Bruce Bartholow from the University of Missouri-Columbia has just released a study (PR) that shows what he calls a causal link (New Scientist) between playing violent games and the “dulling of the senses” if you will to real life depictions of violence and it’s enactment. Of course there are people on both sides of the coin, including Jonathan Freedman who disputes the link between desensitization and aggression.
But wait a minute… What did the story really say? We’ll have to wait for the January 2006 edition of Media Psychology (or of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology if New Scientist is right) to find out, in the mean time however, I noticed something that didn’t really surprise me in the way that the media has reacted to this and the way in which the “culture” of gaming has responded. Media came out flying the part of the press release that touted the link, while ArsTechnica made sure to mention the bit of sophistry that they found when seeing the “short term causal link”.
Not being innocent of any sort of spin mongering, and to point out what brought me to the article is the following from the release:
“However, it is essential to understand how violence is interpreted by players and that only a part of M-rated games contain concerning violence: that is, realistic, rewarded and justified violent activities of attractive perpetrators in real-life settings,” added Weber. “Although there are probably more positive effects of playing all types of video games and even violent video games, such as socializing with peers or improving cognitive and physical abilities, it is important that we continue to explore this causal relationship we have shown in this research.”
They are not really saying that what they found is bad, and they suggest that there may be more positive effects. They surely want to look into violence as something that is easy to measure based on the biomedical metric that they have developed, but at the same time, they are pointing out that that not all games are violent. This is the point that seems to get lost on so many. Of course, I may be looking at it wrong as well, but we’ll have to wait and see.
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