I want to give you and parent a hug right now. Being a social scientist on Slashdot feels kinda like being a biologist on a creationism website sometimes.

You have clearly never tried to do social sciences research. Simply asking "What effects to video games have on children?" is FAR too broad a question for any study. Video games potentially have hundreds, thousands of effects. You cannot design a single study that will successfully measure them all. You can't design a GOOD study that measures more than a couple of them at a time. While a super-general study that tries to count a lot of possible effects might be a good idea at the very very beginning of a brand-new line of research, video games have been researched for decades now, and media in general for even longer. We know a good-sized list of things they may affect, there is no reason to try to study more than a couple of those things at a time.

For example, some studies look at video games' effect on spatial reasoning. Are those studies also biased? Must every study measure both propensity to violence AND ability to count items at the periphery of your vision??

This study may be biased (I, like you, have not actually read it yet, so I don't know), but to say it is biased because it asks a valid, researchable question is idiotic.

From the TFA:

The study was published today in the March 2010 issue of the Psychological Bulletin, an American Psychological Association journal.

Unfortunately, it's not up on their website yet or I'd link you right to the paper.

Oh wait, actually he has a preprint up on his own website. For free.

Thank goodness someone here is sane. No, I don't like that the guy is calling for this to have policy implications either, but I'm not going to condemn the entire study for that.

Pulling out old saws like "correlation doesn't imply causation" doesn't even work here - his meta-analysis includes studies with a variety of methodologies, some of which are designed to piece apart true causation from mere correlation. Nor can you claim that he's only looking at certain types of people (chances are, with 130 studies there's quite a range), or not controlling for other variables (again, 130 studies - probably everything and anything you can imagine has been controlled for in at least one of them). Anyone who wants to attack this guy needs to read the actual paper and make rational decisions based on the actual soundness of his methodology.

Oh shit, you mean Apple's just using this thing to make money? Alert the tech blogs!

Yeah, I found this question to be too confusing to answer. I've been paid a decent salary for being a grad student for 3 years now - is that conventional enough to count? What about the tuition reimbursement I got for being an RA during my master's? What about the hourly paid research positions I held as an undergrad (some of which I'd do for pay one semester and for credit the next semester)?

The whole cost doesn't have to be bundled into the hardware - the purpose of the wireless access is so you can download games from their store. Charge a few extra bucks per game and you probably more than balance out the cost of transmitting it, especially for smaller old-school games, while keeping the cost well below buying a cartridge in a store.

At least they called it a "hypothesis" instead of forcing us to accept it as verified fact.

You say this as though "hypothesis" were some kind of weasel word, as though they actually do consider it a fact but are just calling it something else to avoid criticism.

Did it ever occur to you that this is precisely what a hypothesis is, and that the correlation =/= causation thing is the very reason that it is considered a hypothesis? I'm sure that these biologists have some vague idea what they're doing. If they thought that they had hard and fast proof they'd be moving this on to the "theory" stage. The very fact that they call it a hypothesis means that they agree with you.

Whatever happened to Prodigy? That was my first internet service. I remember my excitement at finding their ST:TNG message board... and chagrin at discovering that it was mostly full of middle-aged women having fantasies about Brent Spiner. I mean, I had a crush on Data and all, but at 14 I was definitely not interested in a 45-year-old actor in the same way these ladies were.

I assume you mean environmentally-caused or genetic? Because "developmental" and "genetic" are in no way whatsoever opposites of each other or mutually exclusive in the least. Even if you do mean environmental, it's a false dichotomy. Very little is entirely one or the other. It's completely possible that certain genes give you an increased proclivity towards autism, but environmental factors (which can include those before you're born) decide whether or not you really make it onto the spectrum, and how far.

Disclaimer: I know very little about autism, but have read enough about nature vs nurture in general to know that the odds of it being entirely one or the other are very, very low.

I dunno, I've downloaded a couple of those myself and they're even more trouble.

First there's the TCO. Keeping them virus-free is a couple hundred a year, plus if you let your subscription to the Kibble service lapse your Pet will stop functioning completely.

They all come preloaded with Poop.app, which can't be removed but needs constant maintenance. And in my models, at least, this sometimes will randomly upgrade itself to Poop 2.0 (code named Diarrhea) - that's a mess to clean up from your desktop, believe me.

And mine always seem to be blocking my access to the Furniture suite of utilities - there are workarounds, sure, but it's just one more thing to keep in mind.

Don't get me wrong, they have a lot of features that make them very worthwhile, but they're not for everyone!

Eight-year-olds are apparently less picky about their online freedoms than you are. Which is unsurprising, given that if their parents are smart they have pretty limited "freedom" to begin with.

I'm relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born..

Aw, that's cute. We'll see what he says when he's forty and he gives his kid an iPod to play with.

I think you're using the term "third world country" when you really mean "industrialized country that's just not quite as globally powerful as the US." If you really, truly mean third world in all of the places you say it, then you are incredibly ignorant. Believe me, not being able to afford to own a house within a few miles of your job, or having kids ten years LATER than you would have liked, are the least of the worries of anyone living in the third world. Try not being able to afford electricity in the one-room shack that houses five people, or having kids far before you were economically or emotionally ready to because you have zero access to birth control or any kind of sex ed (abstinence or otherwise) - or better yet, because you were forced into it, and that's perfectly legal in your country.

I find myself in the oddest of paradoxes: I can afford whatever electronic toys I wish, yet cannot afford the basic necessities of family life.

I think this is also known as "UR Doin it Rong." If you can't afford the basic necessities, then NO, by definition, you CANNOT afford the electronics.

Same here - but my birthday's not for a few more months, so I'm still waiting... Maybe they'll give it the boost when they do their iPod-centric show (with new & improved Jobs?) in September.