I do not feel sufficiently qualified from a research standpoint to comment on Ferguson or any other researcher’s conclusions.

I do comment on others who draw conclusions from such research, as I did in regard to Amanda Schaffer’s article, which, as I noted, had a sensationalized title and made heavy use of qualifiers.

There’s nothing wrong with having an agenda, of course, and it was lazy writing on my part to phrase it this way (which is, regrettably, an ad hom attack–no, really, my apologies). But this post doesn’t engage the media effects literature in a meaningful way. Perhaps it’s too high a standard to expect something like Jason’s comment (he IS a media studies scholar, after all), but it’s problematic to trumpet an article that is not available to most readers without even considering its weaknesses.

All that said, I must concede that it is more thoughtful than the fistful of other blog posts I found citing the article.

Regarding Jason’s comment: good work. I agree (and even pointed out) that video game effects research should be considered as part and parcel with media effects research generally. In light of the meta-analysis on violent effects of violent media more generally (Anderson et al., 2003), this would actually support the claim of effects–albeit with the caveat that the early evidence suggests video game effects may not be quite as strong.

That said, Jason does catch me failing to properly contextualize the debate. As we’ve discussed before in the office (read: Jason dropping knowledge, me listening), the moral panic paradigm is an excellent explanation of how the debate is playing out in the public sphere. In short, nice catch.

Yet the literature suggests violent media generally, including video games, are at least potentially dangerous. As a society, I hope we can water down the genre-specific video games by spreading that outrage to violent role modelling generally.

As far as media policy prescriptions go, this is really the South Park movie paradigm: why do we censor profanity on TV (on the assumption that kids will parrot curse words) but allow impossibly graphic violence during prime time? If we’re worried about the effects of media on kids–and I think we should be–we really ought to keep kids away from all violent media.

I don’t think we should censor games or TV or movies, but as parents, neighbors, uncles, etc., we should keep kids in media environments that encourage the right behavior. Industry-led ratings are an appropriate addition to this solution. FCC fines for naked boobies? Not so much.

If we want well-adjusted kids, maybe we shouldn’t let them watch hours of HBO every week. FPS games just go on that list as far as I’m concerned. After all, as expert Pat Brown argues–recounted on GamePolitics:

“VIOLENT video games can be a part of this picture as they lend to the loss of empathy that is a hallmark of psychopathy and young children viewing repetitive violence and participating in “killing” via video games are living in an unhealthy psychological environment. Furthermore, teenagers who are already psychopathic and then spend a great deal of time with violent video games are being inspired to act out their psychopathy in a similarly violent manner.”

Rather than attacking those who are concerned about video game violence based on uncritical citation to flawed academic research (as on ArsTechnica), the reasonable response is to enter into a broader dialogue that points the fingers at movies and other violent role models. As Marilyn Manson rightly notes, the President’s violent foreign policy is probably an even bigger problem.

Sadly, the single strongest cause of violent behavior among youth is almost certainly the hardest to solve: violent adults in households.

I don’t really have as much an opinion on “Part II” regarding plagiarism. These seems to be some lazy writing going on here, but we as teachers have enough verbatim lifting from Wikipedia to deal with that it’s not really worth it to call someone in to the office who can’t keep her sources straight. Mark down a letter grade, write in the margins in red pen, and move on.

As for “Part I,” however, while I am all for “collective social and especially parental responsibility,” I don’t agree that video games require this any more than other media. Video games are at the center of a moral panic, and their impact has been grossly blown out of proportion. I only know of one study on Bible passages’ effects on aggression, for example, but it also found a positive correlation.

I can’t blame you for describing the VA Tech massacre “first-person shooter-style,” considering that that seems to be what everyone is calling it; consider, though, that the shooter owned no video games, and hadn’t even played Counterstrike since high school (he was a senior in college). While columnists and politicians are still latching onto this as a video game issue, responsible news outlets who checked their sources have noticeably distanced themselves from such claims. (I’ve written about this on my other blog, as well.) Law reviews and magazine articles discussing video game violence typically start with some invocation of statistically unusual school shootings in which police and judges have consistently dismissed video game play as a causal factor. See, too, Dmitri Williams’s “The Video Game Lightning Rod,” which demonstrates how journalistic coverage of games has followed a fairly typical pattern associated with earlier moral panics surrounding popular media. In other words, I think this has more to do with more lazy writing and following trends than with the actual state of current research on game violence, or even current social problems actually linked to games for that matter.

In fact, Schaffer’s approach to the literature is reductive and strangely reminiscent of the way the defendants in video game violence legislation cases described this body of research. Schaffer focuses on literature by Craig Anderson and a small group of others who have transitioned from working on TV violence research. I cover a lot of this ground in an earlier post here, but just to pull out a couple details, first consider Judge Kennelly’s statement in overturning Illinois’s doomed game regulation law. The defense seriously weakened its argument by only presenting research that agreed with its position, rather than addressing any of the research that comes to other conclusions.

There’s more of this literature published than you might expect, too: consider Williams and Skoric’s short-term longitudinal study of an MMO (which found no effect) and John Sherry’s meta-analysis of video game violence research (which found a positive effect, but less than other studies, and put into perspective). Meanwhile, the British Board of Film Classification is considering rating games less harshly than film (the reverse being case as of now in the U.S., at least), as a recent study suggested that games are actually less emotionally engaging than other media. (I know there are more examples, but I wasn’t planning on blogging today, so hopefully I can be forgiven for glossing over this a bit.)

Also consider Kennelly’s (and Sherry’s, and others’, and my) contention that “aggression” as operationalized in much of the violence literature is still a far cry from real-world “violence.” Honking a horn at someone really loud or writing swears on a piece of paper do not equal real world violence. Moreover, what if the “aggression” these studies are picking up is a good thing for many or most players? To quote from my earlier post: “The ‘aggression’ encouraged by playing games might not necessarily be a bad thing. A member of the Quake Grrlz movement (as quoted by Henry Jenkins in his Senate testimony) once suggested, ‘Maybe it’s a problem…that little girls DON’T like to play games that slaughter entire planets. Maybe that’s why we are still underpaid, still struggling, still fighting for our rights. Maybe if we had the mettle to take on an entire planet, we could fight some of the smaller battles we face everyday.’” Seeing as how I’m currently working on a dissertation on “geek culture,” it might also be worth noting in passing that middle and high school ethnographies have indicated that non-aggressive boys are particularly likely to be labeled “geeks” or “nerds,” and these titles (perhaps not coincidentally) have also long been applied to gamers.

I won’t claim that video game violence research is without merit or fails to show some sort of influence, but I will insist that video game violence is not the problem it’s being made out to be. There are too many stumbling blocks along the way to making a conclusion that this medium deserves any more attention than other media. As Henry Jenkins points out in a recent essay on media violence, the current debate is more about pointing fingers and assigning blame than about actual “effects.” A more holistic view of violence in culture opens up opportunities to talk about what might be attractive about violent content in the first place, and how to address what people do with it. Focusing on one medium disproportionately, however, just makes it easier for game publishers to make waves with controversial content. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, this puts even the publishers of non-violent games at risk of a backlash like that seen against comics in the 1950s, from which creators and publishers have struggled to recover for decades.

Moral panics come and go, but the policy that results can have a lasting impact. I know you’re not calling for regulation, Bill, but let’s consider where most arguments of this sort end up going.

Yes, we are a pro-game consumer (not pro-game industry) site, but we routinely report research both pro and con on game issues. Had you been a regular reader or taken the time to search our “video game research” category ( http://gamepolitics.com/category/video-game-research/ ), you would have known this.

At GP we’ve taken the game industry on over a number of issues over the years when warranted, and our record more than bears that out.

In Amanda Schaffer’s case, we accurately pointed out the APA’s 2005 conclusion that violent games are statistically linked to increased aggression, not actual violence.