April 15, 2008 -
I've been reading Grand Theft Childhood of late and thoroughly enjoying it. The refreshing new look into the relationship between game violence and children is authored by Cheryl K. Olson, ScD and Lawrence Kutner, PhD of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media.Adam Thierer has obviously been reading too, and posts a comprehensive review on the Technology Liberation Front:
I must admit that when I first saw the title and cover of Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, I rolled my eyes and thought to myself, “here we go again.” I figured that I was in for another tedious anti-gaming screed full of myths and hysteria about games and gamers. Boy, was I wrong. Massively wrong.
[The authors] have written the most thoroughly balanced and refreshingly open-minded book about video games ever penned. They cut through the stereotypes and fear-mongering that have thus far pervaded the debate over the impact of video games and offer parents and policymakers common-sense advice...
I highly recommend Kutner and Olson’s Grand Theft Childhood. It is must-reading for anyone who is serious about studying the debate over video games, child development and the public policy surrounding them. It is the most sensible thing ever penned on the subject.
Check out Adam's full review.
GP: I particularly enjoyed the way that Olson and Kutner skewered some of the more well-known video game critics. I'll have additional coverage on that aspect of the book later this week.
Comments
That suggests, as this book does, that there are a lot more influences at play that merely 'video games corrupting young minds', many of them societal and even biological, that is why I think gender may actually play a pretty important role in this.
Well done,
KayleL, of course people are going to debunk this. thats what most people do: b!tch and moan about stuff that doesnt agree with their opinion
Thats what politics is.
That was incredibly insightful, thanks.
Suzanne, while we only talked to boys in the qualitative part of our research (focus groups that included 42 boys and 21 of their parents), that part was used primarily to refine the language of our much larger survey of 1254 middle school students of both genders plus about 500 of their parents.
So we most definitely included girls in our research.
Congratulations with the book!
Its great to hear that you have been thorough. :)
Thanks for that clarification. I feel I must pick up this book and give it a nice read.
Haven't you heard the saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover"?
The title of the book simply mirrors the mindset that many parents already have about video games; because most people will only read books that match their own beliefs, the authors used this title to reel in unsuspecting game critics.
The book itself, however, is not the BS that the aforementioned group WANTS to hear, but the unbiased facts about the issue that they NEED to hear! As Daffy Duck would say, it's quite a "devilishly clever" strategy. :)
My narratology is WAY better than your stupid ludology! ;P
/jk, but seriously, narratology > ludology
P.S. - LINKS!
http://www.gameology.org/
http://www.digra.org/
http://gamestudies.org/0701/
Sentences like "Our research found that playing violent video games was associated with playing with friends." Means absolutely nothing. The phrase "associated with..." basically makes the whole thing pointless to use in this kind of argument. I bet I could do a very scientific study of my own and find that playing violent video games is also associated with playing alone, or not with friends, or bear attacks, or global warming.
So far I am pleased with it, but I'm not very far in and this kind of stuff is exactly what pisses me off.
Maybe I'm just jaded, I've seen to many political arguments on Forums I moderate that seem to go:
'You're just a Liberal'
'No... You're the Liberal!'
'No, it's you that is the Liberal!'
'.......My State could beat up your State!'
Judges on the other hand...
To follow up Suzanne's criticism, I am worried about another methodological problem pertaining to interviews with children. I am referring to the third person effect. (Yes, I know some of your articles made references to it, if I remember) It's just something that I'd like to mention for others.
http://tinyurl.com/434efo :D
Liberal did start out that way in the US. Still holds that definition to a degree (ie, the Libertarian party), but, yeah, in mainstream usage, it does seem to have come to mean "Anyone that isn't conservative (or these days, anyone that isn't a neo-con).
Probably has something to do with the Cold War making communist and socialist dirty words in politics.
I'm not sure I understand your point.
The "third person effect hypothesis" involves the concept that people tend to believe that a media message is more powerful on others than on themselves.
In our focus groups with both kids and parents, they each spoke of video games having a possible behavioral effect on other kids but not on themselves (or their kids.) This shouldn't be surprising since (1) they know themselves/their kids pretty well, and (2) the universe of "other kids" is huge, so one would expect even low-probability behaviors to occur.
What struck us, however, was that not a single kid or parent actually knew a gamer who had become violent because of playing video games.
Other than that, we really didn't address the topic in any detail.
(living somewhere in asia)
I'm sorry it just came out of my mind and it wasn't clear to me either. I was just thinking how your critics would say about your results. For example, maybe parents and children did not realize of the attitudinal and behavioural changes (using pre-post measurements) brought about by violent media use.
Another example (Gentile, Saleem & Anderson, 2008, p.43) was that parents or kid would think of extreme violent examples, instead of the more banal aggressive behaviours, like verbal aggression (is swearing verbal aggression?)
I'm sorry I'm seeing VG studies that seemed to have flaws here and there.
On the left, we've got Hillary, Rod Blagojevich, Leland Yee,..Elliot Spitzer...on the right we have Ahnold, Jack Thompson, Sam Brownback, Bill O'Really...Lieberman is also a game critic, but he's honestly not too bad in that area and I'd hesitate to simply classify him as 'liberal' or 'conservative'.
While the bills are often introduced by Democrats, they enjoy bi-partisan support, usually with only one or two dissenting votes...leaving both responsible. It isn't something you can just dump on either party.
"Seriously, is this book being advertised anywhere other than GP (I know it’s not an ad, per say, but you get what I’m saying), people who don’t play games should read this more than anyone. "
well at the very least its getting some attention (and support) from an Omaha radio station (even if it is a country station, well I guess it'll better attract those who need to read it)
At least they're trying to understand the 'why', instead of just painting with a broad brush about what effect videogames have on people.
And funny Lawerence should mention Jackie Chan/Jet Li... aren't they in a movie together? I did hear there were more cops out en force after the F&F movies came out... I confess I love em, but I certainly would not do any of that outside the confines of NFS, though.
Nice job on torpedoing the V-Tech controversy though... sorry Jack. (NOT! :P)
At the very least I'll be putting this book on my christmas list.