Recently two new articles came out about the connection between video games and behavior. In one article,a 17 year old kid killed his mom and tried to kill his dad, apparently because he played Halo 3. In another article, several studies were conducted noting the level of generosity people have after playing either neutral, violent, or prosocial games. In an attempt not to make this blog a multi-page book, I will only mention some of largest fallacies. First off, the 1st article doesn't take into account the boy's previous behavior and life experiences.Things likethe home environment, social or anti-social behavior, and school behavior are someto consider.The father is a minister. So, I guess people just automatically assume it's great to live in his house. Secondly, the 1st article doesn't bring up the fact that most people playing violent video games don't commit such deeds. People always point to the exception to the rule and say, "See! Violent video games do cause violence!" According to the statistics, there is a large correlation that playing violent video games results in non-violent behavior. However, correlation does NOT equal cause-and-effect. To say violent video games CAUSES violent behavior or non-violent behavior, there would have to be said behavior every single time each and every person played a violent video game. Otherwise, no one can conclude a cause/effect relationship. In the next article, the whole study just had the game players hand a puzzle to a random person. The game players had a choice to give the person a hard, easy, or medium puzzle. This only suggests that the game players were affected by the game, but it still doesn't account for the highly exagerated behavior of those that kill. Giving a hard puzzle to a random person is not the same as gunning down a family. Everyone's moods areaffected by everything everywhere all the time. This includes music, sports, dancing, TV, games, sunshine, wind, temperature, etc... However, to connect such a benign action as giving a puzzle to that of murder and assault are erroneous and illogical (not that this article was doing that). The question I have is, aren't violent video games typically more challenging than others? If so, couldn't the people playing the violent video games be influenced more by the greater challenge than the violence itself? This would make more sense given the fact that the gamers chose the more challenging puzzles for the recipients to do, instead of just making the $10 reward easy on them. The biggest problem with psycology and sociology studies is that the researchers conduct experiments with pre-interpretive mind sets. They always "know" how to interpret the results before they even give them. Any scientist will admit that this taints the scientific method. Scientists need to explore every interpretation mixed with many repeated experiments before a sound conclusion is drawn. JEEZ!
