Violence, Games & Art - Part 2

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Summer, 2000 by Thom Gillespie

Given that interactive media is becoming more ubiquitous, what do you think will be the emerging research areas?

Interactive media has all the problems of studying any kind of media. There are multiple causation problems, which you cannot control. It is going to be just as hard to look at as violence on television. But, many of the approaches will be similar to television research: surveys about how much interactive media is used related to outcomes in their lives, experimental research with kids playing violent video games and then putting them into a room with other kids to see if they act out or are more likely to be aggressive than kids who don't play violent games. Some of this is already being done and showing similar effects to earlier media research.

Suppose someone came to you and said they wanted you to look at the effects of violent computer games on 13- to 18-year olds, how would you approach this problem?

Very carefully ... I'd feel very disinclined to do a good study in this area because I think I would have an ethical problem with taking a 15-year old who does not play violent video games and make him play a lot of them. I think I would be doing that child a disservice. But, I think someone needs to do that and watch what changes over time. I'm a parent, I've got a boy, and he plays violent video games. I generally don't think that removing media from kids works. I think the only way you can fight media is by building up the opposite, pro-social messages, and building critical consumers of media because your kids are outside your reach at vulnerable ages. By the time they hit ages 13 to 17, they are gone; you can't keep them from watching media or playing video games or anything else. So, if a kid has made a choice not to do that, I don't really want to bring that kid in and require it of him for research purposes. I don't think I could even get human-subjects approval at a university, and I don't think I would want to do it if I could. As soon as you get into comparing kids who play a lot with kids who don't play a lot; you get into considering what made one kid want to play a lot and another not want to play. Maybe that is the critical causal effect.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The issue of media and violence is both clear and cloudy at the same time. It is clear that there is no hard research which proves that most kids who watch violent movies or play violent games will march, trance-like, to their dad's closet, lock and load the family 30-30, and re-enact the opening scenes from the movie Natural Born Killers or the opening sequences of the games Doom, Quake, or Unreal. What is very cloudy is the well-documented effects of violent media over time: disinhibition and progressive desensitization.

The solution Annie Lang offers is the hard one in which parents must make a concerted effort to be involved in the media-consumption habits of their children. The job of the parent is to build up the "good messages" to counteract the positive reinforcement of negative behaviors often found in violent media. As Annie says, "By the time [the kids] hit ages 13 to 17, they are gone." Parents have no time to waste.