Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 6th Feb 2009 14:34 UTC
Do you remember the good old days? When game manufacturers fully realised that gamers don't really need a motivation and a back story to make them want to kill everything on screen? The good old days, when Grand Theft Auto 1 was released, and Carmageddon 1 and 2 were made. Those were the days. Somewhere along the way, however, game designers started shoe-horning backstories and motivations into games where the goal is "kill everything", and as a consequence, these games became pretentious. Thank god, however, for Saints Row 2: a game that brings back the good old days of mindless violence - just for the fun of it.
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RE[2]: No Cause / Effect Relationship Has Ever Been Shown
by pantheraleo on Fri 6th Feb 2009 20:19
in reply to "RE: No Cause / Effect Relationship Has Ever Been Shown"
Member since:2007-03-07
> Random assignment helps to get around this issue,
> self-selection bias, as well.
It's almost impossible to prove a cause /effect relationship with an issue this complex because there are too many confounding variables that are almost impossible to control for. It's easy to prove a relationship that "violent people are likely to play violent video games". But it is almost impossible to prove that violent video games are the cause.
RE[3]: No Cause / Effect Relationship Has Ever Been Sho
by jimbofluffy on Fri 6th Feb 2009 20:40
in reply to "RE[2]: No Cause / Effect Relationship Has Ever Been Shown"
Member since:2008-07-15
It's almost impossible to prove a cause /effect relationship with an issue this complex because there are too many confounding variables that are almost impossible to control for.
You might be amazed at to what you can control for in some studies if you have the right data, but thats if you don't have random assignment...
Anyway, there is no "proof" in these types of tests. There is only "statistical signficance" and that is if your experiment pans out well. Then there is your own interpretation of that "statistical significance."
In this case you can rule out the explanations of self selection and other underlying sample differences as the source of the results because of random assignment. Nobody in this study selected to play violent games, because they were randomly assigned to play the violent instead of the non-violent. In addition, with a large enough sample there is no reason to think the two experimental groups are different on average ex ante.
In any case the scope of this study is rather small. My interpretation would go something like this: The group that played violent games exhibited behavior relative to the group that played the non-violent games that is consistent with a hypothesis that violent games desensitizes people to violence in the very short term. It says nothing about whether these effects are or could be cumulative or even if being desensitized causes a person to become more violent.
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Member since:
2008-07-15
Random assignment helps to get around this issue, self-selection bias, as well. In a general population sample, yes that would be a problem, unless you have an exogenous (independent) shock to cause people to play violent games. In the controlled experiment the fact that a person is playing a violent game instead of a non-violent game is independent of his or her choice.
While it usually is not a good idea to throw around big conclusion about the exact manner of causality in these studies, it is pretty safe to say their isn't a problem with self-selection.