We will be focusing on video game controversies, primarily violence in video games and how it influences people. Footage will contain both original and borrowed content.
Links:
- http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/25/health/video-games-and-violence/
- http://videogames.procon.org/
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33960075
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-video-games-inspire-violent-behavior/
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/study-finds-no-evidence-violent-video-games-make-children-aggres/
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/09/do-video-games-make-children-violent-nobody-knows-and-this-is-why
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201304/can-video-games-cause-violence
Members
- Brandon Ord
- Kevin-Lee Middleton
- Matthew Tulip
Info from Links
According to CNN:
The American Psychological Association observed in an August 2015 policy statement (PDF) that research demonstrated a link "between violent video game use and both increases in aggressive behavior ... and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral engagement."
In its July guideline on media violence, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that violent media set a poor example for kids. Video games, the academy noted, "should not use human or other living targets or award points for killing, because this teaches children to associate pleasure and success with their ability to cause pain and suffering to others."
Overall, the academy's summary of the results from more than 400 studies revealed a "significant" link between being exposed to violent media (in general) and aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts and angry feelings.
According to ProCon.org:
The debate over violent video games can be traced back to the 1976 release of the game Death Race. The object of the game was to run over screaming "gremlins" with a car, at which point they would turn into tombstones. Controversy erupted because the "gremlins" resembled stick-figure humans, and it was reported that the working title of the game was Pedestrian. After protestors dragged Death Race machines out of arcades and burned them in parking lots, production of the game ceased.
In 1993, public outcry following the release of violent video games Mortal Kombat and Night Trap prompted Congress to hold hearings on regulating the sale of video games. During the hearings, California Attorney General Dan Lungren testified that violent video games have "a desensitizing impact on young, impressionable minds." Threatened with the creation of a federal regulatory commission, the video game industry voluntarily established the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) on Sep. 1, 1994 to create a ratings system. Based on the video game's content, the ESRB assigns one of the following ratings: "Early Childhood," "Everyone," "Everyone 10+," "Teen," "Mature," "Adults Only," or "Rating Pending" (only for use in advertising for games not yet rated). In a Pew Research Center 2008 survey, 50% of boys and 14% of girls aged 12-17 listed a game with a "Mature" or "Adults Only" rating in their current top three favorite games.
According to BBC:
More than 200 academics have signed an open letter criticizing controversial new research suggesting a link between violent video games and aggression.
The findings were released by the American Psychological Association.
It set up a taskforce that reviewed hundreds of studies and papers published between 2005 and 2013.
The American Psychological Association concluded while there was "no single risk factor" to blame for aggression, violent video games did contribute.
"The research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behaviour, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in pro-social behaviour, empathy and sensitivity to aggression," said the report.
"It is the accumulation of risk factors that tends to lead to aggressive or violent behaviour. The research reviewed here demonstrates that violent video game use is one such risk factor."
However, a large group of academics said they felt the methodology of the research was deeply flawed as a significant part of material included in the study had not been subjected to peer review.
"I fully acknowledge that exposure to repeated violence may have short-term effects - you would be a fool to deny that - but the long-term consequences of crime and actual violent behaviour, there is just no evidence linking violent video games with that," Dr Mark Coulson, associate professor of psychology at Middlesex University and one of the signatories of the letter told the BBC.
"If you play three hours of Call of Duty you might feel a little bit pumped, but you are not going to go out and mug someone."
The question about whether violent games inspire violent behaviour "in real life" is a subject that strongly divides opinion.
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The APA taskforce used meta-analysis - combining the results of lots of studies in order to look for patterns and correlations, rather than carrying out any new research itself.
It conducted a comprehensive review of academic work around the subject, some of which dated back to 2005.
"While there is some variation among the individual studies, a strong and consistent general pattern has emerged from many years of research that provides confidence in our general conclusions," said task force chairman Mark Applebaum.
However, this approach was criticised by the group of experts, which said such correlations sometimes had other explanations.
For example, boys were more likely to play video games than girls but they were also more likely to be aggressive in general.
Dr Coulson also cautioned about work included in the study that may not have been subject to peer review, where it is critiqued by the wider academic community.
"Obviously there is a lot of stuff out there that doesn't get into peer review journals," he said.
"If you look at all the literature in this area you are bound to get a sensationalist conclusion."
According to Scientific America:
A few studies tried to draw distinctions between good and bad games. In a 2010 experiment, Tobias Greitemeyer, then at the University of Sussex in England, and Silvia Osswald of Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany asked subjects to play one of three video games—either a “prosocial” game, an “aggressive” game or the “neutral” game Tetris. After eight minutes, an experimenter reached for a stack of questionnaires but “accidentally” knocked a cup of pencils off the table and onto the floor. Participants who had played the prosocial game were twice as likely to help pick up the pencils as those who played the neutral or aggressive game.
Others have tried to tease out the aftereffects of playing violent games. In a 2012 study, André Melzer of the University of Luxembourg, along with Mario Gollwitzer of Philipps University Marburg in Germany, found that inexperienced players felt a need to “cleanse” themselves after playing a violent video game (the so-called Macbeth effect: “Out, damned spot!”). Researchers asked subjects to play either a driving game or the mayhem-heavy Grand Theft Auto for 15 minutes, then pick gifts from an assortment, half “hygienic” (shower gel, deodorant, toothpaste) and half nonhygienic (gummy bears, Post-it notes, a box of tea). Inexperienced players who played Grand Theft Auto were more likely to pick out hygienic products than were experienced players or inexperienced players who had played the driving game.
But neither of those studies make the case that these games lead to real-word violence. Although drawing conclusions about small population subgroups—such as kids at risk of violence—from broad population trends can be dicey, it is still worth noting that as violent video games proliferated in recent years, the number of violent youthful offenders fell—by more than half between 1994 and 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Even if violent video games are not turning people into killers, we might still wonder if they are harming our kids in subtler ways. As psychologist Douglas A. Gentile of Iowa State University puts it, whatever we practice repeatedly affects the brain. If we practice aggressive ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, he writes, “then we will get better at those.” In a 2008 survey on the gaming habits of about 2,500 young people, Gentile and his father, psychologist J. Ronald Gentile, found that children and adolescents who played more violent games were likelier to report “aggressive cognitions and behaviors.” They concluded that violent video games “appear to be exemplary teachers of aggression.”
According to the Telegraph:
Playing violent video games is no more likely to be damaging to young children’s behaviour than those considered harmless, an Oxford University study suggests.
Research involving British primary schoolchildren found that the length of time young people spend playing games, rather than their content, could have an effect on their behaviour or school performance – and even then only slightly so.
But it concluded that fears that a generation of young people are growing up with their development impaired by exposure to violent video games are no more likely to be borne out than previous “moral panics” over television and other media.
The study, published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture, found that children who play online games involving linking up with other players were less slightly likely to have problems relating to other children than those who played alone.
According to the Guardian:
‘Violent videogames cause an increase in aggression long after the game has been turned off’ is the headline for one 2010 study, which draws this conclusion by linking a 20-minute gaming session with an abstract aggression test 24 hours later, and differentiating between players who had ‘thought’ about the game in the interim and those who hadn’t. This is a tenuous experimental setup in the first place and one that fails to account for any number of other factors, so to draw firm causal conclusions – never mind extrapolate (as the authors did at the time) that it is “reasonable to assume that our lab results will generalise to the ‘real world’” – is fanciful.
The problem is not just on academia’s side: the media almost never stops to challenge a tasty headline linking games and real-world violence. This use of games as panic fodder is not benign, but percolates into real-world flash points that have consequences.
The problem with violent video games and aggression is that defining and categorising both is an inexact science. The Children of the 90s study began in 1991, so the ‘shoot-em-ups’ this paper was looking at when those kids were eight or nine might be the likes of Goldeneye 007, Medal of Honor, Quake III and so on. These games are from a different and often incomparable era to the modern first-person shooter, a Call of Duty or Halo, which is much more realistic visually and in most cases includes a competitive online element.
According to Psychology Today:
When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision on the Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association case on June 27, 2011, that ruling not only established that video games were covered under the First Amendment but that video game content could not be regulated by governments. Part of the reason for the court ruling was that psychological research linking violent games and violence was “unpersuasive”. Though psychological research is often used in the courtroom in issues relating to child safety, the lack of consistent findings connecting video games to violent behaviour in children helped sway the court against regulation.
At the same time, there was a sharp rise in research studies examining the link between child violence and video games though the results were rarely consistent. In an excellent overview of video game studies recently published in American Psychologist, author Christopher J. Ferguson of Texas A&M International University pointed out that many scholars working in the area of child violence added to the moral panic with studies that were often flawed. While psychological studies designed to correct for these problems continued to show a link, other studies turned up no relationship at all between video game violence and antisocial behaviour in children. The debate over video games has led to a serious split between different groups of researchers which was as much about politics as research findings.
Whatever the status of the research so far, the only clear outcome is that the divide between pro- and anti-video game activists seems as wide as ever and both sides are citing research to support their arguments. In some cases, they are even looking at the same research studies and coming away with opposite interpretations of the findings.
- This info will be cited and used within the documentary -
Conclusion
All members of the group tend to agree with the sentiment that video game violence does not necessarily lead to real life violence. We ourselves play games with violence and are not excessively influenced by the blood and gore we see. Thus, the conclusion to our documentary will be that we are against the idea of video game violence impacting and influencing the individual into a violent manner that would have long term consequences. This makes our format a subjective take on the issue.
Steps
- Opens with actuality footage of ? playing a game and voice-over accompanying the scene, introducing us to the who, what, when, where and why of the documentary and what it wishes to address.
- Discuss the origin of video game violence and how it sparked controversy.
- Interviews of individuals and their opinions on violence in video games.
- Cut to footage of AlSmithGaming and lead into the studies on video game violence and its impact.
- Offer counter-points to the idea of violence in video games causes negative impacts on an individual enough to make them want to take the violence to the next level.
- Conclude the documentary with our take and end.
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