What video game behavior study would I support?
While debating with someone here about a recent study again showing a correlation (once again, not causation) between game playing and a violent mindset, he asked what study I would support if I had any amount of money and time. Here is my answer:
The key is getting buyoff that what you are testing is not certainly harmful to begin with. If so a classic (but expensive and slow) method is pretty obvious:
–Get two groups of 1000 5-year-old kids, and make them as demographically similar as you can. They must not have played video games yet.
–Promise to pay them and their families a stipend for participating faithfully in the test.
–Don’t tell them what the test is.
–Flip a coin to decide which one to make the control and which one the test. I can have ANY amount of money? Ummm, okay, a solid diamond coin flipped by a naked Brazilian supermodel.
–The test group kids are forbidden from playing “violent” video games as defined by the study….. best way is probably to supply a list of games okay to play, and add to it by request if the proposed new games pass the criteria. The criteria would be the kind of criteria that the game-banner lobby would apply in law.
–Over 20 years (say from their age 5 to 25) they need to report their activities and attitudes in an objective form, particularly arrests, fights, self-harm, substance use, injuries, and so on.
I would love to see the results of that and (assuming a real scientist planned it and did it, not me) I would feel strongly affected by it as I consider legislation and my own approach to making games.
To get parallelism, it would be good to have more than one test group… one that is limited to no more than 5 hours a week of unrestricted games, one that has a more relaxed list that has games which are violent but not the most extreme (WoW is okay but GTA is not), and so on.
It would take a long time, but society will have this issue for the next several thousand years at least so we may as well get started. If they had done this with TV back in the 60s, when they first started speculating on its effects, we’d have been able to get the answer, and design a refined study, and have the answer again by now.
While at it, do the same with other not obviously harmful but suspected things, both for its own reason and to compare relative effects. Include diet, pharmaceuticals, sports, TV news, etc, as I mentioned before.
Tags: harmful-games, kids, Parenting, research, television
