Current Research Perspectives

JENKINS: We are now going to have a review of some current research perspectives on video games by Geoffrey Goldstein from the University of Utrecht. Goldstein was a Professor of Psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia and Visiting Professor at the University of London and is now with the Department of Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. His books include Aggression and Crimes of Violence from Oxford University Press, which won the best book award from the International Society for Research on Aggression in 1988 and Toys, Play and Child Development from Cambridge University Press. His most recent book is Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment, which he edited with support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Goldstein is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and The American Psychological Society .

GOLDSTEIN: I was fully prepared to give my PowerPoint presentation on this subject, but I only now discovered that it's for a Mac and not for a PC so I will instead give a multimedia presentation using chalk and overhead sheets. This is an outline of what I want to talk about. I am going to describe a few areas of research. About half of the research is about violence in video games so about half of my presentation will be about violence in video games.

I want to start by telling you that I don't think video games have any affect on me. I don't think they have very much affect on you. You and I can agree that they have effects, undesirable ones very often, on other people. This line of reasoning is referred to as the third person effect in media research. The idea that the media don't affect me, they probably don't affect my acquaintances, but we all know they affect other vulnerable groups of people. [LAUGHTER] This helps to explain much of what is written about video games and computer games not only in the popular press, but in scientific journals as well. It reminds me of what is called the first law of newspapers. Everything you read in the newspaper is true, except the things you know about. [LAUGHTER]

What people read about video games is that they are violent, they are sexist, they are responsible for some percentage of juvenile misbehavior, sometimes worse than misbehavior, and people become addicted to them and socially isolated as a result. That also is reflected in the scientific literature on this subject. There are perhaps 400 published studies of video games. Very few have appeared in printed journals - at least, about online gaming - but that is beginning to change. They are starting to do studies of PC games. There is a new book by Patricia Wallace, one of my co-authors on one of my books, called The Psychology of the Internet. In it, she describes different motives for people playing online games in MUDs. I will talk about some of those motives for playing particularly violent games shortly.

Many of the studies compare heavy video game users, (I use the words, heavy and light, of course, to refer to weight, but what they really mean is how much time people spend playing video games.) with light video game players. Typically, what happens is a researcher goes into a school or a classroom, asks people to fill in a questionnaire, how much time do you spend playing games, and then divides the class at the median comparing the heavy and light gamers. What they tend to find in these studies and what you would then read about in the newspaper the next day or week is heavy video game players are more aggressive than light players or people who don't play at all. There are very few people who never play video games. Hardly any young people admit to never playing video games so it really is a matter of degree. Heavy video game players are found to be more antisocial, more aggressive, have more delinquency, more truancy from school, poor performance in school. This is written about as though, there is a causal connection here. In fact, there is a basic flaw in this kind of study. Not only is correlation not causality, (day one, lesson one, statistics one), but when you make a study like this - dividing the class at the median in terms of how often they play video games, you end up comparing mainly boys with mainly girls because most of the heavy gamers are boys. What you find is that heavy gamers in comparison to light gamers reflect masculine characteristics. That is, they are more aggressive than girls. Their school performance is lower. They read fewer books and so on. So, you end up with a study of sex differences that masks as a study of video games. This kind of problem shows up in many ways. We will talk about it shortly in terms of violence.

There is a second kind of study that reflects this sort of third person media phenomenon - mainly, the idea that people can become addicted to video games. In the last few years, what happened is psychologists have taken the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the categorization of psychopathologies, referred to as DSM4 for the fourth edition) which includes a pathology that refers to compulsive gambling or compulsive behavior. It reflects addictive behavior, alcohol addiction, drug addiction and gambling addiction. This scale has been modified to study addiction to video games. Let me read you something from one of these studies, if I can only find it. Like the term violence, the term addiction is used in very loose ways. In one study, the American Psychiatric Association DSM4 categorization for addiction was modified to be used in a study of video game addiction and here are four of the nine items on the scale that people are asked whether this is true or false of them: 1) preoccupation with playing video games, 2) playing video games as a way to escape from problems - which, by the way, as a psychologist, it's a perfectly healthy thing to do, nevertheless - [LAUGHTER] 3) trying for an increasingly high score - duh! - [LAUGHTER] and 4) borrowing money to play video games. If a person answered yes to these four or any four of the nine items on this scale, he or she would be regarded as addicted to video games. So you will read in journals about video game addiction, and I just saw the first paper on online game addiction.

There is something else about studies like this that one needs to take into account. This kind of study (in which people fill in questionnaires or are interviewed about their gaming experience) represents a kind of photograph, a snapshot in time. It reflects a fixed point in time at which time some people will, in fact, be obsessed with a new video game, new game systems, competition with fellow players. That is, at any one moment, there are indeed young people (and people in general who play games) who will be obsessed with their new toy or their new game. We don't know how long this obsession lasts, but there is no reason to think that this represents anything like addiction in the sense that people addicted to drugs or gambling or other substances suffer. When people are indeed addicted to substances, or even to behaviors, they suffer when these things are taken away from them and they don't get over it with just the passing of time and more drinking. You don't stop drinking by drinking more, but you may stop playing a video game by playing it more. At some point, it loses its appeal. It becomes less challenging or new games appear or other activities take their place. When we read about and study so called "addiction" to gaming, what we really are doing is taking a photograph at a given point in time. It wouldn't be surprising to find that some small percentage of people at that moment are indeed thinking heavily, and maybe even exclusively, about playing games. However, a recent study in Australia (based on a random sample of thousands of Australian young people) found that these obsessions with games last a period of weeks or months. There is nothing like real addiction going on here, so we have to be careful when we read both the scientific research as well as popular reports about that research.

That's certainly true when it comes to the subject of violence. I want to show you a quote from a recent study that reviews research on video games and aggression, and I want to talk about their use of these terms. According to the authors (two psychologists named Dill at the University of Iowa)"...in violent video games, aggression is often the main goal and killing adversaries means winning the game and reaping the benefits. While murder is a crime in real life, in a violent video game, murder is the most reinforced behavior," they say. "The violent video game player is an active aggressor and the player's behavioral repertoire is expanded to include new and varied aggressive alternatives." Psychologists define aggression as the intentional injury of another organism. Usually when we are talking about human beings, we mean another human, people attempting to injure others. That's what aggression is. There is no aggression in video games. There is no victim that one intends to injure. There is only a digital enemy, a digital victim. There is no living organism that one intends to injure in playing a video game.

That's also true, by the way, of much so called violence in the media. When people talk about violence in the media, they make no distinctions between war footage shown on the news in the evening, a dramatic program with live actors pretending to be aggressive, a cartoon with cartoon characters engaging in some sort of nonrealistic aggressive behavior - hitting a character over the head with a frying pan and his head takes on the shape of a frying pan - or comics who make aggressive jokes. Those distinctions are lost in discussions of violence in the media. In fact, in all of those examples, the only real violence in the media is on the news and documentary programs. All the rest of it is something else, so there is violence and then there is violence.

It’s very important to make the distinction between those two things. Violence without the quotation marks - real violence - is frightening for children, has effects on them, emotional and physical effects on them. Whereas violence in Tom and Jerry cartoons, even dramatic violence, (although that can be borderline disturbing to many people, I will come back to that point in just a moment) is not, in fact, disturbing to people. They don't learn to be aggressive by playing so called violent video games. What's the behavior that may be reinforced when playing a violent video game? It seems to me the behavior that is reinforced is play rather than aggression. There is no aggression. When you talk to people who, in fact, play these games, what happens is they are conscious at the moment of not being aggressive, but of playing a game.

Let me describe a typical study on this phenomenon with young children. A psychologist goes into a classroom and randomly divides the children into groups in which one group plays a violent video game, some Mortal Kombat or Doom type game. Another group, sort of a control group, plays a nonviolent game, some sort of puzzle game, and the third group may play no game at all. The children are then let loose on the playground where the psychologists observe their behavior - looking for aggressive behavior in particular. What they find is, after playing a Mortal Kombat style video game, kids, (especially boys) go out on the playground and they start doing martial arts moves. They pretend to be martial arts experts, and one of the important attractions of this kind of game for them is that it allows them, it even compels them to make sound effects. [LAUGHTER]

One of the attractions of violent entertainment, violent toys and games, particularly for boys, (and it is the same attraction as for automobiles and fire engines and airplanes that little kids, boys especially want) is that it allows them, it gives them permission in a way to make sound effects. Making noise is a guy thing. If you are awakened at night because there is noise out in the street from some drunken people, they are guys. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. These games encourage that kind of guy behavior. You never find kids playing shooting games in an arcade or at home without making the appropriate sound effects. That's one of the appeals of these things for young people. So, the psychologists are observing these kids on the playground and there are kids doing all these martial arts things with all the noises that accompany them and they are going aggression, aggression, aggression, aggression. Compared to the people who play some other game or no game at all, it looks to the researcher as though these boys are being more aggressive and, therefore, violent video games cause aggressive behavior. Nonsense I say. Violent video games cause aggressive play. If we don't distinguish between aggressive play and aggressive behavior, we lose the whole value of play - which is to do things in fantasy that you don't actually have to carry out in reality.

Let's take a similar observation. A psychologist is standing watching these kids on the playground, and the boys are doing these martial arts things. The teachers and psychologists are saying, "Isn't it terrible that the boys are being aggressive?" Often what you see on the playground is - with some exceptions of course - girls in small groups standing or sitting around talking. Occasionally, a boy will chase them and then you get this sort of girl scream, playground scream, that only you hear on the playground. But the teachers and the psychologists think that the boys are being aggressive and the girls are not. In reality, the boys are not being aggressive. The boys are playing. They are playing at fighting, but they are not being aggressive. There is no intention to injure anyone and, in fact, rarely do children get injured as a result of this kind of play. Imagine the girls are standing around saying, let's have a party on Friday night and let's not invite her. That's aggressive behavior. That's behavior designed to injure someone else. [LAUGHTER] So, to the psychologist doing this research, they get the conclusion completely turned around. To them, the boys are aggressive and the girls are nice. In reality, it's the other way around [LAUGHTER]

There is a lot of research on video games exactly like that and, the erroneous conclusion that is drawn is aggressive video games make boys aggressive. There are two studies I am aware of that do make this distinction, that look at aggressive play that is pretending to be martial arts fighters and so on and children actually fighting, pushing one another, throwing something at another kid. When they do make that distinction, what they find is that aggressive media - video games, television programs - increase aggressive play and have no effect on aggressive behavior.

Now, I already said that heavy video game players are indeed more aggressive than people who play video games less often. That is a male/female thing also. But, you can imagine that boys who are attracted particularly to violent video games are, on the average, more aggressive than boys who are repulsed by such games. That's not a surprise either. Everyone seems to have some sort of interest in violent entertainment and we choose the entertainment that suits us, that fits our need for excitement and suspense and gore and whatever else we want. (I will come back to why people might want to watch violence in the first place.) Violent entertainment offers something for almost everyone. There is hardly any person or group of people who are not, in some way, engaged in the discussion about or active consumption of violent entertainment.

You can choose the kind of violence that best suits you. There is really in your face violence - Quentin Tarrantino films, Doom, other games that involve realistic blood and gore. That is one of the categories of one of the descriptors from the ESRB rating system and if that's too much for you, it's too much for most girls. They don't want to play that, and a lot of guys don't want to play those games either. So, you can choose a game that has maybe car crashes in it, maybe other things that are less directly violent, less confrontationally violent. The people who condemn these kinds of games go home and read the latest Stephen King novel and see no inconsistency in their condemnation of violent entertainment and their consumption of such books. If even that's too much for you, if even reading detective stories and horror stories is too much for you to bear, then you can condemn violent entertainment and still be engaged with a subject. So, there is hardly anyone who has nothing to do with violent entertainment. We all choose our own violent entertainment that suits us in these temperamental and emotional ways and condemn the violent entertainment that other people choose. Without understanding that, in fact, these things serve purposes for all of us.

Is it violence for violence sake? David Grossman and other people say people who make video games are just selling violence for violence’s sake. Well, not only wouldn't that sell, but it's not at all what people choose. Violence, if it is to be entertaining, has to fulfill certain requirements. The good guys have to win in the end and if they don't, there has to be a sequel that is the possibility for that to happen. It has to have a moral story in other words. When the bad guys win, people find that disturbing and not at all entertaining. It leaves them hanging in a way that is uncomfortable and unpleasant.

Violent entertainment has to carry cues to its unreality, to the fact that it is intended as entertainment and intended for public consumption. This is easy to do, especially in early versions of video games. Mortal Kombat, that was pretty primitive as a video game. The quality of the images and so on already tell you this isn't real. When clues to the unreality are missing - sound effects, music, cartoon like characters - people find this disturbing and not at all entertaining. For this book, Why We Watch, we had people watch videos of bloody excess as long as they could tolerate them. They sat in a room with a remote control and three videos, and they were told to watch them as long as they could. The three videos were a steer being slaughtered in a slaughter house, a monkey being killed and its brains served in a Chinese village, and facial surgery on a young girl whose face had to be split open and the skin drawn back. Hardly anyone watched these things all the way through, but the very same correlates that you find in media violence research, we found in these studies. Namely, males watch these films longer than females. Males who are high in aggression watched them longer than males who were lower in aggression. Males with a high need for excitement and arousal watched them longer than other males. That is, our ability to tolerate these things varies with our own experiences and temperament, but no one found these things enjoyable or entertaining.

Violence for violence’s sake, blood for the sake of blood, is not at all what consumers are interested in. Without some of these features, violent video games lose their appeal to virtually everyone. People are highly selective in the violence they seek and tolerate in the media. When people are zapping, when people are choosing games, even when people are choosing music to listen to, they choose things that they think will produce in themselves appealing levels of stimulation or distraction or involvement and you can choose things that you think will suit you at the moment. So, if you have had a very busy, hectic day, you might want something involving and so forth. People can choose video games in the same way they choose any other form of entertainment. I don't think that it is fair to say the media have unwanted effects on its consumers because there is always the off switch. No one is forced to play Doom or Mortal Kombat except people in experiments on the effects of Doom and Mortal Kombat. [LAUGHTER] That's a very important point to make because we are all volunteers in this business. Nobody is forced to pay any attention to violent entertainment. You know the story about Mortal Kombat and the famous decapitation scene in the original version that Sega published or sold. When Nintendo also decided to sell Mortal Kombat, they cleaned up the game. It cut about the worse 20 seconds of offensive footage and advertised it as the family version of Mortal Kombat. Despite the fact that, at that time, there were more Nintendo game systems in peoples’ homes than Sega systems, the Sega version of Mortal Kombat outsold the Nintendo version by seven to one. That is, people chose the violent version of Mortal Kombat intentionally. Now, some of them chose that because it was already taboo, and you get some extra points from your friends (if you are a guy) for choosing these things that other people regard as offensive. There is a market for these things, but it's not just violence for violence’s sake. It's violence for entertainment’s sake.

Two things are missing from studies of violent media including violent video games. The first thing missing is the voluntary nature of play in the first place. People play video games. People are not force fed video games. That is an important distinction to make, and there are very few studies of violent video games that actually take into account the fact that this is play. People play video games. The play spirit is something seriously missing from research on this subject.

Violent entertainment is also a social phenomenon. It's true boys may play video games alone in their room, but they are certain to talk about them with their friends. Video games are not things that people do in isolation. They do it in a larger context. What is missing from research on video games is video game research subjects are regarded as individuals. A person is forced to play a game and then some measurements are taken before and afterwards. In reality, boys play these games. Girls play these games too. They talk about them with their friends. Some boys, some kids, become experts in these games. They get status and other valuable benefits from knowing something about these things. They talk about them with their friends. These serve the same function for young people as sports do for adult men. It's something you need to be versed in. You need to know about them. If you are a real guy, you need to know about sports. It can't be any old sport. You can't know about water ballet. That's not the sport that other guys want to talk with you about to test your manliness. You have to know something about football or boxing or other guy sports, basketball, baseball is OK also, especially if there are certain aggressive elements in it. These things are important to establish your manhood. Video games are important for people to know to establish some sort of street credibility. People use their experiences for social purposes. Here we are talking about adolescents and violence in video games without acknowledging that the things that most matter to adolescents are being accepted by their friends, establishing your credibility, having some acceptance by other people. The things that really matter to young people are social and that's entirely missing from all of this discussion and study.

With a remote control or a joystick in your hands, you can control the effects that the media have on you. We did a study in Utrecht in which people watched a violent excerpt from an Arnold Schwarzenegger film with or without a remote control in their hand. That's all. Watch the same 12 minutes of film with or without a remote control, filled in a questionnaire on a mood adjective checklist. What we found was just holding the remote control even if you never used it, reduces the emotional impact of the violence in that scene. Having a joystick in your hand reduces and gives you control over the effects that a game will have on you. a If it's too much and if it's something unwanted, you stop play. It's very, very easy to do that. Let me just quickly add, because I don't just want to focus on violence, there are about 400 studies of video games and about 75 to 100 of them are not about these negative things like addiction and violence. They are about the uses and benefits of video games. This is a quote from Marsha Kinder's book Playing With Power: "Video games have considerable educational and therapeutic value for a diverse range of groups, including adolescents, athletes, would be pilots, the elderly in old age homes, cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, stroke victims, quadriplegics and young children suffering from palsy, brain damage and Down Syndrome." It sounds like a panacea to me.

We did a study in the Netherlands where we had people in a nursing home play video games one summer. This was two years ago. We randomly assigned people to play Super Tetris, a video game on their apartment's television screen, or no video game. We measured reaction time, emotional well being and social contacts. What we found was that playing video games benefited these older women in terms of reaction time, (if you go to a nursing home, there are almost always a disproportionate number of women. If you live long enough, you will always have a date on Saturday night if you're a guy. [LAUGHTER] . The reaction times were faster after five weeks of playing video games. Their sense of emotional well being was better and what we observed unexpectedly was when they went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee in the afternoon, they, 85 year old women, are talking with other 85 year old women just like 12 year old boys do. "How did you do? What is your highest score? How do you get to the next level?" They used these things just like adolescents do for social purposes.

So, video games have much to recommend. Even the hardware has much to recommend it. It's lightweight. It's portable. It's standardized. These things can be used and are used increasingly in psychological tests and as psychological tests and as a positive way to spend your free time. Let me just close because Henry is giving me the signal here. What is missing from video game research? I have already mentioned this. Missing is any acknowledgement that video games are a form of play, are a voluntary activity which people can start or stop as they choose and gamers enter, in the spirit of play. That is something entirely missing from laboratory studies so it's not surprising that laboratory studies of video games give us not a very realistic picture of how these games are used or what effects they have.

I will close with just one other media psychology lesson. It's called the file drawer problem. I told you this would be a multimedia presentation. If you are going to publish a paper in a psychology journal, you have to have statistically significant results or the editor will say "we can't publish this - we don't publish "no" results in our journals. sYou set out to do a study on the effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior for example and you find it doesn't make any difference. It has no affect on aggression. You send it off to a journal editor, he sends it back to you saying we can't publish this. Do something else. So, the study goes in your filing cabinet in your file drawer because it's not publishable. The only things that are publishable are those with significant results. If you are studying violence or addiction or the effects of heavy game play on your school performance for example - three active areas of research on video games - if you don't have significant results, your study won't be published. So, what's published, if you do a review of the literature, are mostly negative findings. We don't know how many normal findings, how many studies with non-significant results are sitting in people's filing cabinets all around the world because they are not publishable. So, what we have with someone like the Dills, they conclude, erroneously I think, that the evidence is pretty good, that aggressive video games cause aggressive behavior, but the file drawer problem says well, there are studies out there we don't know. We don't know how many there are with no results. What you find is the published literature is a biased sample of all studies done on video games, and it is a serious problem for people who want to do literature reviews. There are ways to overcome that, but you can see the problem. What you read about video games both in the popular and scientific press is a sample of what we know and what has been done on this subject and it leaves you with a decidedly distorted impression, I think, of the uses and benefits of video games. Thanks. [APPLAUSE]

JENKINS: All right. This leaves us with about 10 minutes to take some questions and answers. There are two mikes about halfway down the aisle if people would like to ask questions, please step up to the mike and fire away.

PEARCE: Hi. That was great. I am Celia Pearce from USC and I have a question, something that I have been curious about and wondered if you looked at it at all. You talked about correlation as not necessarily causality. I am curious if anybody has done any studies the other way - where they looked at, for example, comparing general aggression among adolescent males who play or don't play video games. Also, whether males who are already aggressive want to play video games, rather than if the video games are making them aggressive.

GOLDSTEIN: Yes. The second question is certainly true. Part of your question is true. The more aggressive a person is, the more tolerance he or she has, even the more desire he or she has, for violent media, to expose him or herself to violent entertainment. So, aggressive boys and men mostly are the biggest audience for violent entertainment of all sorts, including video games. That doesn't have any bearing on the causal argument. Attempts to get to the causal argument by, for example, doing an experiment in which men are randomly assigned to play a violent video game or not and then some kind of aggression is measured - the problem with this kind of study is measuring aggression itself. Some people have lately taken to saying the evidence for the effects of media violence on aggressive behavior is as strong as the effects of smoking on cancer because that too is all correlational study. You can't ask randomly assigned people to smoke cigarettes and see if they get cancer. So, it's also correlation evidence; however, the difference between media studies and cancer research is we know when somebody has cancer. We know when people die. We can measure that with great precision. What we can not measure with great precision is aggression. I would venture to guess that there are media violence researchers who have never seen an act of violence because what you watch is kids on the playground pretending to be aggressive. You rarely encounter people beating one another up, hardly ever. It's a rare event, despite the popular reports of high school killings and so on. It's a rare event and many aggression researchers have never seen aggression. Yes?

WOMAN: I wonder what you think happens with kids after school when they are in a lab setting and they can do whatever they want with computers. Because what I have observed is that the boys are very aggressive. When the girls come to the computer, it's like no so what you have to do is make groups or change so that the girls get some experience. Most of the time, they don't have as much. This is like fourth, fifth grade.

GOLDSTEIN: Well, I think two things about it. One is, as you heard from Doug in the very beginning, increasing software appeals to girls and, in fact, is universally appealing and girls have a right and do demand their right to play these games and increasingly online games are appealing to universal audiences as well. It doesn't surprise me that boys hog the hardware. I got kicked off the basketball court by the bigger –kids. Hi. Give us your name, please.

DOUGLAS: My name is Douglas. I'm at Harvard's Technology and Education program. Another finding that's been bandied about in popular studies is that as gamers are exposed to violent video games, (and I guess there's a certain visceral thrill that comes from playing it), that the more violent video games they play, the more violent the games have to become to satisfy that same level of stimulation. I wonder if you could speak a little to this question.

GOLDSTEIN: I think that's true. If you've never exposed yourself to horror films, for example, and suddenly you watch Halloween, whatever part it is, that's pretty tough to take. I think you have to work your way up to something like that. And after you've watched a half dozen films like that, you no longer have the same visceral reaction to it, and so indeed you get an escalation in the amount of violence it takes or the amount of excitement it takes to generate the same physiological response in a person. That's true, and when I talked to colleagues about this subject, I said, does that mean that we will have increasingly violent entertainment as time goes on? And the answer appears to be yes, unless we can figure out other ways that are not violent that generate the same visceral response. Violence is a cheap way of doing it; it's an easy way of doing it, and it's attractive to people because it does generate excitement and arousal. And that's very often what people seek. Why else would there by roller coasters in this world? Video games are another version of a roller coaster, better story.

DOUGLAS: In your opinion then, should something be done to halt the increasingly upward trend of violence in video games? Do you feel that it's --

GOLDSTEIN: I mean the measurable effect we're talking about here is some visceral reaction. What's wrong with that? It's a cheap thrill, and that's what people are after. It's to get your heart rate up, do something slightly dangerous, I mean there may well be people who are attracted to violent video games because other people object to them. There are always tough guys on the margin. If a teacher objects to it, then that's the very thing he wants. That's the downside of a rating system, is it may attract people rather than repel some of them.

DOUGLAS: Thank you.

MAN: Maybe this is a quibble, but the idea that the outcome must be good, I think there's a whole class of things, Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, where the whole thrill, actually, is that the outcome isn't good. I guess it's clear that there's a sequel coming, but it's not clear that the sequel is going to right that wrong.

GOLDSTEIN: You're right. Not every story ends happily. Not every violent sporting event, boxing match ends the way you want it to, and the promise of a rematch, the promise of a sequel is a way of dealing with that. Not everyone would find it distressing that the bad guys win in the end, but for most people, on the very few studies done on this subject, when people are given a choice of watching some successful resolution in a video game or a film or not successful resolution (where the bad guys get away or something) they almost always choose the former.

MAN: Yeah, that is sort of a Hollywood principle, and it does seem to apply mostly across the board. I think it's a little bit limiting to state that it is a principle

GOLDSTEIN: Yes, perhaps I overstated it.

ELIOT: Hi. Chris Eliot, U. Mass., Amherst. I'm just wondering if you know of any studies about video games relative to children with identified behavior problems.

MAN: Oh, indeed, attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. There's one very wonderful video game that was developed that’s driven by brain waves, and brain waves characteristic of paying attention will get you to the next level if you sustain that long enough. I can give you the reference for that. It's a fascinating study done about a few years ago, originally developed to train pilots, and then somebody got the bright idea you could also train kids with attention deficit disorder and it seems to work with them.

SMITH: Greg Smith from Georgia State. Hi. I'm now doing the Oprah thing. I agree with what you're saying about this, that violent games tend to get more violent because you need to up the ante with that. I agree with that but I would want to tweak the meaning of what that is because I don't think that when you progress through more realistic violence, that arousal is necessarily the thing. For horror film fans, what goes on is not increasing levels of arousal and so you up the ante, but then they begin to look at the violence in a different way. You begin to look at the violence like ooh, isn't it cool that they got killed by the paper shredder, you know, becomes a different kind, a connoisseur's pleasure, which is a very, very different thing.

GOLDSTEIN: Yes, absolutely, but as a psychologist I would interpret what you just said in a slightly different way. If the violence becomes too threatening to you, it's really awful, you know, and you say, oh God, people's guts look like that, and so on. One of the ways to deal with that is to pull back a little bit emotionally and start talking about it like a critic, say I wonder how they did those special effects. That is, you take some of the emotional content away and you start looking at this thing with the dispassionate eye of the critic. And then when the bloody excess is past, you can immerse yourself again in the story, and you can fine tune your involvement in a game, in a film, in a television program, in music by paying attention to different things, thinking about different things. I know one woman who is a fan of horror films because her boyfriend is a fan of horror films, and I say, how do you take it? She said, well, if he looks at the screen, I look at the screen, but if it's something really awful, I squeeze my leg until it hurts. That is, you have ways of distracting yourself from what's going on in front of you so you can tolerate it. Everyone does that.

HANCOCK: Hi. Chris Hancock from the Media Lab here at MIT. I find quite persuasive your argument against certain classes of media effects research and the debunking the notion of a direct effect from violence in a game and violence in activity. However, I wonder if you would agree that that leaves another whole class of questions open about ways in which violence in video games might still be problematic in the culture. I have an example or one direction where there might be some more complexity. It came to mind when you mentioned the need for there to be a moral context for violence in entertainment. There's a class of movies which I'll admit I haven't sampled that highly because I don't actually like them that much. I think of them as the Bruce Willis style. I've seen a couple of movies where Bruce Willis ends up doing really horrendous things to people, but the movie has been set up that these people are so bad and so terrible that it's absolutely justified that you can do anything to them. Of course if you listen to people from Serbia talking about Serbian responsibility in the war, they'll tell you how terrible the Croatians were and vice versa. I'm wondering, is it as easy to make the distinction between dehumanizing the enemy and play dehumanizing enemies as you did between violence and play violence?

GOLDSTEIN: I don't know how to answer that. I think it's an interesting question. I do think there are problematic issues in violent entertainment. I don't think it's something we shouldn't discuss. I think it's something that periodically should be discussed. It's good to be aware of how you're entertaining yourself and what's going on when you do that. I don't know what evidence there is for any connection between entertainment dehumanization of victims and dehumanization in reality. I don't think people in war countries need any kind of entertainment to dehumanize the enemy. They're brought up with the folklore that dehumanizes them from the very beginning, and this may fit into that folklore, but I don't think it creates it.

DOUG LOWENSTEIN: I just want to make one comment that's contextual. I think it's unfortunate that Professor Goldstein ran out of time because he has a body of research he can share with people about the effects of video games on spatial skills and cognitive intelligence and a whole range of other things. We've tended to focus on violence, which of course tends to be what we focused on for much of the last year, but one thing that I think is important to point out here, and Doug, I think, raised this point. I'd ask people here to speculate on what percentage of games that this industry produces fall into the category of first person shooter games. We talk about violence in this industry as if it is ubiquitous, as if it is all we do. Well in 1999, the total percentage of first person shooter games published on a dollar or unit basis, anyway you look at it in terms of games sold and purchased, was 5%. That's it for first person shooters. Now when we talk about violence, of course some of the games that are not first person shooters also have violence. However, most of the controversy focuses on the shooters, and that represents 5% of the market. The ESRB rating system, for example, which has rated over, I don't know, 6000 games now, 70% or thereabouts are rated in the appropriate for everyone category, and that's a rating system that everybody from President Clinton to Senator Lieberman and critics of the industry have said is the best content-rating system in the country. So I just thought it would be worthwhile putting on my advocacy hat, not my academic hat because I don't own one of those [LAUGHTER] to just make that point and I appreciate your indulgence.