By Deitra Wedd
New Editor
A school shooter blamed the video game called Doom for a misleading interpretation of what happens when someone gets shot.
At age 16 Evan Ramsey, brandishing a 12-gauge shotgun, shot and killed two people before turning the gun on himself. After surrendering to the police, he made his claim that he thought shooting people would be like in the video games where once they are shot they get back up again instead of dying.
While Ramsey may have blamed his actions on video games, according to the professionals the research for video games having negative effects on those who play or watch them has been poorly constructed and even shows that video games have positive aspects.
The effects that video games have on society vary from improving learning ability to causing aggression. “Several studies showed an increase of aggressiveness due to being exposed to violent video games,” said Craig Anderson Iowa State University’s Distinguished Professor of Psychology. “However, most haven’t been able to control all of the factors that can cause an increase in aggressive behavior.”
Matthew Barr, the vice chair of the University of Glasgow, said something similar about the inability to control all variables. “Correlation is not the same as causation,” he said. “By this I mean just because there’s an association between, say, people playing video games and high problem-solving ability, this doesn’t mean the games are the cause of the problem-solving ability.”
Barr pointed out that people who are good at problem solving may just like playing video games. “The same goes for things like video games and violence,” Barr said. “Perhaps violent people are drawn to violent video games, rather than the games causing them to be violent.”
Barr said the research itself has problems. “We must also be careful that the studies showing benefits are properly constructed,” he said. “Aside from the sort of skills that my study suggests games can develop, others have shown, for example, that games can develop spatial skills, problem solving and persistence or improve moods.”
Video games can make people feel better because when a player accomplishes something in a game, the player may experience a sense of accomplishment. “When a player beats a particularly hard level in Mario, a sense of accomplishment can be felt when that level is finally beaten,” Barr said.
Anderson, on the other hand, said research over playing video games has been linked to poorer academic performances, obesity and attention problems. “Aggression has also been linked to video games,” Anderson said.
The reason behind the increase in aggression, according to Douglas Gentile, who wrote the book “Media Violence and Children,” is because people, especially children, tend to imitate aggressive actions more readily when they can relate with an aggressive character. Gentile wrote in his book that, “On television, it is hard to predict with which characters, if any, a person will identify.”
When it comes to video games, however, identifying with characters is different. “In most violent video games, the player takes the point of view of one particular character,” Gentile said.
Gentile also said that video games increase learning because video games are a form of active participation. While increased learning is a benefit, it’s active participation of a video game that helps to cause increase in aggression. “Viewers of violent content on television are passive observers of the aggressive acts, whereas game players are active participants in the violent acts,” Gentile said.
While television only shows bits and pieces of the violence, video games require players to do the violent acts step by step, according to what Gentile wrote in his book. “The video game series Rainbow Six is so good at teaching all the steps necessary to plan and conduct a successful special operations mission that the U.S. Army has licensed the game engine to train their special operations soldiers,” Gentile wrote.
Violence in television only lasts a few minutes, but the step by step process, by which video games tend to follow, keeps the violence going in a continuous flow. Another thing that keeps the violence going is the reward the player gets from completing violent acts. “Rewarding aggressive behavior in a video game increases the frequency of behaving aggressively in that game.” Gentile wrote. “Rewarding aggressive behavior in a video game also teaches more positive attitudes toward the use of force as a means of solving conflicts.”
This rewarding system can also have its benefits. “The rewards help educational games be more effective.” Gentile said in an interview.
Patricia Greenfield, distinguished professor of psychology and UCLA director said video games aren’t as addicting as some would have people believe. A study of 973 young people in arcades was conducted to determine if video games are addicting. “The study showed about half the kids playing video games in the arcades were spending more time socializing than actually playing the games,” Greenfield said.
This study showed that arcades were being used for social gathering rather than for compulsive video game playing. Greenfield said another study showed something similar. It had 20 families keep diaries for five months after getting a video game set to record how long each member of the family was spending playing video games.
According to Greenfield, the study showed that the families were only playing about an hour a day. “Studies show that people spend more time watching TV, with preschoolers spending up to two and a half hours a day watching television,” Greenfield said.
One of the concerns of video games effect on society is that the only skill being taught is eye-hand coordination. “There is much more learning involved with games than just coordination skills,” Greenfield said. “For example, Pac-Man, Pac-Man is not a game that can simply be picked up by watching others play.”
The object of the game is to have Pac-Man eat all the dots in the maze. Greenfield compared the game to chess and said the objective is simple enough, but other parts of the game are what makes it more complex and requires certain skills to play.
“In Pac-Man, the obstacles that bring complexity to the game are the ghosts,” Greenfield said. “Each ghost has different traits, the red one, Shadow, is more aggressive and most likely to chase Pac-Man. Pokey, the orange ghost, will not cross any of the energizers (the flashing dots that allow Pac-Man to eat the ghosts) and Speedy, the pink ghost, is the fastest.”
Greenfield said while in chess each piece also has its own allowed behavior, Pac-Man is different in that players must figure out for themselves what the different behaviors of the ghosts are. “In chess, the rules are clearly explained so that you can play the game, but in Pac-Man players must learn the differences of the ghosts through observation,” Greenfield said. “And they have to do so quickly before Pac-Man gets eaten.”
Other video games require observation skills to figure out the rules as well. “Video games require inductive reasoning skills much more than games of the pre-computer era,” Greenfield said. “They also require parallel processing, such as in Pac-Man where the player must know where all the characters are, where the dots are that need to be eaten and how many energizers are left in the maze.”
While these skills can be learned from violent video games as well, and video games have been mentioned as being used as tools for training for shootings, “the research behind video games being the cause of violence isn’t strong,” Barr said.