Yeah, so the formating for the paper below sucks... I'm done playing with it. It barely came in under the 20,000 character limit. As I couldn't fit it there, here is the works cited list:
Works Cited Page
Anderson, CraigA.; Brad J. Bushman; Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior,
Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Effect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial
Behavior: A Meta-Analytical Review of the Scientific Literature; Psychological Science; Sept,
2001;
http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/caa/abstracts/2000-2004/01AB.pdf
Associated Press; 7/14/2005;
“Clinton seeks ‘Grand Theft Auto’
probe”; USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-07-14-clinton-game_x.htm
Cullen, Dave; The Depressive and the Psychopath; April 20th, 2004; Slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2099203/
Entertainment Software Association; Essential Facts About
Games and Youth Violence; 2005
http://www.theesa.com/files/GameYouthViolence_2005.pdf
Engle, Mark K;
The Violence Debate II: The First Amendment, The FTC Report, and Legal
Strategies; University of Chicago;
2001;
http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers/engle.html
Entertainment Software Rating Board; Education and Outreach;
http://www.esrb.org/about/education.jsp
Freedman,
Jonathan L.; Evaluating the Research on Violent Video Games; University
of Toronto; 2001;
http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers/freedman.html
Greene, David;
Marjorie Heins; Burton Joseph; et al; America Amusement Machine v. Teri
Kendrick; National Coalition Against Censorship;
http://www.ncac.org/entertainment/
20031121~USA~American_Amusement_Machine_vs_Kendrick.cfm
Goldstein,
Jeffrey, PhD; Does Playing Violent Video Games Cause Aggressive Behavior?; University
of Utrecht; October 27, 2001;
http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers/goldstein.html
Holmes, Leonard, PhD; Violent Video Games Produce Violent
Behavior; 11/9/05
http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/familyresources/a/vidgameviolence.htm
National
Coalition Against Censorship; American Amusement Machine v. Kendrick; 2001,
National Coalition Against Censorship
http://www.ncac.org/entertainment/
20031121~USA~American_Amusement_Machine_vs_Kendrick.cfm
National
Institute of Mental Health; Child and Adolescent Violence Research At the NIMH;
2000;
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/NIMHviolenceresfact.pdf
Lieberman, Joseph; Kohl, Lieverman Commend New Voluntary
Computer and Video Game Ratings Improvement; June 6th, 2003
http://lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=207741
NPD Group; Annual U.S.
Video Game Sales; 2002
http://retailindustry.about.com/od/seg_toys/a/bl_npd012703_3.htm
…Annual U.S.
Video Game Sales; 2003
http://retailindustry.about.com/od/seg_toys/a/bl_npd012703_2.htm
…Annual U.S.
Video Game Sales; 2004
http://retailindustry.about.com/od/seg_toys/a/bl_npd012703.htm
Does
Exposure to Violent Video Games Cause Violent Behavior?
By Kevin Kelly
Society has
a vested interest in the behavior of its members, for it is by the actions of
these members that society functions and grows. The actions of adults drive
society, and the lessons taught to and adopted by children are what will drive
the future. When violence arises in society, routine actions are disrupted, and
society itself is forced to confront the cause(s) of the violence and how it
plans to prevent future repetitions of the incident. However, when the cause of
the violence is unknown, society must first find the cause of the violence
before they can confront it, and to do this, they must investigate the
circumstances surrounding the violence.
On Tuesday, April 20th, 1999,
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine
High School in Littleton,
Colorado, and began shooting fellow
students and classmates. Over a dozen people were killed, and two dozen more
were wounded, before the two gunmen committed suicide, ending the terror. The
nation was left speechless, save the thought that echoed in everyone’s mind:
“Why?”
As is its
right and duty, society clambered to find the cause of this disturbance, and
one of the primary targets was violent media. Video games in particular were
targeted, due to the Eric and Dylan’s enjoyment of a modified version of the
violent game Doom that they themselves made. Craig Anderson, a psychology
professor at Iowa State University, and Brad Bushman, a researcher at the
University of Michigan, explain the concerns surrounding the game in their 2001
meta-analysis by saying that “Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold… created a
customized version of Doom, with two shooters, extra weapons, unlimited
ammunition, and victims who could not fight back – features that are eerily
similar to aspects of the actual shooting” (Anderson and Bushman, 2001). This
statement implies that this game had some measure of importance in the
shooting, possibly inspiring the shooters’ actions. If exposure to violent
video games drove the shooters to this act of violence, then violent video
games must surely pose a risk to society due to the possibility that they might
drive others to perform similar acts of violence. However, despite what
numerous highly publicized events such as those that transpired at Columbine
High School would like to imply,
exposure to violent videogame software has not been shown to mechanically nor
psychologically train human beings to be violent.
Whether or
not violent media, and violent video games in particular, can cause people to
be violent is a very important issue because of its potential impact. According
to the NPD Group, a leading sales and marketing tracking firm, the video game
industry is now making well over ten billion dollars in the United
States alone and selling hundreds of
millions of video games worldwide each year. (2002, 2003, 2004) That’s a lot of
money and a lot of people that could be potentially impacted by any actions
that could take place should violent video games be proven to make players
violent. If playing violent video games psychologically teaches people to
develop violent personalities, then perhaps Hilary Clinton was correct when she
said that video games represent a “silent epidemic”. (Associated Press, 2005)
While several
studies have been done over the years on the effects of playing violent video
games, the results analysts have drawn are wide spread and often contradictory.
Though some researchers have come to the conclusion that violent video games
make people more aggressive, increase physiological arousal, and decrease
prosocial tendencies (Anderson and Bushman, 2001), others believe that there is
far too little evidence to draw any reliable conclusion and that poor
methodology makes the results of research misleading (Goldstein, Freedman).
For the sake of practicality, we
will look at Anderson and Bushman’s
meta-analysis to make the argument that exposure to violent video games in turn
makes people violent or aggressive, as the meta-analysis is itself a collection
of relevant data gathered from multiple studies. According to Anderson and
Bushman, “Violent media increase aggression by teaching observers how to
aggress by priming aggressive cognitions, by increasing arousal, or by creating
an aggressive affective state” (p355). In their meta-analysis, the two found,
based on 35 research reports (p356), that “short-term exposure to violent video
games causes at least a temporary increase in aggression”, “violent video games
cause at least a temporary decrease in prosocial behavior”, that “violent video
games may increase aggression in the short term by increasing aggressive
thoughts”, that “Violent video games increased aggressive affect”, and,
finally, that “exposure is positively linked to… physiological arousal” (p357-35
.
Reading through their meta-analysis, their conclusions seem quite convincing.
However,
there are fundamental flaws with the research, such as the differing
environments of play (home versus laboratory), the differences in choice
(wanting to play a violent game versus being told to play a violent game), the
small number of samples, and the presence of other variables that alter the
results from what they would be in a natural environment, meaning that any and
all data collected cannot accurately predict the effects violent video games
would have in a home environment. (Freedman, 2001; Goldstein, 2001) These
problems are summed up by Jeffrey Goldstein, Ph.D, professor of psychology art
the University of Utrecht
who comments that:
“Almost
no studies of violent videogames have considered how or why people play them,
or why people play at all. Experimental research does not recognize the fact
that video game players freely engage in play, and are always free to stop.
They enter an imaginary world with a playful frame of mind, something entirely
missing from the laboratory studies of violent games. One of the pleasures of
play is this very suspension of reality. Laboratory experiments cannot tell us
what the effects of playing videogames are, because there is no sense in which
participants in these studies ‘play’.” (2001)
As Goldstein goes on to say, “Video
games cannot ‘reinforce’ aggressive behavior since players do not engage in any
aggressive behavior in the first place”. (2001) When playing a video game,
regardless of content, the players are, by and large, simply sitting down,
pressing buttons, and tilting analog sticks, hardly movements that could teach
someone how to operate a chainsaw, steal a car, or hold a gun. Even those
controllers with triggers on them cannot teach someone the mechanics of firing
a gun, because holding a controller is more akin to holding the sides of a
pancake with both hands than correctly holding, taking the safety off of,
aiming, and firing a firearm.
Did Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
go on a shooting spree because they played Doom, or did they play Doom because
they were prone to violent behavior? Freedman theorizes that “One reason why
playing violent games is related to aggressiveness could be that playing the
games makes people more aggressive. However, there are other plausible
explanations, such as that people with a more aggressive personality like
violent videogames and also engage in more aggressive behavior” (2001).
Predispositions towards violence only make implicating violence in video games
as something that increases violent behavior harder.
The fact that players who played
violent games had more aggressive or violent thoughts than those who played
non-violent games, however, means little. As Freedman points out, “After eating
a huge meal, you probably are thinking about food – but you are less rather
than more likely to eat it” (Freedman, 2001). This analogy brings up the
possibility that violent video games serve as an outlet for violent actions,
allowing people to ‘get their fill’ in the game’s world instead of in the real
world, and when this thought is put up against the declining violence rate in
the United States, it holds up quite well. About 15 years after “violent video
games came of age in the 1990s, with the killing games Mortal Kombat, Street
Fighter, and Wolfenstein 3D” (Anderson and Bushman, 2001), and as video games
are more popular than ever, one can only wonder why Hilary Clinton’s ‘silent
epidemic’ has been so silent.
The relatively small amount of
research into the area of videogame violence makes the results of any mean
conclusion weak at best. Freedman claims that “In their meta-analysis, Anderson
and Bushman identified 35 research reports… Of those, 22 were published. And of
these, only 9 studies dealt with aggressive behavior. I cannot think of another
important issue for which scientists have been willing to reach a conclusion
based on such a small body of research” (2001).
Freedman and Goldstein both argue
that the amount of time given to players in laboratory experiments is not
reflective of a natural play experience, yet they both fail to realize the true
significance of being thrust into a game for a limited amount of time. When
players are forced to play a violent game not of their choosing, they are not
exposed to the context of the violence.
If, in the game, a player is simply given a gun and told to shoot a targeted
civilian, that player will certainly have some sort of reaction, whatever that
may be. However, had the player been at home, and had they started that game
from the beginning, they may have learned that they are, in actuality, an
undercover FBI agent in the process of chasing and stopping an internationally
wanted terrorist. Whatever the player’s thoughts about the situation beforehand,
their thoughts given the context of the violence would surely have been, in
many ways, different, and any potential lessons drawn from that situation would
naturally be different given the change of context.
Every video game has its own rules,
mechanics, and themes that players learn as they play, with some having far
more complex rules than others. For players to learn these rules, however, they
must spend a sufficient amount of time with the game, a variable dependent on
the game itself and the player’s abilities, and a variable that can not be
guaranteed when a player is only given an fifteen minutes to an hour with a
product that has dozens of hours of story, a 3 hour tutorial section, or that
may take over 80 hours to complete. As such, any measurements of the reaction
of the player to their actions in the game in a laboratory environment are, at
best, misleading, in that the actions themselves were made with a lack of
insight in to the consequences relative to the game’s universe, a deficiency
that may not be present in the home environment. Furthermore, given that the
subject of the experiment is aware of the fact that they are only playing the
game for the sake of the research, and that they cannot come back to the lab to
play the game at will, as they would be able to if they were playing at home,
they have little incentive to learn anything beyond the basic functions of the
game. When players play for the sake of others and not for the sake of their
own entertainment, they are encouraged to go after the short term rewards that
a game provides, such as, in the case of the Grand Theft Auto series, stealing
cars and killing people for their possessions, rather than the long term
rewards, such as exercising restraint towards civilians so as not to put your
character in danger of repercussions.
Regardless of the context, though,
Anderson and Bushman claim that physiological arousal differences between those
who play violent video games and those who play non-violent ones are also signs
that violence in video games creates an aggressive affective state (2001).
However, Anderson and Bushman also mention that “Even non-violent games can
increase aggressive affect, perhaps by producing high levels of frustration”
(p356). If the violent and non-violent games the studies are using to field
data differ in more than just violence, than any number of different aspects of
the game could cause the arousal. In general, violent games tend to have far
more action in them, which could more than account for the increased arousal.
If one were to compare a violent action game against, say, Burnout 3, a high-adrenaline
racing game where you weave in and out of traffic at hundreds of miles per
hour, would there be much difference between the player groups?
Not only are the results of
research lacking, but so are the definitions used to get data. Even what constitutes
aggression is up for debate. Anderson and Bushman defined aggression as
“behavior intended to harm another individual who is motivated to avoid that
harm” (p354) Several sources take issue with the means used by the various
reports analyzed by Anderson and
Bushman to measure aggression. Goldstein comments that “Observations of
children on the playground may confuse mock aggression (pretending to engage in
martial arts) with real aggression (attempting to hurt someone)…. In the rare
study that measures both aggressive play and aggressive behavior,
violent video games affect the former and not the latter.” (2001) Barrie Gunter,
a professor at the University of Sheffield, feels that “Even with experimental
studies, there are problems of validity that derive from the fact that they do
not measure ‘real aggression’, but rather simulated or pretend aggression”
(qtd. in Goldstein, 2001). Freedman says that “Anderson
and Dill used as their measure of aggression the intensity and duration of a
loud noise that one subject gave to another. Pressing a button that delivers a
short burst of loud noise is pretty remote from real aggression”( 2001). If the
very data measuring aggression is inaccurate, how can anyone possibly find
reasonable cause to say that violent video games make people violent?
Due to the
fact that the research into video game violence cannot tell us what the effects
of playing violent video games are, we have to look at actual trends in our
world for hints. The most telling trend is the decline of national violence.
Since the mid 1990’s the violent crime rate in the United States has been
constantly declining, and during that time video games have only been getting
more popular and more graphic (Entertainment Software Association, 2005).
With the
impact of violent games undecided, what should society do about them? One
obvious path is censorship of the product itself, but that is inherently
unconstitutional, and so is not a viable option. Another method that has been
attempted in the past is to make illegal the sale of violent or Mature-rated
video games to minors. This method, however, is legally infeasible, as has been
demonstrated by the fact that every law trying to place such a restriction has been
overturned, due to the fact that no judge has found that there is sufficient
evidence supporting the notion that violent games are a danger to minors. In
fact, in his ruling in the case American Amusement Machine v. Kendrick,
which involved restricting minors from playing violent arcade games, U.S. Court
of Appeals Judge Richard Posner wrote that such exposure may actually be
beneficial:
Violence has always been and remains a central
interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both
high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone
familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and
Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure
to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming;
it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it. (American
Amusement Machine, 2001)
In 2000 the
Federal Trade Commission released a report initiated by President Bill Clinton
following the events of Columbine on the marketing of mature and violent media
to children. In her summary of the FTC’s findings, Mary Engle, project director
of the study, recommended that each media industry “Establish or expand codes
that prohibit target marketing to children and impose sanctions for
violations”, “Increase compliance at the retail level” with content ratings,
and that each industry “Increase parental understanding of the ratings and
labels” (2001).
In response, the Entertainment
Software Rating Board, or ESRB, has stepped up its efforts regarding parental
awareness of ratings. The ESRB is non-profit organization that reviews the
contents of games and assigns one of six different ratings (Early Childhood,
Everyone, Everyone10+, Teen, Mature, and Adults Only), and then subsequently
provides a list of any number of 32 descriptors revealing to the consumer what
potentially unsuitable content is in the game. These descriptors list
everything from violence (Both serious and cartoon) to use of drugs, alcohol,
gambling, and obscene language, to sexual content, and everything in between. In
2003 the ESRB launched, and is still running, the “Ok to play? – Check the
ratings!” education program, intended to inform consumes, specifically parents,
about the presence and value of the ratings on every game. This program covers
television, magazine, and radio advertisements, some made by famous
celebrities, to in store signs displayed on shelves and at the counter alerting
parents to the presence of the ratings. The ESRB is even working in cooperation
with most major videogame retailers to have them voluntarily enforce the
ratings. The ESRB does such a good job, in fact, that Senator Joseph Lieberman
has said that the ESRB is “the best rating system in the entertainment media”
(Lieberman, 2003) As a result of its efforts, the Entertainment Software
Association now claims that 92% of parents monitor what their children play,
and that 90% of the time adults are involved in videogame purchases. (2005)
So are violent video games, as Anderson
and Bushman claim, a “growing problem” (p.353)? The National Institute of
Mental Health doesn’t seem to think so. In their research report regarding
youth violence, they never even mention videogames, let alone violent ones, nor
any other form of media, instead coming to the conclusion that “The development
of series behavior problems is best understood as a dynamic interaction between
child predispositions and various influences on children’s lives (family, peer,
and school/community) that change over critical periods of development.” (p9)
Parents have power over their
children. They can control which games come into their house and which games
their kids have access to, and they can sit down with their children and talk
about the content. As numerous sources have confirmed, parents active in their
children’s lives have the greatest amount of influence on their children’s
development. It’s a parent’s responsibility to raise and teach their children,
in all manner of things. Video games are simply starting to be recognized as
another area to add to the list.
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