Regardless, Dr. Anderson confidently told the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee that , "Though there are many complexities in this realm of behavioral research, there is one clear and simple message that parents, educators, and public policy makers such as yourselves need to hear: Playing violent videogames can cause increases in aggression and violence.”
Thompson and crew were ecstatic.
Despite his slow start, and beginning less than a year after Columbine, Anderson was listed as an author on at least nine articles over the next five years that specifically linked videogames to aggressive thoughts and behavior.
In fact, when Judge Matthew Kennelly struck down Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s stab at game regulation, he noted that of the 17 scholarly articles submitted to support the statute, Dr. Anderson authored or co-authored no fewer than 14. The remaining two, the only studies of the bunch that employed brain imaging techniques, relied on Anderson’s research for their experimental design. The rest of the nation’s videogame legislation has succumbed to similar analysis.
Onslaught 1.0 did not fail because its underlying strategy was rejected. The courts have accepted that state legislatures have a compelling interest in protecting children from harmful products. Instead, the courts have consistently found that the evidence supplied in support of video game laws is insufficient. The science was simply not there.
Enter Onslaught 2.0: The Addiction Game.
In retrospect, Onslaught 1.0 bit off more than it could chew from the beginning. Media effects are notoriously difficult to establish, and despite 50 years of studying television no one has been able to show negative effects compelling enough to justify anything more than restricting broadcast of certain programs to times of the day when children are unlikely to be viewing.
Onslaught 2.0, however, is not a claim about the effect of videogame content, it’s a claim about the medium itself: Because videogames are an addictive product, 2.0 goes, they belong in the same class as tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, all of which are subject to regulation restricting access. And while the science is not there, the pure sensationalism of the claim is frightening enough to compel many to accept the claim blindly.
Of course, videogame addiction is in itself anything but a new idea. Throughout its history, the incredibly compelling nature of games has moved gamers to use ‘addictive’ as a term of praise. In 2005, as 2.0 began to gather force, Ernest Adams pleaded with gamers to cease referring to their pastime as an addiction, since it’s so easily confused with psychological use of the term. In a recent review of the science, Neils Clark pointed out that there is an important distinction to be made between people getting addicted to videogames and the claim that videogames are in and of themselves an addictive product. Current science seems to support the former and has almost nothing to say about the latter.
None of this, however, stopped NewScientist from including videogames among crack, nicotine, gambling, and nymphomania as things to which our brains are “primed for addiction.”
Experience cravings
Consider the presentation. An extremely underexposed image of three adolescent men before a suite of three, huge flatscreen monitors displaying a first-person shooter is accompanied by a caption that reads: “Some gamers experience cravings that are just as powerful as those felt by recovering crack addicts.” To the left is a breakout box entitled ‘The Computer Addict’ which details a ‘case history’ of a 16-year-old who spends 70 hours a week socializing with his friends online.
Pepper this with giant pull quotes of statistical factoids—83% of 18-year-olds have a videogame player, 2 hours spent gaming each day in US households, 31 hours average spent online per month worldwide—sandwiched in among sinister stats about gambling and an illustration of a brain outlining dopamine release to the frontal lobes, and its hard to stave off an impression of impending DOOM.
The problem is that the research cited in the article isn’t anywhere near compelling enough to justify the claim that games are genuinely addictive, yet there it is anyway, sandwiched in among drugs and gambling, both of which have been studied far longer and much more thoroughly. Nevertheless, it’s gaming that is consistently slipped into the article to make the piece seem interesting and urgent.
For example, although it’s titled ‘The Computer Addict,’ the case history is taken almost verbatim from a journal article written by Mark Griffiths, a psychologist and longtime gambling researcher at Trent-Nottingham who is quoted in the piece. But in the original article, which reviewed five case histories of patients exhibiting ‘excessive computer use,’ Dr. Griffiths concluded that while two of the cases, including the one cited by NewScientist, could possibly be considered cases of addiction, it was not at all clear that they were in fact examples of addiction. In other words, the ‘computer addict’ might not have been an addict at all. But by making the case into a sidebar next to an ominous image of shadowy gamers playing violent videogames and titling it ‘The Computer Addict,’ NewScientist encouraged an altogether different interpretation.
Then there’s the brain studies. Sabine Grüsser–Sinopoli, a researcher who uses a form of time-course EEG called evoked response potential (ERP) to study drug addicts, is quoted extensively throughout the piece, including the astonishingly flat proclamation that “addiction is all the same.” Grüsser–Sinopoli has used ERP to compare the ‘arousal’ reactions of drug addicts, gamblers and gamers to both neutral images and images associated with their compulsive behavior.
If the acronym ERP looks familiar to you, it’s because ERP has been hailed by the proponents of Onslaught 1.0 for showing that “chronic exposure to violent videogames has lasting deleterious effects on brain function and behavior.” Last year Bruce Bartholow published a study where he showed neutral images, positive images and images of actual violence to a group of ‘violent videogame players’ and compared the resuts with a control group. The study, whose experimental design relied on Craig Anderson’s research, found that certain characteristic EEG peaks were diminished when players of violent videogames were shown images of actual violence. The control group did not exhibit this feature. Bartholow took this as evidence that violent videogame players were physiologically desensitized to actual violence.
But an ERP study conducted by sports researcher Stephen Radlo that compared novice, intermediate and advanced batters’ responses to pitches found the very same relative diminution in characteristic peaks among advanced batters that Bartholow found with violent videogame players. Yet, instead of concluding that the advanced batters had become desensitized to pitches, Radlo concluded that the lack of reaction in the batters was due to cognitive efficiency—the advanced batters were able to quickly extract relevant cues in a dynamic situation and identify the pitch, using less cognitive power. This is consistent with previous findings that have associated the amplitude and latency of the characteristic peak (called the P300) with semantic evaluation, information processing and calculation of subjective probabilities.
Plausible hypothesis
A similar hypothesis could easily explain Bartholow’s findings—rather than being desensitized to violence, the violent videogame players’ brains were just more adept at extracting relevant cues and identifying violent images. It’s a very plausible hypothesis and one that Bartholow never even entertains in his paper.
Although her ERP studies focused on a different characteristic peak, the failure to consider competing hypotheses also undermines many of Grüsser–Sinopoli’s claims. What she interpreted as signs of drug addict like emotional ‘arousal’ in gamers presented with surprise images of videogame cues could easily be accounted for by supposing that the ‘compulsive’ gamers responded strongly to the game images because they simply contained more semantic content that was relevant to them than the neutral images. The similarity in reactions among gamers and drug addicts shown images of places where they formerly used drugs, for example, could say more about the similarities among learning processes and addiction than they do about games being addictive.
And that’s the rub with these kind of studies. ERP, for example, is extremely useful but it’s also incredibly low resolution, which makes it very easy to conflate distinct phenomena that yield similar experimental results.
Despite numerous reasons to be skeptical about the conclusions drawn from research into games addiction, NewScientist devoted nearly a third of its space to policy changes that should be considered in light of this kind of ‘suggestive’ research, gaming included. For example, after describing studies where she observed that children are “more likely to turn to computer games when they are unhappy,” Grüsser–Sinopoli is quoted as saying that “We need to be made more aware of the potential risks, and we need as a society to worry about what we do, and remove subsidies for addictive behaviors, tobacco, gambling, state lotteries—it’s absurd.”
Of course, scientists like Grüsser–Sinopoli aren’t Jack Thompson, to be sure. Grüsser–Sinopoli’s a well-respected scientist who has dedicated her career to the study of addiction. But the rising interest in videogame effects coupled with increased public apprehension about the ubiquity of videogames creates a climate that strongly encourages people to find ‘evidence’ that supports big claims—claims that make headlines, get one asked to testify before legislatures, and invited to make television appearances. Pretty soon, it becomes ‘accepted wisdom’ among the public and before you realize it, an expressive communication medium is transformed into harmful contraband.
The NewScientist cover story closes with a sinister, if entirely vague quote from Peter Whybrow, author of American Mania: “If politicians and leaders understood how the brain works, they would not be building society as they are doing.”
You can almost hear the family-friendly videogame vigilantes whispering, “I told you so.”
 |
Provided by Next Generation
- |
Printer-Friendly Version