Research Finds Negative Effects in Violent Videogames

antipunt

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Jan 3, 2009
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Hmmm

*reads study

Hmmm

>_>


oookk.....

so .. what?.. I don't get it..

This doesn't mean anything at all. It's like saying a Hockey game makes fans more aggressive after the game.
 

Clankenbeard

Clerical Error
Mar 29, 2009
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So much anger. Wow.

The study is a small focus group. The sampling could be bigger. What are the quantitative results? Don't know..I don't want to pay to actually download the study from Scopus. And yes, there are seemingly presumptuous conclusions without basis in the article printed here. But...

Why is it so hard for everyone to believe that video games can affect your behavior? The study doesn't say you are going to act out the things you saw in a violent game. It says there is evidence that they influence behavior. If the study said video games about selfless acts inspire people to volunteer in their community, would there be this uproar of dissent?

Your brain is a very complicated thing. It is influenced by everything you take in and not all of it on a conscious level. Your super-ego is always there, putting the stop limits on your actions and filtering incoming information to fit your belief system. But that underlying id shifts its boundaries around based on the environment it experiences.

For Example: I did a couple long days of Saints Row 3 a while back. Afterwards, I didn't want to whip out The Penetrator for any beatdowns. But I do remember that my driving was actually more reckless for a bit. I pulled into a parking spot way to fast and came really close to the side of another car. That was the way I had been driving for the past few days in game. The reckless driving style was becoming an unconscious competent act (see: The 4 Stages of Learning) and I had to do a conscious mental "reset" to get back into the right mindset. I'm 43. And I slipped into a recent, abnormal behavior during a normal unconscious act. Is the game to blame? Hell no--I am the only one accountable for my actions. But, my short-lived behavior change was a direct result of my gaming experience.
 

Lunatic High

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Apr 14, 2012
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What a crock of shit I play nothing but violent video games my whole life from Mortal Kombat to Gears of War and I've never hurt anyone who didn't have it coming
 

Farther than stars

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DrOswald said:
Farther than stars said:
DrOswald said:
Farther than stars said:
ZombieMonkey7 said:
Another garbage scientific research find to add to the list
You're aware that the longer that list becomes, the less valid your arguments become, right?
I am not saying that I agree that this study is garbage, but 1,000 or 1,000,000 garbage studies prove nothing more than a single garbage study. If the study is carried out under improper conditions then the results are not valid. That is the complaint most often leveled against these studies, that they are done poorly and the results are therefore invalidated and should be ignored.
My point is that if there are a million studies out there that suggest the same link, they're a lot less garbage than any unscientifically founded arguments, because they have an academic community backing them up.
And my point is that a million points of data that were each obtained through faulty experiments will lead to an incorrect conclusion. Bad data is bad and should be thrown out. Having a great deal of bad data does not somehow make it good data.
No, but the fact that there are large quantities of data means that the accumulative chances of it being faulty fall under the fault margin. Or is scientific consensus something that's now on trial here?
 

spartan231490

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Jan 14, 2010
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Sample size is way too small, choosing from university students is not a representative sample, wasn't double blind(which probably means the stories read to the violent games group were read in a more aggressive tone), expectation of violence in media does not equate to expectation of violence in real life, expectation of violence does not equate to violent behavior or tendencies in the subject, this is not even close to being something that you can reasonably draw a conclusion from.
 

vxicepickxv

Slayer of Bothan Spies
Sep 28, 2008
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I have a feeling that there's a lot that's not mentioned here OR on the Ohio State site... mostly because Andy lifted the article in its entirety(sans Wikipedia links to most of the games).

Given the fact that more and more people are long term gamers now that when I was a kid leads me to believe that there isn't really a link between even the increased aggression and actual increases in violence.
 

sumanoskae

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Dec 7, 2007
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So you're telling me that after playing a war game a work of FICTION, when people were presented with other works of fiction that they referred to the other and most recent work of fiction.

If you've just finished watching 300, and I ask you to think of a color, are you more likely to say florescent pink or crimson red?

I don't see how this proves anything.
 

Grottnikk

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Mar 19, 2008
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I've played video games since the Atari 2600. The only offense I've ever committed was a moving violation 20 years ago (and no I don't play racing sims). Either the world is sitting on a powder-keg of violent videogamers ready to go ape-shit at the slightest provocation, or people are just looking for a scapegoat.
 

chiefohara

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Sep 4, 2009
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Cryo84R said:
As much as I may dislike the findings, we must go with the best available data we have when forming conclusions. Is this study comprehensive or authoritative? No, but it's data appears to be valid and scientific. As honest intellectual individuals, we must set aside our personal beliefs when confronted with evidence and question not only the evidence, but our beliefs. The mark of a good scientist is the ability to toss out long held, even intimate and personal beliefs when presented with contradictory data.

Again, I'm not saying this is authoritative by any means, but please keep an open mind to all sources of valid data, regardless of conclusion.

EDIT: That being said, I do some some holes in the study methodology.
I know you gave the disclaimer about the methodology, but i can only speak from personal experience and my post was based on such.

Im 20 years playing violent video games. I volunteer at my local search and rescue unit, im a corporal in the army reserve, i do a shit load of charity work as an actor (my main job), the only altercations i have ever been involved in has been to defend someone,and i have no criminal record and one citizenship award

I watch violent movies too.

I pay my taxes, do right by my neighbours, I vote and take a principled stand when i need to.

I also have an MA from a university.

Im not perfect, but i do alright by people. Im certainly no genius, what i have noticed however in my time in university is that Academics will and quite happily shit on anyone and anything if it gets them a thesis.

These guys admitted to a limited scope of study and they found results.... fine. Results are results, but insinuating conclusions out of this is a betrayal of the academic and research principle these guys are hiding behind. From my own perspective and using my own personal experience as a flimsical authority in this matter, i think these guys are not only stretching, but also attention seeking.
 

synobal

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Jun 8, 2011
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sethisjimmy said:
Not only does this study not prove that violent video games make people commit more violence, but it also does not prove that violent video games even make people more aggressive. Unless you consider writing violent stories correlates into you being an aggressive person, which I think is silly.
Thank you, I'm always effected in my writing by any media I've recently consumed. It is part of the reason why when I sit down to write a particular Genre I put myself on a genre ban of that particular genre.

I don't want my work to seem overly derivative or be overly influenced by other media in that genre. So say I'm writing a fantasy story, I don't play any fantasy games, watch any fantasy movies etc. Because if I do elements of them will find their way into my writing and it will greatly distract me and generally stop my flow.
 

DrOswald

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Apr 22, 2011
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Farther than stars said:
DrOswald said:
Farther than stars said:
DrOswald said:
Farther than stars said:
ZombieMonkey7 said:
Another garbage scientific research find to add to the list
You're aware that the longer that list becomes, the less valid your arguments become, right?
I am not saying that I agree that this study is garbage, but 1,000 or 1,000,000 garbage studies prove nothing more than a single garbage study. If the study is carried out under improper conditions then the results are not valid. That is the complaint most often leveled against these studies, that they are done poorly and the results are therefore invalidated and should be ignored.
My point is that if there are a million studies out there that suggest the same link, they're a lot less garbage than any unscientifically founded arguments, because they have an academic community backing them up.
And my point is that a million points of data that were each obtained through faulty experiments will lead to an incorrect conclusion. Bad data is bad and should be thrown out. Having a great deal of bad data does not somehow make it good data.
No, but the fact that there are large quantities of data means that the accumulative chances of it being faulty fall under the fault margin. Or is scientific consensus something that's now on trial here?
This is exactly what I was talking about when I said that having a large amount of bad data does not make it good data.

Imagine that 10,000 different experiments are performed. The objective of these experiments are to determine which value is larger: A or B. 9900 of the experiments come to the conclusion that A is larger than B, while only 100 of the experiments state that B is the greater value.

According to your logic the 9900 experiments are more likely to be true, and this is the important part, even if many or most of them can be proven to be experimentally unsound. Simply because there are more of them.

Moving on. After the 10000 experiments are performed and we check the methodology of each, it turns out that 99% of the results favoring A were based on faulty experiments, while only 1% of the results favoring B were based on faulty experiments. This means that there were only 198 valid experiments, with 99 results in favor of A being larger and 99 results in favor of B being larger.

While this is an extreme example, it demonstrates that faulty data (data obtained through flawed experiments) should be ignored entirely. They should have no bearing on our conclusion at all. Valid conclusions can only be drawn from good data, and a valid scientific consensus can only be reached using good data.

Which means that if this is indeed a garbage study, then it should put in the list of experiment to be ignored entirely. It does not matter if that list has 5 items or 1,000,000 items. All of them should be ignored completely.
 

UrieHusky

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Sep 16, 2011
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They must have a TARDIS to be able to see "Long term effects" in a three day span.

Honestly.. what a bunch of rubbish, you can't test the long term effects of ANYTHING in a short period of time, that's completely against the definition of LONG TERM

*looks at captcha*

I'm Batman? well that's one way to calm me down after getting slightly worked up haha

It didn't accept my answer of "This city's full of people, WILLING TO BELIEVE IN GOOD"
I'm sad now.
 

kburns10

You Gots to Chill
Sep 10, 2012
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medv4380 said:
Aureliano said:
Brilliant! So that's why violent crime has been on the rise for the last 20 years--Oh, er, wait. Sorry. Apparently violent crime has been on a massive decline since the early '90s. Huh. That one period of time where people have been playing craploads more video games than ever before.

Anyway, there definitely couldn't be an inverse relationship between people getting out their rage fake murdering people and the rate of frustrated people getting guns and regular murdering people. That would be silly.
You have a point but you're missing some data. Things that affect violent crime in youth typically take 20 years for it to be seen in statistics. The book Freakanomics has a good argument that shows the logic behind it. So if you use Mortal Kombat as the start of Violent video games then there should have been an uptick in violence in 2011. And since games only got more violent you'd expect the next 10 years to have a substantial increase in Violent Crime. However, we're still in a decrease in violent crime.
This. I feel like this study made a few leaps in conclusions without fully testing them. Either way, I have yet to kill or want to kill anyone, so *shrugs* I don't know.
 

Moonlight Butterfly

Be the Leaf
Mar 16, 2011
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kburns10 said:
medv4380 said:
Aureliano said:
Brilliant! So that's why violent crime has been on the rise for the last 20 years--Oh, er, wait. Sorry. Apparently violent crime has been on a massive decline since the early '90s. Huh. That one period of time where people have been playing craploads more video games than ever before.

Anyway, there definitely couldn't be an inverse relationship between people getting out their rage fake murdering people and the rate of frustrated people getting guns and regular murdering people. That would be silly.
You have a point but you're missing some data. Things that affect violent crime in youth typically take 20 years for it to be seen in statistics. The book Freakanomics has a good argument that shows the logic behind it. So if you use Mortal Kombat as the start of Violent video games then there should have been an uptick in violence in 2011. And since games only got more violent you'd expect the next 10 years to have a substantial increase in Violent Crime. However, we're still in a decrease in violent crime.
This. I feel like this study made a few leaps in conclusions without fully testing them. Either way, I have yet to kill or want to kill anyone, so *shrugs* I don't know.
Sorry to jump into your conversation but the first gaming console the Magnovox Odyssey was invented in august 1972. I don't really see many 40 - 50 year olds running about tearing each other apart.

Violent crime has been on the decrease since video games were invented. If they were villain training machines surely the earth would be a wasteland by now. I have been playing games since I was 3 years old in 1984 and I haven't killed anyone yet :p.

Also as a personal anecdote my dad who suffered from violent episodes which we later found out were due to a form of epilepsy, (Think living in The Shining every night) could put off his rampages by playing DOOM 2 on the snes with infinite health and the chainsaw. I think video games are more likely to be an outlet for violent tendencies rather than a cause of them and that's the reaction their studies are seeing.
 

Ninjat_126

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Nov 19, 2010
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Riobux said:
You know, alternatively violent video games produces a heighten violent imagination, or they are more likely to perceive FICTIONAL characters to doing violent things because they've been constantly exposed to a medium where problems are fixed violent. He may be correct, but it's REALLY lacking ecological validity and I'm really hoping the article is being paraphrased and not they've deduced that violent video-games have long time negative effects from three days of playing video games leading to a tendency to be more violent with the imagination. Which by the way, violent imagination means nothing in terms of violent behaviour.
Mature, well composed, and well spoken, kind sir.
 

Aaron Sylvester

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Jul 1, 2012
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The study did suggest that the violence factor "levels off" after a certain point. So maybe it levels-off at a point so insignificantly low that it has virtually no impact on actual violence/aggression outside of the mind. Those who are violent and aggressive would've been that way regardless of whether they were playing violent videogames or not.
 

BroJing

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Sep 16, 2010
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Aaron Sylvester said:
The study did suggest that the violence factor "levels off" after a certain point. So maybe it levels-off at a point so insignificantly low that it has virtually no impact on actual violence/aggression outside of the mind. Those who are violent and aggressive would've been that way regardless of whether they were playing violent videogames or not.
Actually what he says is that 'It may level off at some point' he uses very dismissive language about the possibility while going on to claim that there is no 'theoretical reason' why levels would later decrease.

Except all the studies mentioned which only found short-term aggression increases rather then long ones.Odd how he forgets to mention that.
 

I.Muir

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Jun 26, 2008
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Id like to see this study's data, was it peer reviewed?
Ive been playing violent games since Ive been 14 and if anything have mellowed out as time has gone on, I'm 20 btw
Actual violence is nothing but a lack of self control and will