While browsing through Neuroanthropology.net’s blog entry entitled Gaming Roundup, which I found linked to my article Video Game Addiction: Fact or Fiction? under the addiction category, I came across an interesting article by Chris Lavigne entitled, Why Video Game Research is Flawed. Lavigne makes some interesting points, specifically about studies of violence in video games.

Lavigne’s first complaint is that researchers often do not fully understand the video games they use in their studies. Pointing to a Dutch study in the journal Aggressive Behavior that compared aggressiveness between a group playing Tekken with a group playing Crash Bandicoot 2, Lavigne points out the considerable differences between the two games. Interestingly, there is violence in the control group’s game, CB2, though it is milder than the experimental group’s game.

Saying the games differ “only on violent content” is false, but the assertion is typical of the kinds of mistakes researchers make when they’re studying videogames. Researchers often pair up completely unrelated games but act like they’re equivalents.

Studying violence in video games seems to be a common approach, since the methods of measuring violence can be agreed upon by researchers (or at least there is a foundational set of measurements, which leads to de facto agreement). Lavigne is miffed, though, when games are used interchangeably in such studies.

Most researchers assume that video games are completely interchangeable with one another, a concept any gamer would find as ludicrous as the idea that all books are the same or all movies are basically identical. One study by two American media researchers acknowledged this limitation. In an article published in the Journal of Communication in 2007, James Ivory and Sriram Kalyanaraman carefully chose to contrast violent and non-violent games with very similar gameplay styles and presentations. Probably not coincidentally, their study found no significant differences in aggression levels between the players of the different games.

Lavigne points to a study that rated game violence subjectively by ranking weapon maneuvers in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance as more violent. But, some of the most gruesome action in that game takes place bare-handed.

Another study found players of zombie-shooting game House of the Dead 2 were faster at identifying angry faces than players of a kayaking game. The study’s authors considered this evidence that violent games produce aggressive thinking. Gamers would point out that House of the Dead 2 is a reflex-oriented shooting game. Success in the game specifically relies on being able to quickly identify angry faces. Surely, that would have affected the study’s results.

Researchers also do not distinguish violence within context in a game. Violence in movies is generally understood in context, Lavigne asserts. We understand the violence in Saving Private Ryan is different than that in a horror flick. Video game researchers are guilty of lumping all violence in games together, regardless of context. Measurements of violence are also problematic. Since there is no standard, each video game must be subjected to an arbitrary measurement devised by authors of the study.

This last one is a valid complaint, as there are few standards of measurement for quantifying things like “levels of violence” or other intangibles within a game. Such measurements indeed are subjective. Often professors will enlist the help of students to go through a game and provide rankings. A thorough researcher may have many students provide rankings and average the results. In a perfect world, we would have a large population provide subjective rankings on an identical scale for several intangibles within all the popular titles. Then, researchers could draw upon the rankings, where individual biases have been averaged out, and everyone could agree with the premises ahead of time. Alas, such a huge time sink will likely never be practical, especially in the rapidly changing world of video games where titles rarely persist in popularity more than a few months.

Lavigne sums up by complaining about comparisons between graphically violent games and obscure titles, leading to questionable results in studies that are then cited in future studies and reported in the media as fact.

Many pick questionable games in their research as well, choosing titles with extreme levels of violence that were never particularly popular with gamers and contrasting them with amateurish, low-quality free games that no one’s ever heard of. And then these are supposed to represent all video games. These leaps of illogic make reading video game research like peering into a parallel universe, where everything may seem internally consistent, but nothing matches up with the real world.

Though raising many valid points, I suspect Lavigne is a little too worried about studies on violent video games. Video games are the new bugbear on the block, just as comic books were 50 years ago. There is concern this new media may be contributing to the delinquency of children, and this feeds a research frenzy centered around fuzzy measurements in the soft sciences.

Eventually, errors and false assumptions will be uncovered and rectified through repeated measurements and multiple studies. Over the years a consensus will build, be struck down, multiply into competing consensuses, argued over and hashed out in the leading journals, and eventually researchers will agree on some core issues. Or maybe not. They may agree to disagree on certain items. The point is, eventually they’ll come up with something useful. Maybe by that time there will be a new bugbear on the block and their attention may shift to it, whatever it is.

But such is research. If the research articles on video game violence are disconcerting, there are many more interesting articles on video games in education. Several young professors, even some in their 40s and 50s now, have grown up playing video games and understand their characteristics enough to come up with some interesting results.

It’s not worth getting upset every time the media trumpets the latest research article linking video games to violence or aggression. Rather, it’s more interesting to learn how video games are enhancing the education of students. Such articles won’t get as much sensational press as the ones linking video games to violence, but they are much more useful, informative, and fun to read.

References:
Lavigne, C. (2009, May 25). Why video game research is flawed. Maisonneuve. [Online.] Available: http://www.maisonneuve.org/pressroom/article/2009/may/25/why-video-game-research-is-flawed/