Greg Tito said:
While I encourage people like Bartholow to design experiments to test whether there is a link between violence and games, I think he missed the mark with this one.First off, blasting more sound at someone is hardly an accurate measure of aggression and probably speaks more to the sound design of the games played. Call of Duty is likely way louder than whatever game the control group played and probably affected the experiment more.
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I'm sorry, this makes no sense to me. If someone watches a lot of CSI, and then is shown a picture of a dead body, of course they are going to have less of a reaction than those who have never seen anything like that. That doesn't mean that these people are "desensitized" to violence, it just means there is a basic familiarity with those kind of images.
To his credit, Bartholow admits that violent games are not the sole reason that humans can become aggressive, but he is ready to claim victory nonetheless. "Many researchers have believed that becoming desensitized to violence leads to increased human aggression. Until our study, however, this causal association had never been demonstrated experimentally," he said.
I suggest that Associate Professor Bartholow keeps working on it.
I'm sorry, but was any of that even remotely necessary? Not only do you miss his point, you try to inject common sense into a field where that can easily be challenged. This is my main grievance when discerning between whether the Escapist wants to be an editorial site or a news one, and this is just demeaning to journalism. We don't care if any of this makes any sense to
you, you're not a trained psychologist or cognitive researcher. You are an objective journalist, you are not in a position to say whether it makes sense or not and doing so is purely opinion based, making it not an objective news report. Not only that, but you clearly attempt to paint Mr. Bartholow as one of those "anti-game" radicals against all things fun, which is hardly what his point was. He even states that all media does the same and that it would be silly to think that video games are the sole factor. But
it is a factor, and that is the crux of his research. And yes, familiarity with violent imagery
is exactly what desensitization is. And in the end,
you insultingly attempted to catch "victory" just as you claimed Dr. Bartholow had when he did no such thing. I suggest that
you, Mr. Tito, keep working on this, and I say this with utmost sincerity.
Instead of just simply stating your opinion, ask us our opinion. Go "So what do you think? Is this study bunk, or does it warrant some notice? What do our scientists thing about the write-up? Leave your comments below!" or something like that. Don't give us your (obvious biased, as this is a gaming site) opinion on whether it has merit or not as that just puts us in the unmovable mindset that "this man is wrong! He is doing everything wrong!"
On top of that, every single time we get some sort of "anti-game" research statement, all of a sudden we all get defensive. We always go "Dude, like, we already knew that! Of course games cause you to be more aggressive, that's, like, common sense yo!" and go on and demonize them because they're "wasting money on something so clearly obvious!". And every time there is a "pro-game" research, we all go "Oh ho ho! This
proves that games aren't as bad as the naysayers say they are!" and completely disregard any negative effect that they may have. It's absolutely hypocritical of us. This study, while done before, was, as far as I can see, much less agenda driven and put forth with the data at interest, not because they wanted to prove something.
Here's the thing; games have both positive and negative effects, that is absolutely undeniable. When it comes to aggression and/or violent behavior, what we haven't found out is whether those effects are long- or short-term. Of course someone who has played Call of Duty 10x as much as someone else can become more aggressive, but the question is why does it affect him more than someone else? Other people play Call of Duty the same amount of time yet are totally chill. This is all a mystery to us, and the dramatic effects that video games, and all media, cannot be denied.
Now, when the politicians and agenda-driven researchers come in, they tend to blow things out of proportion. Those are studies try to push their own beliefs as to what video games can do, and this if prevalent on both the anti- and pro-gaming sides. Whenever there is a "video games cause aggression" research thing, we always get defensive and point out every single flaw it has while bemoaning the fact that they're "wasting time!" not researching about cancer or some bullshit, and yet when a "video games help eyesight" suddenly, and hypocritically, we're all for it and mock the others for even
thinking that video games could somehow be negative in any way and we don't scrounge the experiment with the same amount of scrutiny as the previous one. It's disgusting, to be frank.
