this style of attack has a flaw, and that flaw comes into play when the source being attacked is mislabeled. What would America have done if we had decided to make the Soviet Union the biggest threat during World War II and simply ignore Germany?

The same situation on a much smaller scale is occurring now with a different mis-targeted source: video games. As the years go by and technology improves, video games get more and more realistic, and as a result have a certain level of immersion. No longer do gamers control a small yellow disc with a small piece removed chasing down little pellets, nor do they control a centipede running around trying to find apples to eat without running into its ever-growing self. Games of the twenty-first century can involve a player controlling a single unit in an army of soldiers in a realistic recreation of events that took place in World War II, or an army of one in a futuristic world with battles to preserve the core of mankind.

As games became more and more popular during the nineties, an organization was founded in order to treat video games just as movies are treated with a rating system. This organization, known as the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), has three primary categories for rating games to keep them simple: E for Everyone, T for Teen, and M for Mature. Retailers are asked to ensure that minors are not able to buy games unsuitable for their age, but there are those stores that ignore this rule. Despite this, several other investigations may lead down a different path of the origin of the “who’s to blame” game. Even if the retailer broke its rules of conduct and sold the game to the minor, several questions remain: how did the child get the money? If the money was handed to the child, why did the parent not ask what it would be used for, or why did they not check it once the product entered the house?

No matter how anyone plays the blame game, the end result is always the parent who either funded, bought, or neglected to take action in preventing their child from playing the game. M for Mature games are not intended to be played by anyone under seventeen, much like how R-rated movies are for the same age group. A study by the Center for Children and Families covered on health news website HealthDay.com reports that underage drinking and smoking have a direct link to the availability of R-rated movies to children, which falls under the same age demographic as M-rated games. Madeline Dalton, head of the study, says that “media is a very important part of children's lives today, and parents need to take it seriously” (Gordon). Dalton goes on to say “I was pretty surprised at how few parents set restrictions and monitored movie-viewing” (Gordon).

If so few parents are managing their children's movie-viewing habits, then they will not be monitoring what their children purchase at a video game store. M for Mature means just what it implies: games rated with this rating are not suitable for children. It is therefore the parent's responsibility to regulate what their children watch, play, and interact with and any lack of taking responsibility should not be pushed onto the publisher or manufacturer of the video game. The ESRB knew of the danger M-rated games could possibly pose to children and sought to prevent any problems by rating the game for adults or mature children. If congresspeople, parents, and those involved in the debates are wrong about who to blame for failing to take responsibility, then clearly they can be wrong about other factors in the argument for prevention of violence in video games as well.

Recently, the National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF) released its report card for 2006. This report card is generally viewed as just a list of the top ten games parents should not let their children have. The list this year has the top-selling M-rated games of the year, much like the lists of 2005, 2004, and so on. However, the report card also had more information regarding who does and who does not actually care to regulate such matters. “As the world of video games continues to evolve, parents are falling behind. As we found last year, this year’s parental survey uncovered an alarming gap between what kids say about the role of video games in their lives and what parents are willing to admit. For instance, while nearly two-thirds of surveyed parents said they had rules about how much time their children may spend playing video games, only one third of their children said they had such rules. Perhaps parents are reluctant to confess how little they attempt to control the amount of time their kids spend in front of the screen. This much is certain: too many of us do not seem to exercise enough control” (Walsh).

After some other information, the article goes on to suggest what parents can do in order to better regulate their children’s activities. “Once parents realize what is at stake, based on scientific research, they should start limiting game time and keeping M-rated games away from their children. … all agree that the Mrated games are inappropriate for kids” (Walsh). This article really approached the core of the true side of the argument. It is very true that M-rated games are violent. Some go so far as to show an unskippable warning on the first screen of the game before anyone can even see the title menu, such as the survival horror game Resident Evil, which reads “This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore.”

Some individuals with power are taking strides to educate parents on the matter, such as Utah Attorney General Mark Shutleff. He made an advertisement to run on Utah’s network television clearly stating that parents need to check the ratings on video games and become a part of their children’s lives to understand what it is they are playing using himself as a personal example. If more people could understand the matter like Shutleff does, this entire debate could be out of Congress and make room for more important legislation.

As it turns out, Congress is wrong about yet another key part of this argument. For this argument to be true at all, there would not only have to be a tie to violence and video games, but there would also have to be violent crimes committed with which the link can be formed. However, according to the Department of Justice's crime rate statistics among children, no such link exists. In fact, crime rate has been increasingly dropping ever since video games became popular (Department of Justice).

According to Duke Ferris, owner of gaming news website GameRevolution.com, those in charge of making laws have been so invigorated by trying to protect children from harm that they have completely misjudged children of this day and age. With such events as arrests for eating a French fry (Aulds) and strip-searches to find a lost ten dollar bill (“Criminalizing”) taking place among children, it is increasingly obvious that the lawmakers assume the worst of our children before even trying to “shield them from harm”. Duke Ferris goes on to say “The most peaceful generation of Americans in recorded history is being shoved through metal detectors, having their civil rights violated on a daily basis, are the victims of unreasonable search and seizure, and are treated with constant suspicion” (Ferris).

Yet another problem is that the definition of “violence” is incredibly subjective. What is violent to one person may be commonplace to another, whether the two people are in different towns, states, countries, or continents. Cultural differences play a key role in defining violence along with how a person was raised. What we consider violent and unsuitable for children here in America may be the norm overseas on prime time television broadcasts. Of course, this can work in reverse too, where a person considers anything and everything to be violent in nature. In fact, according to a study by Dr. Kimberly Thompson, those classic games mentioned before -- the lovable Pac-Man and Centipede -- are so violent that they should never be exposed to children. Her study analyzed game play for 90 minutes and calculated how many minutes featured violent game play. For Pac-Man, 56 minutes were filled with violence, while Centipede had 84 violent-filled minutes (Stanton).

Anyone who has played these classics would note the flaw in this study with the way it is presented thus far. Pac-Man featured a small pie-shaped disc eating pellets while running away from ghosts in a total of 16 whole colors (compared to 16.7 million on the average PC). Centipede had a small snake that grew longer with each apple it ate. The animation of this day was crude at best, which only aides the fact that these games are much less capable of being on the same level as an M-rated violent game of today. To further add incredibility to her theory, Dr. Thompson continued her study with a comparison between old games and their counterparts on upgraded consoles.

With each new console release, graphical capabilities increase and game play becomes more immersive, so as a result, the children who are being exposed to these so-called violent games should be much more into the game play of newer games than they would with older games. As games shifted from 2-D to 3-D, an entire new level of innovation and realism was added, and it has only continued to become more realistic with each passing year. Thus, it is strange to see that the 1985 release of Super Mario Bros. and the 1987 release of The Legend of Zelda were considered to be significantly more violent than their eventual sequels on later consoles (Stanton).

The Legend of Zelda., one of the most widely-recognized classics of all time, is the most violent in the Zelda series according to this study despite being the least aesthetically correct to even be able to form any correlation between the main character and a human being, with the original having 62 minutes of violence, the next in the series having 41, then 32 on the next console, and finally 10 on the newest release of the game at the time the article was written (Stanton). Therefore, according to this study, as realism and interaction with these games increase, children actually become less susceptible to violence from them.

Clearly there is a flaw with the way this is presented, and it is simply a matter of whether or not those who hold the power to use it as a basis to blame video games for all of life's problems use it as fact. So far, the government is actually listening to this study carefully and using its facts for a realistic basis on whether or not the ESRB has to change its rating system (Stanton). The study, in fact, only seems to prove that the word “violence” has mixed definitions among all people and is too vague to describe video games as a whole, so it could be used in favor of those who support video games. It's just one other thing video game manufacturers and producers can use in order to remove the blame from their products and finally allow people to understand what the problem at hand really is and how to help solve it.

The ESRB has been another entity heavily focused upon during the entire debate. Some may say they don’t rate accurately and that they are heavily biased. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. The process of rating a game begins with a random anonymous selection of three individuals in the ESRB pool of about a hundred to view the game separately and submit reports without contacting one another. These individuals are required to have no ties to the entertainment industry. Their reports are sent to another individual who compares the three and judges their accuracy based on how similar they are. It is then reviewed and sent back to the publisher to decide what to do about the rating (Price 124).

All of this information is compiled into Monroe Edwin Price’s book The V-Chip Debate: Content Filtering from Television to the Internet, which goes on to show more information about the processes involved during and after the rating. “Submitting companies are required to sign judicially enforceable affidavits attesting to the accuracy of the submitted material. The ESRB...has a range of sanctions to use against companies which fail to provide full disclosure. ... As a condition of accepting an ESRB rating, publishers must adhere to the [International Digital Software Association (IDSA)] Advertising Code of Conduct, which requires them to display the rating ... on product packaging, and to include the rating symbol in all electronic and print advertising, as well as in other consumer marketing material” (Price 124).

When Madeline Dalton, the expert mentioned earlier with a study among young children and their habits to smoke or drink, focused her study, it was based on R-rated movies and how easily the children were able to access them. It's quite true that it is incredibly easy for children to get access to these movies. What is even more true are the statistics that make up ratings in movies. Children have an easy time discovering these movies unsuitable for their age demographic because over half of all movies on the market are rated R. On the contrary, M-rated video games aimed toward the same demographic as R-rated movies only make up about a tenth of the video game market, with E for Everyone titles scoring the top spot of video game ratings at well over half of all video game titles (Ferris).

This is not the first time an outside source has been wrongfully blamed for the cause of problems in certain children. In the 1950s Rock and Roll had just begun becoming popular among the children of that time period. It was about the same time that more and more teenage incidents took place, so, naturally, the people blamed Rock and Roll for tainting their children. It even went before the House of Representatives, just like this video game violence case has been. As is obvious from listening to radio stations these days, Rock and Roll got off the hook for the “problems” with children of that time (Ferris).

There are clearly differences with Rock and Roll and video games, but the fact that Rock and Roll was not to blame for a surge of “bad” behavior among children only continues to prove that there are other factors at play with this kind of behavior. Placing the blame solely on one facet of the media industry, even solely on one company (the creators of the Grand Theft Auto series) at times, is not the way to approach the problem of how to prevent school shootings or adolescent crime. Perhaps hiring security guards for education facilities to ensure the children’s safety is the best course of action. If a child is displaying violent behavior, keeping that child away from R-rated movies, M-rated games, and Parental Advisory music might be the best option. After all, these forms of media are rated solely for the purpose of keeping children away from them.

However the media and congress like to put it, this entire situation has been blown entirely out of proportion. Children are not becoming increasingly aggressive these days. In fact, ever since the PlayStation hit the market back in 1993, crime rate among children has dropped significantly. A fact directly quoted from the Department of Justice’s website on crime rates among United States citizens reads “Between 1992 and 2002, crime in the Nation's schools for students age 12-18 fell, a pattern consistent with the decline in the national crime rate” (Department of Justice). Continuing to browse their site will reveal a line graph with each line representing an age group. While the groups of those who play video games nowadays (12-24) is still the highest in crime rate, the graph spikes in 1992 and plummets every year following that. These are crime rates that were initially over 125,000 crimes per year and only in violent crimes such as “homicide, rape, robbery, and both simple and aggravated” that have since fallen under 50,000 a year (Department of Justice).

With the least violent children seen in years, how is it that most people blame video games and those who create them for all problems caused by children these days? The source of the problem is a lack of responsibility taken by the parents and the spread of misinformation by the media outlets leading everyone to believe that video games are the root of the concerns adults have with some children’s violent tendencies that make news. There are violent games on the market, but they are rated in such a way that only those mature enough to handle the violence without emulating it are the same people who are old enough to watch R-rated movies without wanting to do the same things seen on screen. If some parents know that R-rated movies are not intended for children, why is it that they cannot see M-rated games in the same light?

Works Cited
Aulds, TJ. “School strip searches students” 7 Jan 2005 Galveston County News. 17 Nov 2006. <http://news.galvestondailynews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=7f11e36c3e86f0bf>.
Ferris, Duke. "The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games." GameRevolution.
13 Nov 2006
<http://www.game-revolution.com/features/violence_and_videogames>.
Gordon, Serena. "Kids' Smoking, Drinking Linked to R-Rated Movies" 6 Nov 2006. ScoutNews LLC. 17 Nov 2006 <http://www.healthday.com/view.cfm?id=535930>.
Price, Monroe Edwin. The V-Chip Debate: Content Filtering from Television to the Internet. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998.
Stanton, Aaron. "Understanding the 62% Violent Pac-Man." About.com. 13 Nov 2006 <http://nintendo.about.com/od/gamingpolitics/a/pacmanvszelda_2.htm>.
Walsh, David, Douglas Gentile, Erin Walsh, Nat Bennett. "11th Annual MediaWise Video Game Report Card ." National Institute on Media and the Family. 28 Nov 2006. NIMF. 2 Dec 2006 <http://www.mediafamily.org/research/report_vgrc_2006.shtml>.
"Bureau of Justice Statistics." 2005 U.S. Department of Justice. 17 Nov. 2006 <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/welcome.html>.
"Criminalizing Kids II." Overcriminalized. 17 Nov. 2006 <http://www.overcriminalized.com/studies/2004.01_ZT2.html>.
"Mass. grade school bans tag, other chase games." 19 Oct 2006 MSNBC. 17 Nov 2006 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15316912/>.

[RandomPscho]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

And today my local news said that "The children that were playing violent video games had emotional changes. When the kids were given some tests, they had a harder time focusing and a harder time suppressing their emotions than that of the kids that played education video games."

[tsugomaru]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

And today my local news said that "The children that were playing violent video games had emotional changes. When the kids were given some tests, they had a harder time focusing and a harder time suppressing their emotions than that of the kids that played education video games."

Didn't we say somewhere that it is hard to test these type of things as they do not count other outside factors that are influencing them?

~Tsugomaru

[RandomPscho]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

Didn't we say somewhere that it is hard to test these type of things as they do not count other outside factors that are influencing them?

I am just saying that it was on my local news, and they made violent video games sound terrible for people.

[gerbi7]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

Well what were you expecting some educational video game to do... lmao

And wouldn't playing a game of football or something get you similarly riled up?

[Selinica]

Re: Well, it happened again. Scientists are bashing video games.

Oh please. How many times do scientists have to bash video games, and how many times will I simply snicker at it?

I've been playing video games since I was three and I'm no worse off.

Maybe I'm just not that impressionable, or these studies are all a load of crock. :P