Harvard Phd Vs. About.com over Gaming 320
MaryAlan writes "I don't know if anyone has noticed this, but About.com's Aaron Stanton is in the middle of a back and forth firefight with Dr. Thompson, a Harvard researcher who recently testified before the U.S. Congress about violent video games. She published a study that listed Pac-Man as being 62% violent. Stanton attacked in an article criticizing her research. Then, Joystiq.com contacted Dr. Thompson and got an interview and a response, published her rebuttal, in which she defends the Pac-Man rating and the study.
So today, Stanton attempted to tear the study apart, detailing why it's flawed even though Thompson claims otherwise. On one hand we have an established Harvard Phd, who has testified before the U.S. congress, against a game journalist with a bachelors degree in Psychology. Hmmm..."
The hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
Judge the argument, not the person (Score:5, Insightful)
Argument by authority (Score:5, Insightful)
So? If a PhD came out and said that all fish were descendant from cows and some fry cook said it was the other way around, who would you believe? You should base your conclusions on the soundness of the arguments, not who made them.
For that matter, who the arguments where made to shouldn't give them added credibility. Do you really believe that someone having testified to something before Congress makes it automatically true--or even more credible? 'cause there have been a lot of woppers told on the floors of Congress.
--MarkusQ
Say whaaa? (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't checked recently, but has it become passe to ignore that you need to do isolate as many dependent variables as possible in a scientific experiment for the results to be valid?
The kind doctor's response? Well theres a lot of studies so our study (whether it's crap or not) is going to be only one data point. FFS, if a data point is made-up it doesn't deserve to even be in the statistical sample!!!
Chess is incredibly violent. (Score:5, Insightful)
No. It is the abstraction that removes the "violence" from the loss.
Violence is only violent if there is some aspect of realism.
By her "logic", chess is an incredibly violent game.
Re:The hell? (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't. I think the Pretzeldent has an MBA from Harvard, so you raise a good point.
It's not the violence inherent in the system, it's the actual impact. Most studies in peer-reviewed journals I've seen seem to indicate that one should be far more concerned with Bruce Willis in terms of making us more violent than Pac-Man or any video games.
What if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
also, nowhere does anyone seem to say what that lady's PhD was in. If it is in Biomedical Engineering, that doesn't make her an expert on (video) game theory. Also, why does it matter if the PhD is from Harvard? The location again means nothing... other than they paid through thier ass for ivy league connections. Its like the fact that she has a PhD (from Harvard!) and testified is more important than logic here and what she is actually saying.
full -o- shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Caveat Emptor. Grow up Americans. Think for yourselves, people.
and since when does testifying in front of congress give someone credibility? The people in Congress are not the brightest critters out there. To me, congressional testimony is as good as saying you were a witness in a trial. Whoop de doo.
PhD's can be crackpots too. (Score:4, Insightful)
William Shockley won the prize in Physics for inventing the transistor. He used the prize as a foundation for the soapbox from which he spouted racist bile.
A proper argument is based on facts. PhD vs. grade eight education. Doesn't matter. If some illiterate has the facts in his corner and the PhD only has theory well; reality always trumps theory.
Actually, taking experts too seriously can sometimes have horrible consequences. There was a British 'expert' who got a bunch of people convicted of murder because their kids died of sudden crib death. "... the testimony of Sir Roy Meadow, a prominent pediatrician who was the first to suggest in 1977 that some mothers induce illness in their children to draw attention to themselves." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=he
Flawed study (Score:5, Insightful)
By their standards it would seem like one minute of thumb restling out of 2 minutes of gameplay would be rated as 50% violent whereas 1 minute of shooting a guy in the face with blood splatter effects and visceral gurgling sound effects out of 10 minutes of total gameplay would only be rated as 10% violent. It's a flawed system of measurement which completely fails to take into account all the factors involved in what a normal, average, discerning, human being would normally use to define "violence".
Even when it measures relative deaths per minute, it doesn't seem to care exactly what is dieing. Apparently a goomba or a turtle from mario, or a plant monster, or even a ghost, is measured exactly the same as a poor defensless civilian grandmother from GTA. It also doesn't seem to care about the method used in killing; whether it be bopping on the head, causing it to instantly dissappear, or to light a person on fire and watch him burn to death screaming. Burning someone to death usually takes a little while, so you might actually get a lower violence rating if you kill people exclusively with flamethrowers.
The relative levels of education involved in this debate in this case is just another misleading factor. Just because the person who conducted the study has a Harvard Phd doesn't mean she has a clue. Her study may very reliably and accurately measure the level of something in videogames, it certainly isn't what most people would call violence. And whatever it measures, it certainly doesn't seem to be anything useful.
What about Hitman? (Score:5, Insightful)
She's not a PhD. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't inflate it, this isn't a hard science PhD. Its not even a Psych PhD!
Her field is "risk analysis"
Re:The hell? (Score:4, Insightful)
A PhD is not an excuse to live outside the confines (physically or intellectually) of mainstream society.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
A PhD in *WHAT*? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because she's testifying before Congress doesn't mean that she's giving good testimony.
Two examples:
- A PhD in Music talking about orbital mechanics
-
The 12 year old kid who tearfully testified about Iraq soldires draring babies from incubators who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador (and probably not in Kuwait at the time of the attack).
___Personally, I'd be inclined to describe PacMan as akin to a computerized game of 'tag'. Now, if you come up with a definition of 'violent' which classifies tag as violent, then you're gonna probably tag pacman with that same definition.
If, on the other hand, you use Bush's definition of iraqi torture as the border for violence, then Pacman doesn't register on the scale.
Re:Judge the argument, not the person (Score:3, Insightful)
How precisely do they indicate the study was flawed? (I.E. in technical terms - not "but duude, Centipede is way so not violent".) Any game that involves shooting a simalcrum of an actual creature must perforce be similiar in violence levels to Pac-Man (where the monsters eat the protagonist) and Dig Dug (where the protagonist inflates the monsters until they explode).
Re:Judge the argument, not the person (Score:2, Insightful)
How boody hard can it be? (Score:3, Insightful)
How could this POSSIBLY justify a "62% violent" rating?!? That's like saying you're committing murder by eating your Rice Krispies(TM) each morning.
This "Doctor" (and I use that term extremely loosely) needs to get a life. (Or maybe some paying patients...)
Re:Perfect for Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, just because someone is educated, doesn't mean they're necessarily smart... or don't have an agenda... I don't really see how Pac Man could EVER be considered in the same violence league as Grand Theft Auto, etc.
Just my $0.02 - Wonka, wonka, wonka...
Another Harvard PhD says (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that there are some fairly serious problems with this entire field of videogame violence studies, which has been characterized by some of the sloppiest, most overinterpreted "science" that I have ever seen. Dr. Thompson is far from the worst offender. The main problem with her work is that it utilizes an arbitrary, unvalidated definition of "violence." If she wishes to relate here work to the studies that purport to detect harmful effects of videogame violence, then she certainly needs to establish in some rigorous way that what she calls "violence" is in some sense comparable to what these studies are examining. (those studies are mostly pretty bad, too, but that is another issue).
Stanton's point that Thompson's classification system yields high violence scores for games that most people, and most parents, would not consider to be particularly violent is a perfectly valid criticism, and her defense, which was essentially "we aren't using it for those games" simply dodges the issue. Given that her criteria are clearly misleading for some games, how does she decide which games it can validly be applied to. I think that it is highly irresponsible for her to report her %violence measures to Congress without properly explaining the criteria she used for classification (saying that it's in her papers is hardly adequate here, considering that her audience is most certainly not going to be reading those papers). Frankly, it seems highly questionable to me whether Dr. Thompson's studies have any value at all. I thought that her defense of classifying Pac-Man as violent was particularly revealing:
What I find notable here is that she seems to have made no effort to actually determine whether many--or indeed, any--young children actually interpret Winky, Blinky, et al. in Pac-Man as "ghosts trying to kill you" or are actually frightened by the game. This kind of uncritical thinking seems representative of her approach.
I should note, however, that her actual recommendations to Congress seem fairly reasonable. She suggests, for example, that ESRB members should actually play the games, hardly a radical suggestion. And somewhat ironically, she suggests that they should do what she failed to do herself in her testimony--"make its rating process and the terms that it uses in its ratings more
transparent."
Re:Judge the argument, not the person (Score:5, Insightful)
It obliterates the conclusion drawn from the study.
The central finding of the study was that E-rated games without violence-related descriptors contained "unlabelled" "intentional violence", and that the rating was therefore untrustworthy, finding that 64% of a sample of 55 games contained between 30% and 90% "violent game play". When you recognize, however, that the same methodology rates Pac-Man as 62% "violent", Dig Dug 67% violent, and Centipede 97% violent, it makes it a lot harder to take seriously that the 30%-90% ratings found for 64% of the games in the study in any way shows that the absence of an ESRB violence descriptor in an E-rated game is substantially misleading, as the kind of arguable "violence" in Pac-Man, Dig Dug, or Centipede is not what most people are looking to ratings to protect children from.
Thompson's "research" on media ratings (consistently coming to the conclusion that every type of rating system in existence underrates every kind of media and is getting worse all the time) has all the hallmarks of a political crusade masquerading as science, and highly selective presentation of data an expunging data that would call into question the conclusion rather than presenting the facts found fairly is a central hallmark of such pseudo-science.
But that's not all (by far) of Thompson's research, and its certainly not unheard for an otherwise top-flight researcher to have a hobbyhorse issue where they go off the deep end (its particularly noticeable to the public with researchers in the social sciences since those issues tend to be politically salient; the same thing in physical scientists gets seen more as eccentricity since when they got goofy about an issue, its usually not political salient, and often is completely incomprehensible to laymen.)
Definition of violence (Score:3, Insightful)
So for pacman, eating dots being the primary goal isnt violent, eating a power pill and then eating ghosts a supporting goal is violent, and getting caught by a ghost to loose a life is also violent. The fact that the violence was not portrayed in a realistic or gruesome manner was not considered.
Thus by her definition, Space Invaders, chess, Quake would all easily out rank pacman for violence because the primary goal is eliminate/kill an enemy, and the loss condition being death of the players avatar. Where as solitaire, most racing games, or DDR would be almost devoid of violence.
The best bit about her reply was saying that the parents of kids are ultimately responsible for what they let their kids play.
Regardless of what Dr T said to some senate committee, it will be perverted/given spin by the politicians for their own means.
Re:What if... (Score:4, Insightful)
So WHAT? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to say how violent a game is by how many minutes of 'violence' there is a game without ANY weighting to the context or impact of said violence is ridiculous. To say that Centipede is 100% violent because the entire game is spent being chased by something that intends 'harm' is just stupid. It's a reflex/puzzle game... and it's a game of tag effectively. To rate it higher than GTA because there are stretches in GTA where there is no violence is just plain moronic.
You can't apply an objective measure to something so plainly subjective as violence in the media.
I don't care how many pieces of paper she has.
Re:Perfect for Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Perfect for Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Well then what the heck are you blathering on about? The article was a well-written critique bringing up very valid points. In other words, to directly answer your question, Person A. Some advice... don't get starry-eyed because someone has letters after their name-- try to judge ideas and methods on their own merits.
Re:The hell? (Score:2, Insightful)
The proper response to, "This standard is wrong because
BTW, I couldn't find misuse of the word "flare" in TFA. Would you mind pointing it out for me?
Think of the children! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parenting is a hard enough job as it is without studies like Thompson's being taken out of context and used to give parents yet more confusion. Television and tabloid psychologists should always be ignored in favor common sense. "How do I determine if this game is too violent for my young one?" Look at the packaging, read the copy, scrutinize the screenshots. Think about the implications of the words "Rape, pillage, claw, and shoot your way through 69 bloodthirsty levels of gore, guts and mayhem!" If you're still not sure, try renting the game and maybe even playing it yourself.
Re:The hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perfect for Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Perfect for Slashdot (Score:1, Insightful)
Did anyone read Thompson's response, or are you all going to judge Thompson by what Stanton says?
Some choice quotes from Thompson herself:
With respect to all of our studies, I will also emphasize that we performed separate studies of different categories of game ratings (E, T, and M), because they are played by young people of very different developmental levels and comparisons between them would be inappropriate. We have never and would never use the percentage of violent game play to make a ridiculous claim that a game like The Legend of Zelda is more "violent" than a game like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, for example, although critics of our work like to throw out such statistics and attribute such claims to us. In contrast to what you may believe, we are aware of the developmental differences in children of different ages, and we have been very careful to consider this in our research.
I think that it is important to keep in mind is that games rated E are played by children as young as 2 and 3 years old, and the developmental psychology literature indicates that young children do not have the developmental capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy until approximately age 6 or 7 (of course this varies).
We are also surprised when critics of our research omit important information about our studies in which we have addressed this issue more. For example, we specifically examine not just the percentage of violent game play, but also other crucial factors like the severity of the portrayal of injuries and suffering, the numbers of human and nonhuman deaths, the types of weapons used, and the reward system.
In particular, the severity of the portrayal of injuries and suffering is often what people think of when saying that one game is more "violent" than another (which is more relevant from a developmental psychology perspective for games rated T and M). For example, does the game contain minor auditory or visual representations of injury and pain that primarily serve to notify the player that a character has been injured (e.g., characters like Mario grunt or flash red when injured), or does the game contain graphic representations of injury and pain that serve to exaggerate or focus attention on suffering (e.g., characters screaming in agony or bleeding excessively when injured or when otherwise physically tortured)?
Re:Perfect for Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't be ridiculous. If the Hot Coffee scandal has taught us anything, it's that merely playing a game would be an utterly inadequate means of rating it, since one can view the worst accessible content in a game and give it a "mature" rating and still be lambasted in the press for failing to guess that it can be hacked to display simulated sex.
It's not feasible for game raters to play games in depth, and even if they did, they would inevitably miss content. That's why the current system has them rate games based on videos of the most violent/whatever moments. It's a good system, and no more flawed than the alternatives.
Writing off violence just because it is cartoon violence doesn't really cut it, since young children can be affected by cartoons as well as real life.
Why, could this possibly be why ESRB ratings have contained helpful little content descriptions like "animated violence" for about 10 years now?
the ESRB needs to provide more information about the games it rates so that parents can have a better idea of the content in their kid's games.
Perhaps the real problem is that nobody, apparently not even Harvard researchers, bothers to read the content information the ESRB already provides.
Re:Perfect for Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
You are making a very stupid mistake here.
Yes, the online journalist has a lesser academic background than the person who compiled the study. Nonetheless, the academic background is irrelevant when talking about the veracity of given statements. A statement is true or false independent of who makes it. The truth value of a statement doesn't change if the same statement is given by a Harvard PhD, a Bachelor's degree or a street sweeper. The messenger doesn't influence the truthfullness of a message. It's valid or not and the person who states it (i.e., it's academic background, life, experiences, whatever) doesn't have any impact whatsoever in it.
What you are claiming is that the authority of a figure influences your apreension of a subject. You opt to blindly believe anyone who is an authority figure without taking a moment apply some critical reasoning to the message itself. If two messengers contradict each other, you prefer to believe the biggest authority figure instead of analyzing the facts. That is very silly and I hope you know it.