April 4, 2007
Most youngsters are not affected by video game violence, says a new study conducted at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology.As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, researchers looked at 120 kids aged 11 to 15 before and after a 20-minute session of Quake II (screen shot at left).
Results showed that test subjects who displayed anxiety, neurotic behavior or aggression beforehand were more likely to show increased aggression after playing the first-person shooter. But the majority of kids were unaffected by the game, according to the study results which are published in the Psychology, Crime and Law journal.
Swineburn's Professor Grant Devilly told the Morning Herald:
The majority of people did not increase in aggression at all and we're not the first people to find that.
(the idea that violent games increase aggression is) the only message parents have ever received and it's just not accurate. You've got to basically read your own kid. If you have a quite hyper kid they will come down after playing a bit, but for the rest of kids, the vast majority, it makes no difference at all in their general aggression rate.
Comments
it wasnt just doom they were blaming, marylin manson was a huge target for them when it happened, apparently they were fans of his music. the reason people target games and such is because out of all the possible causes and solutions, something like video game content and accesibility are easy to fix. more complex problems such as identifying the effects bullying had and harris and klybold and major depression they had are much harder to correct and near impossible to reverse the damage if it was in the extremes, and in that case it was. you cant honestly state that doom made them go and shoot up 12 or so classmates and then shoot themselves with shotguns. what politicans are doing is creating a quick-fix solution to a problem that cannot have one.
What encoding did you post in?
So did anyone e-mail this study to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?
@ Lazy
Does it matter? Okay, it kinda does. I read a "report" on the PTC site the other day that claimed religion was being portrayed "negatively" and complained that that was a vague description at best. So, I gotta agree that we need a definition of aggression to better understand the results.
I'd assume that it would use the same definition of aggression as previous studies. More than likely the kids were more accepting of violence or were just more aggressive.
Not sure, the study is in Psychology, Crime and Law, but that isn't available for free. Any psych students have libraries that subscribe to PCL?
And UNstable kids, if it wasn't games, it would be something else that would set them off, even in Jack's sterilized utopia. There have been killers who have blamed their violence on the Bible.
"Game industry buys university, uses money to get phoney study"
Oh I can see it now . The ranting of a losing man.
I mean lets forget that practically all of these kids were screwed up to begin with from years of a crappy home life or bullying and just go on a witch hunt ignoring the real problem. What's the point? See, these people fooling themselves into thinking they're helping the kids are actually hurting them because they ignore their real problems and focus on what they're playing in a video game.
"Out of curiosity, who else has come to this conclusion?"
For recent studies, try here:
http://gamepolitics.com/category/video-game-research/
http://gamepolitics.com/2007/02/28/violent-games-dont-cause-youth-violen...
http://gamepolitics.com/2007/02/19/researcher-finds-scant-evidence-linki...
(Sometimes studies fail because their sampling is not random. The famous example of this is the "Dewey Defeats Truman" scenario - polls predicted Dewey in a landslide because their randomizing method was selecting random phone numbers from the phone book. This was when phone use was not widespread and those with phones were predominantly wealthy and Republican but the population as a whole preferred Truman. Your daily dose of useless trivia, folks.)
Stay tuned for more of this breaking news, including the new Earth is not flat scandal.
Out of curiosity, who else has come to this conclusion?
Then the media picks up on a story, runs it to death, lawyers start finding new 'ambulances' to chase and ramp things up.. And suddenly a minor issue becomes something absolutely huge. I mean come on, we'd blame everything a person does for their actions rather than face up and individualize the person and say "What that person did was wrong"...
Dungeons and Dragons used to be a 'hot topic' of violence and anti-Christian development in youths.. But it's not the business that's pulling down the billions and will dole out big bucks for class action suits. Games are just the new 'pop target', and I dare say until somebody develops a significantly improved method of providing entertainment which garners an even larger amount of income, it will remain so, as stupid as that sounds.
Population: Sadly, not a whole freaking lot.
Here's to hoping anti-gaming fools will get their heads out of their nether regions and realize that not all gamers are crazed psychopaths out for blood.
Really, you can also blame ignorant parents for buying their children violent videogames at the ripe age of 11-15.
Seriously.
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