The moral panic around video games has taken hold differently than the panic that originated in earlier entertainment around rock music and television. But the evidence is not there.
Avid gamers have been the perpetrators of mass shootings since the mid-1990s, according to the media, and a number of studies starting in the early 2000s have raised concerns that violent games make people more aggressive. strengthened. According to these reports, participants said,punished“Opponent for longprovided to taste testers lots of hot sauceand was likely to guess offensive words such as “explosion” in a word completion task after playing a violent game. But other researchers have since questioned how effective these studies were in measuring violent behavior.
2020 meta-analysis Royal Society Open ScienceWe reviewed 28 studies from the past several years.Low-quality studies that do not use standardized or well-validated measures may exaggerate the effects of games on player aggression. High, high-quality studies tended to show negligible effects.
The same pattern is being repeated with respect to studies linking video games to mental health ailments, using objective data on game duration rather than relying on subjective self-reports from participants (OII study (as did), tend to report smaller effects. Peter Etchells, Professor of Psychology and Science Communication at the University of Bath Spa, has said that over the past two decades to his thirty years of gaming research, there has been no consistency in what it is trying to measure or how it is trying to measure. I believe that there was no proper handling.
“New research like this helps draw a line on the whole ‘Are video games good or bad for us?’ because it’s always been the wrong question,” he says. “It’s like asking, ‘Is diet bad for your waistline?’ It’s a silly question.”
“My hope is not to think in terms of, ‘Are video games bad?’ But think about the gray areas in between,” he adds. “Because there’s all the interesting stuff there.”
Przybylski said write a letter to WHO In 2016, it opposed the “premature” inclusion of gaming disorder in the ICD guidelines, citing the fact that the research base was of poor quality and academics did not reach consensus. For example, researchers disagree about the difference between a gaming addiction and a substance or gambling addiction.
An interesting next step would be to focus on participants exhibiting problematic behavior in the OII study to see how they are coached or supported…and digital balance. Another worthy area of his research, he says, is the predatory business models game makers use to put pressure on player behavior. For example, encouraging you to skip frustrating levels, play at set times, or make microtransactions to log in every day so you don’t miss anything. to something.
