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. 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 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. 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, yet when a "video games help eyesight" suddenly 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.
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