Study finds stable personalities unaffected by violent games
(Visited 7615 times) Game talk
Apr 032007
Today came word of word a new study on games and violence or aggression. This one seems to reach some reasonable conclusions, too:
The authors propose that gamers fall into two groups: stable personalities, and those with emotional states that are susceptible to being influenced by game play. Within the latter group, the response to violent games largely depends on the emotional states of the gamers when they begin play. Angry gamers will cool off, calm gamers will get agitated. They also note that only two of the cases of rising anger reached levels that would be considered cause for concern, suggesting that dangerous levels of anger were rarely triggered by gaming.
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[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe authors propose that gamers fall into two groups: stable personalities, and those with emotional states that are susceptible to being influenced by game play. Within the latter group, the response to violent games largely depends on … […]
The actual studies that I’ve read that linked aggression and video games explicitly described the affected to possess an aggression disorder. In my opinion, the results of these studies were misinterpreted, deliberately or not, when announced to the world. At least we now have a study whose results are explicit about the affected.
[…] Original post by Raph […]
Weren’t this uncovered relating to films and violent behaviour ages ago? Shouldn’t that have rung a bell with the nay-sayers?
I’ve always believed people that get affected by games, films and books(!) have had a troublesome upbringing, less than ideal family stability, emotional issues etc… And now I’m proven right…yey.
Trouble is that it is FAR easier for politicans to say :”Games are bad! Remove them!”, than saying : “Society is bad! We need to change everything about it!” …right?
Shouldn’t that have rung a bell with the nay-sayers?
Logic does not work well in politics. Yet.
And this study will get half the play in the mainstream media of the more sensationalistic “Games are sending us to hell in a hand basket.” I can hear the crickets already… Too bad though.
I would assume that it would be obvious to most that if someone is already screwed up mentally that they are going to be more likely to be disturbed by something they see on tv, movie, or a video game that they play. A disturbed person playing a violent video game is sort of like asking a crack addict to hang out in a room full of crack and not touch it.
It also reminds me of being a kid and my parents not wanting me to listen to Snoop Dogg because I would become a drug user. They thought the music was subliminal. I have never touched a drug in my life and I still enjoy Snoop:P
It is just the media and politicians trying to find new ways to win the next election. Gaming is huge right now- so lets blame it for everything!
Where are all of the research design experts in the gaming community warning me that the study hasn’t been ‘proven valid’? No concerns about using correlations?
I’ve got to give you kudos Raph; with this following on the recent kerfuffle about the driving study you’re the only one I’ve seen with any balance to your thinking. Everyone else seems to think that games and gaming has the unique attribute of affecting people but only in good ways.
You are not earning any points with that remark. I cannot speak for anyone else, but I simply do not have the time to engage in fruitless debate with complete strangers every time some group of scientists somewhere publishes some research about something. If you want to review this study to check for correlation-causation issues, be my guest. I will read your review, I will consider your thoughts, but whether I will comment on your review depends on whether I have time. Now, if you will excuse me, I have better things to do than explain to you why alienating people interested in this subject with ad hominem remarks based on narrow-minded notions of the infallibility of science is a piss-poor attempt to spark discussion.
[…] New scientific research tends to annoy me, at least when the research is not actually new. When the Hot Coffee debacle hit the press, I decided to hit the books instead. I found numerous published papers in various academic journals about research into media-and-game violence and its effects on viewers. A few of those papers are listed below with their abstracts. Numerical data was stripped from some abstracts for readability. […]