November 19, 2007 -
Texas A&M prof Christopher Ferguson has sent GamePolitics a copy of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: A Meta-analytic Review of Positive and Negative Effects of Violent Video Games. The work represents Ferguson's latest meta-review on the effects of video game violence. GamePolitics covered an earlier publication by Ferguson in February.
Ferguson's review disputes findings by other researchers that link violent games to agression. Ferguson writes:
Video game violence has become a highly politicized issue for scientists and the general public. There is continuing concern that playing violent video games may increase the risk of aggression in players...
[Ferguson's] results indicated that publication bias was a problem for studies of both aggressive behavior and visuospatial cognition. Once corrected for publication bias, studies of video game violence provided no support for the hypothesis that violent video game playing is associated with higher aggression. However playing violent video games remained related to higher visuospatial cognition.
At the time that this article is being written the mass-homicide at Virginia Tech... is but a few months old. Not surprisingly... news media have indulged in speculation that video game playing may be involved in the etiology of this shooting although information about the shooter has thus far not supported a substantial link.
Ferguson notes that video game play is ubiquitous among modern youth while school shooting incidents are rare:
It is not hard to ‘‘link’’ video game playing with violent acts if one wishes to do so, as one video game playing prevalence study indicated that 98.7% of adolescents play video games to some degree with boys playing more hours and more violent games than girls.
However is it possible that a behavior with such a high base rate (i.e. video game playing) is useful in explaining a behavior with a very low base rate (i.e. school shootings)? Put another way, can an almost universal behavior truly predict a rare behavior?
Comments
w00t
Ummm maybe u can hope for micheal moore?
And that's impossible to prove since history has already shown us otherwise: Not only was their violence before pong, there was tons of it to go around.
I love this line. It's succinct and beautifully phrased.
Good Dr. Ferguson, you win the Al Gore Award. You don't need to win the Internet, because you invented it. :D
Hear,hear!
That is, by and far, my favorite quote from MiB.
Good arguement, the only flaw (as such) is basing it on JBT having eithics. Sadly he sold his in an attempt to make bank. He has fallen to (at least) one of the 7 deadly sins.... Greed. ie in his parlance. The Love of money is the root of all evil. All he has left is hot air and shadows. All he can hope for is to attempt to dazzle and delay.
-DarthCylon
Point taken. Truth doesn't seem to concern him too much these days, based on what I've see of his "lawsuits."
I'll read more into what this study has done, and if they follow the right procedures (that is, the intent of the study cannot be noticed by the surveyed and so on). If you get asked by someone just two questions "How often do you play videogames?" and "How aggressive are you?", the study would be fundamentally flawed, obviously.
oh and there are two different Skyler/ars on here now. Just hope that Skylar doesn't think I'm stealing his/her thunder.
@Father Time
You have to actually buy the report. It costs $30 and would probably a very dull read.
Oh if the info isn't unbiased just in our favor then I'd definitely have to play devil's advocate and take the other side.
I have to believe that 90% of us here who follow GP would be very much against violent games being played by the general public if causation was found between them and violent acts on society (i.e. school shootings, homicide, armed robbery, etc).
Would that be the old report referenced in february or the new one? If it's the new one then I'd still like to have a link anyway.
The old report in February is one of Ferguson's previous works, but now Ferguson is responding to some of the newer studies.
Old Ferguson work: http://gamepolitics.com/2007/02/19/researcher-finds-scant-evidence-linki...
The kinds of stories I think he's responding to:
http://gamepolitics.com/2007/11/19/study-finds-violent-games-can-teach-a...
And if even he isn't banned, it wouldn't look good for his case against GP and the ECA to be posting on their forums.
Since when has that *EVER* made a difference to JT? Posting gay porn in a legal filing doesn't help make cases either.
I need the link to the actual study not the gamepolitics story about it, (and I want the one posted about today, not the one in february)
Asif he cares. He acts like he's the second coming thus he can't be touched.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiT2cbyRtAI
This was one of the sources I found on EBSCOHOST.
Interestingly enough, another source I found was "Not in front of the children" by Marjorie Heins. It mentioned a study decades ago where one researcher asked several juvenile delinquents if they read comic books. Most of them answered yes, so he came to the conclusion that comic books were to blame. It then cites someone with some common sense, who explains that if they had taken a more varied cross-section, they would have found that 90% of the kids in the city ream them as well.
Also, did you know that 100% of murderers and rapists consume some sort of liquid? DOWN WITH WATER! DOWN WITH MILK! DOWN WITH ORANGE JUICE!
etc etc
Paying $30 to read a report on violence when Game Politics gets as a freebee!
I'm gonna punch the first kitty kat I see I'm so angrY!
How can I find out where or when it will be published?