I stumbled across a news report today which caught my attention, so much so that I felt compelled pose a counter argument here as this is the view of someone who does play a lot of “violent” computer  games and has done for about 14 years now. The actual article is here but I’ve paraphrased the good bits:

Violent Video Games Increase Aggression Long After the Game Is Turned Off, Study Finds ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2010) — Playing a violent video game can increase aggression, and when a player keeps thinking about the game, the potential for aggression can last for as long as 24 hours, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE).
Violent video game playing has long been known to increase aggression. This study, conducted by Brad Bushman of The Ohio State University and Bryan Gibson of Central Michigan University, shows that at least for men, ruminating about the game can increase the potency of the game’s tendency to lead to aggression long after the game has been turned off.

The researchers randomly assigned college students to play one of six different video games for 20 minutes. Half the games were violent (e.g., Mortal Kombat) and half were not (e.g., Guitar Hero). To test if ruminating about the game would extend the games’ effect, half of the players were told over “the next 24 hours, think about your play of the game, and try to identify ways your game play could improve when you play again.”

Bushman and Gibson had the participants return the next day to test their aggressiveness. For men who didn’t think about the game, the violent video game players tested no more aggressive than men who had played non-violent games. But the violent video game playing men who thought about the game in the interim were more aggressive than the other groups. The researchers also found that women who played the violent video games and thought about the games did not experience increased aggression 24 hours later.

This study is the first laboratory experiment to show that violent video games can stimulate aggression for an extended period of time. The authors noted that it is “reasonable to assume that our lab results will generalize to the ‘real world.’ Violent gamers usually play longer than 20 minutes, and probably ruminate about their game play in a habitual manner.”

Right first things first, this is a pile of steaming penguin shite. Again to reiterate I’ve actually been playing Mortal Kombat since its first release in 1992. And I can safely say I’ve played it a LOT. I’m one of those video game nerds who actually learn all the moves and fatalities, so in line with the bullshit studies, yes I think about the game long after I’ve finished playing it. That doesn’t mean I act overly aggressively does it? Yes I agree that the introduction of fatalities would have increased the creativity in the mind of the average player about elaborate ways of despatching an opponent but that’s all it would be. Computer games are exactly as they are, a computer. And a computer is a set of established rules. You cannot actually do anything beyond the confines of the rules of the game. So while one may pensively analyse that, you can’t actually do anything about it. There isn’t a function, certainly on the 8-bit consoles, whereby you can “create a finisher” is there? Lets not ignore the fact the graphics on an 8-bit console were hardly very realistic. Yes you could tell that Mortal Kombat motion captured actors, but it was hardly like watching a real person dying was it?

People have been exposed to disturbing media for hundreds of years anyhow, but would you describe someone who has studied the works of Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon as being violent? In fact I implore you to try and accuse a devoted fan of Hieronymus Bosch of being a psychopath based on the fact that they have violent and disturbing images in the forefront of their mind. But why stop there? What about literature analysts who have written dissertations on Dante Aligheri’s “inferno” as the entire book was focused on the descent through hell and all the violent punishments. In fact there was a whole circle of hell devoted to Violence. So when you reach the seventh circle in the book, just reading it and getting mental connotations makes you violent because according to this report, you have it in your mind.

I am so sick and tired of video games being villified by the psuedo “scientists” as they try and justify their funding for some bullshit research because they can’t properly analyse anything. If they wanted a proper cross section for their research why don’t they experiment with real gamers such as myself. And playing 20 minutes is not exactly a time whereby you can accurately deduce a hypothesis. Anyone exposed to a meagre 20 minutes is going to think about it but that is going to be bourne purely of curiousity rather a physical deviance. They never actually select the real cross section of society in order to perform a correct analysis. Of course you’re going to find evidence of aggression if you only select individuals who fit with your hypothesis, that’s not accurate science.

And how do you measure how violent someone has become? Is there a tangible scale you can apply to someone’s behaviour? Or do you just ask them a series of questions and time the interval before you get lamped in the face?

Another point I’d like to make is that what do they classify as “non-violent” games? They mentioned Guitar Hero for example. One of the hardest songs on Rock Band 2 is “Painkiller” by Judas Priest. In 1990, Judas Priest were summoned to court with allegedly having the subliminal message of “do it” in one of their songs which was blamed for a gunshot murdering. So where’s the continuity in that? The only consistency here is that people look for something random to blame when they don’t have any answers. But I digress from my point.

This “experiment” has completely lost all integrity when they create such a wafer argument as a blanket statement against the rest of us gamers. You contemplate your current game your playing as a result of improving your experience, not because you are inherently violent. Do people who think more about their save slot on Forza 3 become better drivers? Has one assumed the skills of Kirk Hammett because they’re contemplating stepping up to Expert on Guitar Hero: Metallica? Does the sale of bubble bath go through the roof when Bubble Bobble gets its Xbox Live remix? I’m not going to lie that video games; “violent” and “non-violent” have shaped my life but I wouldn’t say that influence is necessary a negative thing.

In my opinion, Bushman and Gibson should get signal. So called “violent” media has existed for centuries. Immersion in media is relative, you can’t blanket all of us gamers by your stupid theories.