catharsis – Technology Liberation Front

50 Years of Video Games & Moral Panics

Adam Thierer — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 18:42:45 +0000

This essay originally appeared on The Bridge under the title “Confessions of a Vidiot” on July 16, 2019.

I have a confession: I’m 50 years old and still completely in love with video games.

I feel silly saying that, even though I really shouldn’t. Video games are now fully intertwined with the fabric of modern life and, by this point, there have been a couple of generations of adults who, like me, have played them actively over the past few decades. Somehow, despite the seemingly endless moral panics about video games, we came out alright. But that likely will not stop some critics from finding new things to panic over.

As a child of the 1970s, I straddled the divide between the old and new worlds of gaming. I was (and remain) obsessed with board and card games, which my family played avidly. But then Atari’s home version of “Pong” landed in 1976. The console had rudimentary graphics and controls, and just one game to play, but it was a revelation. After my uncle bought Pong for my cousins, our families and neighbors would gather round his tiny 20-inch television to watch two electronic paddles and a little dot move around the screen.

Every kid in the world immediately began lobbying their parents for a Pong game of their own, but then a year later something even more magical hit the market: Atari’s 2600 gaming platform. It was followed by Mattel’s “Intellivision” and Coleco’s “ColecoVision.” The platform wars had begun, and home video games had gone mainstream.

My grandmother, who lived with us at the time, started calling my brother and me “vidiots,” which was short for “video game idiots.” My grandmother raised me and was an absolute treasure to my existence, but when it came to video games (as well as rock music), the generational tensions between us were omnipresent. She was constantly haranguing my brother and me about how we were never going to amount to much in life if we didn’t get away from those damn video games!

I used to ask her why she never gave us as much grief about playing board or card games. She thought those were mostly fine. There was just something about the electronic or more interactive nature of video games that set her and the older generation off.

And, of course, there was the violence. There is no doubt that video games contained violent themes and images that were new to the gaming experience. In the analog gaming era, violent action was left mostly to the imagination. With electronic games, it was right there for us to see in all its (very bloody) glory.

As depictions of violence in video games became more intense, parental anxiety boiled over into political activism. By the early 1990s, complaints by parent groups and politicians escalated and congressional hearings commenced. This was the Nintendo and Sega era, when games like “Mortal Kombat” and “Night Trap” were capturing attention for their violent themes.

By this time, I had moved to Washington, DC and taken a job with a think tank. I was a young researcher covering media and telecommunications policy issues, so I had both a personal and professional interest in covering video game hearings. What ensued was a media spectacle in which an endless parade of politicians and self-anointed “parent advocates” expressed their concerns about various games and the supposed lost generation of kids playing them.

The first major congressional hearing on video game violence that I attended in 1993 included then-Sen. Joe Lieberman and other lawmakers speaking with disgust and furrowed brows as they watched clips from those games. But most of us twenty-somethings in the hearing room were rolling our eyes through the entire spectacle. I distinctly remember hearing a Capitol Hill staffer that I was sitting next to whisper, “This is the greatest ad for getting a Sega Genesis ever!” Following the hearing, several friends and I went to my house and played Mortal Kombat together just for kicks.

As the decade went on and gamers began enjoying a third generation of consoles that included Playstation and XBox, the moral panic surrounding violent video gamesrapidly intensified. This was the era of “Doom,” “Resident Evil” and then “Grand Theft Auto.” The whole world went mad.

Critics were writing books with titles like Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill and referring to video games as “murder simulators.” Every TV news outlet was running some sort of hair-raising report about how America’s youth were doomed for a life of depravity due to video games. By 2006, Sen. Lieberman and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton were floating the “Family Entertainment Protection Act” to create a federal enforcement regime for video games ratings and sales. Court battles ensued over the constitutionality of restrictions on video game sales.

During this push for video game censorship, I wrote many essays, papers, and even contributed to court filings in which I poured over the evidence—or rather the lack thereof—for what we might think of as the “monkey see-monkey do” theory of human behavior. Put simply, there has never been any conclusive scientific evidence correlating video game exposure and real-world acts of violence. If this theory held any water, at some point it should have shown up in crime statistics either here or abroad. But it hasn’t.

In fact, over the past two decades, the US population has grown from 270 million in 1998 to 325 million today, and video games have grown in popularity over that same period. At the same time, according to FBI data, overall violent crime has fallen by almost 19 percent, and for adolescents ages 12 to 20, every class of crime plummeted over the same period.

To be sure, video games—violent or otherwise—can give rise to some problems worth worrying about. Addiction is a real concern, and not just for juveniles. Again, I’m an old man, but I still play far too many games on my phone when I could be doing other things. That’s not technically addiction, but it sure feels like it sometimes. When our kids, or even some adults, go overboard with game time, they need strategies to find a better balance. That has always been a legitimate issue deserving attention.

But the people and politicians who engaged in panics and proselytizing about the supposed evils of video games went much too far. What they failed to realize—as almost all cultural critics have mistakenly done throughout history—is that humans are more sensible and resilient than they assume. We can muddle through and find a reasonable balance.

Indeed, a great many first and second generation gamers are now raising kids and actively gaming with them. My teenage son and I play multiple games together and are part of many different leagues and teams. On our phones, we play “Boom Beach” and other games together, often with groups of other father and son gamers. At home, we love to play “Star Wars: Battlefront” and we are absolutely infatuated with the alien bug-killing “Earth Defense Force” games.

A few years back, my son and I got so good at the game “Toy Soldiers: Cold War” that we were briefly ranked in the top 15 globally. We also play a lot of board games together. I now include him in monthly poker nights at my house, where he has become quite the card shark, regularly depriving many of my adult friends of their money.

My strategy with my son and gaming activity has been simple: stay involved, be open-minded, and set reasonable limits. Oh sure, there are games he plays that I find silly and worthless. But I try to talk to him about all of them and get a better understanding of what they are about. And I encourage him—not always successfully—to get off the couch and go outside to get plenty of outdoor playtime in, too.

While heavy-handed regulatory efforts have been beaten back, we can expect moral panics to continue as video games become even more interactive and immersive. We aging gamers should be willing to hear out concerns about those new gaming themes and capabilities and consider reasonable responses.

If we have learned anything from the first half century of video game history, it is that over-reaction is never the right response. Whether you are a parent or a politician, try to be patient and willing to talk to kids in an open and understanding fashion about things you might not appreciate at first.

Now please excuse me while my son and I get back to killing some alien bugs and saving the Earth once more!

Additional Reading :

The Social Science Debate over Violent Video Games Will Never End

Adam Thierer — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:49:53 +0000

NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam had a great spot on NPR’s Morning Edition today about the disputes among social scientists over the impact of violent video games on kids. [“It’s A Duel: How Do Violent Video Games Affect Kids?”] You won’t be surprised to hear I wholeheartedly agree with Texas A&M psychologist Chris Ferguson, who noted in the spot:

Ferguson says it’s easy to think senseless video game violence can lead to senseless violence in the real world. But he says that’s mixing up two separate things. “Many of the games do have morally objectionable material and I think that is where a lot of the debate on this issue went off the rails,” he said. “We kind of mistook our moral concerns about some of these video games, which are very valid — I find many of the games to be morally objectionable — and then assumed that what is morally objectionable is harmful.”

I’ve written about Ferguson’s work and these issues more generally many times over through the years here at the TLF. Here are some of the most relevant essays:

In these essays, I’ve tried to make a couple of key points about the social science literature on “media effects” theory:

(1) Lab studies by psychology professors and students are not representative of real-world behavior/results. Indeed, lab experiments are little more than artificial constructions of reality and of only limited value in gauging the impact of violently-themed media on actual human behavior.

(2) Real-world data trends likely offer us a better indication of the impact of media on human behavior over the long-haul. And all those trends show encouraging signs of improvement even as video game consumption among youth and adults increases.

(3) Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Of course, whether we are talking about those artificial lab experiments or the real-world data sets, we must always keep this first principle of statistical analysis in mind.

(4) Finally, it’s worth reconsidering whether more weight should be given to the “cathartic effect hypothesis” in these debates.

A bit more on this final point since I feel quite passionately about it…

The battle over media effect theory goes all the way back to the great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. While Plato thought the media of his day (poetry, plays & music) had a deleterious impact on culture and humanity, Aristotle took a very different view. Indeed, most historians believe it was Aristotle who first used the term katharsis when discussing the importance of Greek tragedies, which often contained violent overtones and action. He suggested that these tragedies helped the audience, “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” In Part IV of his Poetics, Aristotle spoke highly of tragedies that used provocative or titillating storytelling to its fullest effect:

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell upon his murderer while he was a spectator at a festival, and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.

And for me, that remains the best explanation for how humans process dramatic depictions of violence and tragedy. We humans are unique among all mammals in our ability to adapt to changes in our environment and to process new and different forms of content and culture. We process. We learn. We assimilate. We adapt. Thus, we can enjoy the “tragic wonder” of watching a violent Greek drama or playing a violent video game without running for the kitchen to find a knife to plunge into somebody’s back. We can separate fantasy from reality and we do so every day of our lives.

Yet, many social scientists today, echoing Plato, continue to search for proof that the alternative is true and that depictions of violence on the stage or screen will have a direct and quite deleterious impact on human behavior. They subscribe to the “monkey see-monkey do” theory of media effects. Again, I think that’s utterly bogus and flatly contradicted by real-world facts. After all, if there was anything to their theories, shouldn’t it have shown up sometime, somewhere in real-world data trends by now?

Still, don’t expect this debate to ever end. Just wait till virtual reality technologies go mainstream! Oh boy, now that will have the “monkey see-monkey do” crowd whipped into a lather. I look forward to the debate (and to playing those VR games with my kids!)

Video Games, Media Violence & the Cathartic Effect Hypothesis

Adam Thierer — Thu, 27 May 2010 02:55:27 +0000

David Leonhardt of The New York Times penned an interesting essay a few days ago entitled, “Do Video Games Equal Less Crime?” reflecting upon the same FBI crime data I wrote about earlier this week, which showed rapid drops in violent crime last year (on top of years of steady declines). Crimes of all sorts plummeted last year despite the serious economic recession we find ourselves in. Downturns in the economy are typically followed by upticks in crime. Not so this time. Which leads Leonhardt to wonder if perhaps exposure to violent media (especially violent video games) could have played a positive role in tempering criminal activity in some fashion:

Video games can not only provide hours of entertainment. They can also give people — especially young men, who play more than their fair share of video games and commit more than their fair share of crimes — an outlet for frustration that doesn’t involve actual violence. Video games obviously have many unfortunate side effects. They can promote obsessive, antisocial behavior and can make violent situations seem ordinary. But might video games also have an upside? I’m willing to consider the idea.

Go Back to the Greeks

What Leonhardt is suggesting here goes by the name “cathartic effect hypothesis” and debates have raged over it for centuries. Seriously, the fight goes all the way back to the great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. And, as with everything else, Aristotle had it right! Well, at least in my opinion he did, but I am a rabid Aristotealian. While Plato thought the media of his day (poetry, plays & music) had a deleterious impact on culture and humanity, Aristotle took a very different view. Indeed, most historians believe it was Aristotle who first used the term katharsis when discussing the importance of Greek tragedies, which often contained violent overtones and action. He suggested that these tragedies helped the audience, “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” (See Part IV of Aristotle’s Poetics,) Aristotle spoke highly of tragedies that used provocative or titillating storytelling to its fullest effect:

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. We may instance the statue of Mitys at Argos, which fell upon his murderer while he was a spectator at a festival, and killed him. Such events seem not to be due to mere chance. Plots, therefore, constructed on these principles are necessarily the best.

Of “Tragic Wonder” & Balanced Passions

Again, what Aristotle believed was important about such tales was precisely that they help give rise to a heightened sense of “tragic wonder” that helped us purge away or balance out similar passions brewing in the human psyche. [For a broader discussion of the catharsis debate from Plato and Aristotle on down to the modern “media effects” psychologists and social scientists, see Marjorie Heins’s brilliant 2001 book, Not in Front of the Children: ‘Indecency,’ Censorship and the Innocence of Youth, p. 228-253.]

One might just as easily apply this thinking to many of the most popular video games children play today, including those with violent overtones. That’s exactly what Gerald Jones does in his book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence:

One of the functions of stories and games is to help children rehearse for what they’ll be in later life. Anthropologists and psychologists who study play, however, have shown that there are many other functions as well—one of which is to enable children to pretend to be just what they know they’ll never be. Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden to them is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people.

Judge Richard Posner used similar logic when penning the 7th Circuit’s 2001 decision in American Amusement Machine Association v. Kendrick, which struck down an Indianapolis ordinance prohibiting anyone who operated more than five arcade games on their premises from allowing an unaccompanied minor to play games that would be considered “harmful to minors.” In the Kendrick decision, Posner noted that “To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.”

Don’t Be the Boy in the (Intellectual) Bubble

Posner’s opinion for the court was a blistering tour-de-force that included a review of violence in literature throughout history. “Self-defense, protection of others, dread of the ‘undead,’ fighting against overwhelming odds—these are all age-old themes of literature, and ones particularly appealing to the young,” he noted. “To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it,” he argued. “People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.” This is a different sort of construction of cathartic effect hypothesis. In essence, Posner is explaining how exposure to violently-themed media helps to gradually assimilate us into the realities of the world around us.

Such thinking will undoubtedly remain controversial—perhaps even outlandish—to some. But the history of art and entertainment has always been filled with its share of controversies in terms of its impact on culture and society. Indeed, one generation’s trash often becomes a subsequent generation’s treasure. Sculptures, paintings and works of literature widely condemned in one period were often praised—even consider mainstream—in the next. As The Economist magazine editorialized in the summer of 2005: “Novels were once considered too low-brow for university literature courses, but eventually the disapproving professors retired. Waltz music and dancing were condemned in the 19^th century; all that was thought to be ‘intoxicating’ and ‘depraved’, and the music was outlawed in some places. Today it is hard to imagine what the fuss was about. And rock and roll was thought to encourage violence, promiscuity and Satanism; but today even grannies listen buy Coldplay albums.” I’ve written more about such “moral panics” here in the past.

Humans Adapt

Here is the important point: somehow we get through it. We learn to assimilate culture into our lives that previous generations feared or loathed. As the late University of North Carolina journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once noted: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.” And Thomas Hine, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, argues that: “We seem to have moved, without skipping a beat, from blaming our parents for the ills of society to blaming our children. We want them to embody virtues we only rarely practice. We want them to eschew habits we’ve never managed to break.”

If you subscribe to the cathartic effect school of thinking, however, you typically do no fear social or technological change as much because you realize that human adapt. We learn to cope with cultural or technological changes, and in many cases we are actually made better off as a species because of those changes.

Can It Be Proven One Way or the Other?

But is there any hard evidence to prove or disprove the cathartic effect hypothesis? The problem is, as I have noted here before repeatedly, we must never forget the first iron law of statistical analysis: Correlation does not necessarily equal causation. Whether we are talking about those artificial lab experiments or the real-world data sets, we cannot lose sight of the fact that just because B follows A it does not mean A caused B. That is particularly the case when it comes to human behavior, which is complex and ever-changing.

That being said, I’ve also suggested that, at some point, a consistent trend in real-world crime data must suggest that at least the opposite is not the case. Thus, when it comes to the supposed relationship between violent media and real-world violence, I have to believe that if there was anything to the thesis that a correlation exists, we would have to see it manifest itself at some point in crime statistics. But we have now experienced roughly 15 years of steady drops in all categories of criminal activity, especially juvenile violence, while at the same time witnessing a fairly steady increase in exposure to video games and violently-theme media in general.

Incidentally, Leonhardt’s New York Times article cites a recent study by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna that appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in May 2009 entitled, “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” which tried to use some hard data to evaluate the cathartic effect hypothesis. Dahl and DellaVigna found that:

exposure to violent movies has three main effects on violent crime: (i) it significantly reduces violent crime in the evening on the day of exposure; (ii) by an even larger percent, it reduces violent crime during the night hours following exposure; (iii) it has no significant impact in the days and weeks following the exposure. We interpret the first finding as voluntary incapacitation: potential criminals that choose to attend the movie theater forego other activities that have higher crime rates. As simple as this finding is, it has been neglected in the literature, despite its quantitative importance. We interpret the second finding as substitution away from a night of more volatile activities, in particular, a reduction in alcohol consumption. The third finding implies that the same-day impact on crime is not offset by intertemporal substitution of crime. An important component of these interpretations is the sorting of more violent individuals into violent movie attendance. These findings appear to contradict evidence from laboratory experiments that document an increase in violent behavior following exposure to movie violence.

Of course, it’s just one study, so I’m not ready to rest my entire case upon it (or even dozens of other studies like it). But I do think they’re on to something.

review: Kutner & Olson’s “Grand Theft Childhood”

Adam Thierer — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:19:23 +0000

Don’t judge a book by its cover (or its title, for that matter). I’m usually faithful to that maxim, but I must admit that when I first saw the title and cover of “

It’s clear that the “big fears” bandied about in the press—that violent video games make children significantly more violent in the real world; that children engage in the illegal, immoral, sexist and violent acts they see in some of these games—are not supported by the current research, at least in such a simplistic form. That should make sense to anyone who thinks about it. After all, millions of children and adults play these games, yet the world has not been reduced to chaos and anarchy. (p. 18)

Exactly. [It’s a point I have been making for many years in essays like “Why Hasn’t Violent Media Turned Us Into a Nation of Killers?” as well as my PFF study on “Fact and Fiction in the Debate Over Video Game Regulation” and my book on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection.”] They go on to note that many game critics:

…may be asking the wrong questions and making the wrong assumptions. For example, instead of looking for a simple, direct relationship between video game violence and violent behavior in all children, we should be asking how we might identify those children who are at greatest risk for being influenced by these games. (p. 18)

They point out that some kids who play some games obsessively may indeed be to susceptible to certain negative influences, just as they might from reading certain books or listening to certain speakers. But it would be wrong to generalize this problem and say that all kids are, therefore, equally susceptible to the same influences. They argue that most kids play games—including violent games—for perfectly rational, healthy reasons: to engage escapism or role-playing, for example. Other times, violent themes can be used to convey messages or morals. I love this passage from their chapter on “Why Kids Play Violent Games”:

The threads of violence are woven throughout the fabric of children’s play and literature from a very early age. We sing them to sleep with lullabies that describe boughs breaking, cradles falling and babies plummeting helplessly to earth. We entertain them with fairy tales in which a talking wolf devours a girl’s grandmother and an old woman tries to roast children alive in her oven. Even religious instruction is replete with stories about plagues, pestilence, jealousy, betrayal, torture and death. While the stories and songs may be different, the underlying themes are generally the same in cultures throughout the world. Ogres, monsters, sexual infidelities, beheadings, thievery, abandonment, cannibalism, drownings–such was the stuff of children’s literature long before video games. (p. 118-19)

They conclude, therefore, that “children are drawn to violent themes because listening to and playing with those frightening images helps them safely master the experience of being frightened. This is an important skill, perhaps even a life-saving one.” They also argue that “Video games give free rein to fantasies of power, glory and freedom. That’s quite different from the mundane lives of most children.” (p. 121) In this sense, Kutner and Olson’s argument is very much consistent with the work of Gerald Jones, who wrote the brilliant book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super-Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence. In that book, Jones argued that:

One of the functions of stories and games is to help children rehearse for what they’ll be in later life. Anthropologists and psychologists who study play, however, have shown that there are many other functions as well—one of which is to enable children to pretend to be just what they know they’ll never be. Exploring, in a safe and controlled context, what is impossible or too dangerous or forbidden to them is a crucial tool in accepting the limits of reality. Playing with rage is a valuable way to reduce its power. Being evil and destructive in imagination is a vital compensation for the wildness we all have to surrender on our way to being good people.

To some of us, that seems completely sensible and consistent with what we know about child development from our historical experiences. How is it, then, that so many people—including many other psychologists—could think otherwise and make sweeping, outlandish claims about the negative impact of video games on children? Kutner and Olson provide detailed answers in their brilliant chapter on “Science, Nonsense and Common Sense.” I wish I could reprint the whole thing here and make every politician and gaming critic read every word of it because it provides the definitive deconstruction of much of the modern “science” surrounding the impact of violent media on kids and society. They begin by noting that:

Scientific research is like solving a jigsaw puzzle in which you don’t know if you have all the pieces; the pieces that you have can fit together in many different ways and you’re not sure what the finished picture will look like. (p. 57)

And that is more true than ever when the subject of the scientific inquiry is the human brain and the impact of visual media upon it. There are countless other inter-personal and environmental influences that impact the psychological development of a human being, especially a child. How is it that we have allowed some to weave such simplistic causation theories together and blame media for the woes of the world?

Part of the answer lies in the belief that experimental studies conducted in artificial laboratory environments (using noise blasts or small electric shock tests, for example) have produced conclusive proof of a clear causal connection between exposure to violent media and real-world acts of violence or aggression. But Kutner and Olson point out some of the problems with this theory:

[T]he researchers fail to differentiate between aggression and violence. Their logic assumes that the subjects in these experiments—usually college students who participate to earn some spending money or to get credit for a class—cannot tell the fantasy from reality and don’t know that “punishing” a person with a mild electric shock or a 9mm pistol with lead to different outcomes. Can someone who delivers a brief blast of noise really be said to have the same malicious intent as someone who shoots a convenience store clerk or stabs someone in a bar fight. (p. 65)

They also note that lab experiments are rarely compared to real-world data regarding violence or aggression:

For whatever reason, the various experts who cited the 1990s increase in crime as evidence of harm from media violence are not rushing to take back those statements in the face of reduced crime or the more direct explanations for the temporary rise. Nor are they addressing the dramatic growth in the popularity of video games, including violent video games, during the years when crime rates were plummeting. (p. 61)

The also point out that:

Violent video game play is extremely common, and violent crime is extremely rare. This makes it tough to document whether and how violent video and computer games contribute to serious violence… Criminals are also much more likely to have past exposure to other factors, such as poverty, alcoholism, family violence or parental neglect, that are know contributors to violent behavior. (p. 66)

And there are other problems regarding who is studied in these experiments and how they are studied. Most obviously, when you are dealing with the study of children, it is difficult to get parental permission to involve them in the study. This leads to questions about the sample group, how they were chosen and what we know about them and their pasts. Also, because children are the subjects of study, their developmental limitations also create unique difficulties. Kutner and Olson note that:

[Kids] don’t read and write as well as adults do. They get bored and make things up. They have trouble remembering or estimating potentially important things, such as how many hours they play video games during a typical week. At what age can kids be expected to fill out questionnaires or give accurate responses? Can older kids accurately recall what they not only last week, but what they did a few years earlier? (p. 67-8)

Moreover, can we trust that they are always telling the truth, or are they tailoring their responses and actions to what they believe the researchers want them to say or do? Having been a subject in several experiments during some college psychology classes back in the mid-80s, I remember how some of my colleagues and I would often leave the laboratory and joke about how we essentially told the researchers what they wanted to hear just to get our $20 bucks and get out of there quicker. In most cases, we caught on to the hypothesis they were trying to test pretty quickly, and that influenced the decisions we made or the answers we provided. This works the same way with kids. If you sit them in a room and show them a video of a guy punching a Bobo clown doll in head and then put those kids in a room full of a bunch of Bobo dolls, sure enough, a lot of them will pop the Bobo dolls in the nose. No duh, right! That’s pretty much all those Bobo dolls were made for; getting popped in the nose! Shockingly, however, early studies of media violence used this method and jumped to sweeping “monkey see–monkey do” conclusions about the impact of television and movies on the aggressive behavior of children in society. How could educated people believe such drivel?

In other words, there are complicated and controversial issues surrounding laboratory experiments in terms of WHO and WHAT is being studied and HOW it will be studied or measured. That leads to some of the problems mentioned above, especially when noise blasts or the punching of Bobo dolls in a lab environment are extrapolated to account for complicated real-world effects that could have multiple influences / causes.

Finally, what about the video game industry’s responsibility to parents? And what about the gaming industry’s private rating and labeling body, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). Kutner and Olson discuss many of the same industry-provided parental control tools that I have summarized in my book on the issue. And they have some suggestions for how the ESRB’s rating process might be tweaked and potentially improved, but they also rightly note that:

No [rating] system will ever be able to scrutinize and label all potentially offensive or upsetting content. The more complicated a system becomes, the less likely busy parents are to understand it and to actually use it. Given the constraints, we thing the ESRB has done a good job. (p. 186)

That’s in line with my own conclusions, as I noted in this essay on “Video Games, Ratings & Transparency“:

What critics consistently forget—or perhaps intentionally ignore—is that media rating and content-labeling efforts are not an exact science; they are fundamentally subjective exercises. Ratings are based on value judgments made by humans who all have somewhat different values. Those doing the rating are being asked to evaluate artistic expression and assign labels to it that provide the rest of us with some rough proxies about what is in that particular piece of art, or what age group should (or should not) be consuming it. In a sense, therefore, all rating systems will be inherently “flawed” since humans have different perspectives and values that they will use to label or classify content. Much ink is spilled over how rating systems can be improved. Everyone seems to have their own ideas about what “the best” system would look like. But, at the end of the day, someone has to (1) create a standard and (2) enforce it as broadly as possible so that (3) the public accepts and uses it. The ESRB has done that quite effectively in my opinion. In fact, in many ways, although it is the newest of all industry content rating and labeling schemes, the video game industry’s system is in many ways the most sophisticated, descriptive, and effective ratings system ever devised by any major media sector in America. Is it perfect? Of course not. Improvements can always be made, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the ESRB system (1) is highly descriptive, (2) rates virtually all game content sold today, and (3) is widely understood and used by game consumers and parents today. We should not underestimate that accomplishment.

Kutner and Olson also provide a litany of other useful tips and strategies for parents who are worried about their children’s exposure to certain games, or just how much time they spend playing games. But they conclude with the following sage advice:

For most kids and most parents, the bottom-line results of our research can be summed up in a single word: relax. While concerns about the effects of violent video games are understandable, they’re basically no different from the unfounded concerns previous generations had about the new media of their day. Remember, we’re a remarkably resilient species. (p. 229)

Indeed.

I highly recommend Kutner and Olson’s Grand Theft Childhood. It is must-reading for anyone who is serious about studying the debate over video games, child development and the public policy surrounding them. It is the most sensible thing ever penned on the subject.

[Note: The authors have also developed this user-friendly website to accompany the book. It does a nice job of summarizing many of the myths they address and debunk in the book, but make sure to buy the book, too.]