Impossible to find links between video games violence?

[Anach]

Well, that's the claim of Jeffrey H Goldstein, a professor of psychology at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands). Speaking at this year's ISFE Experts Conference, held in Brussels last month, Goldstein was moved to pass a comment on the never-ending media attention on the apparent links between video games and actual violent behaviour from those who play them. Although by no means a conclusive argument to the whole debate, it's heartening to see that not everyone is determined to lay the problems of today's world solely at the feet of the video game.

Specifically, this is what Goldstein had to say:

I want to say something about violent games. There have been recent critiques of the laboratory experiments of violent video games but it is not possible, as an Experimental Psychologist, to study the effects of violent video games. People freely engage in play. One of the fundamental aspects of play is that it is something you choose to do as and when you like.

Asking a research subject to 'play' a video game, violent or otherwise, is not 'play'. It violates the very characteristic that makes something 'play'. So no-one is 'playing' a game in a laboratory experiment, because play cannot be created on demand. Nor do we know how to measure aggression in the laboratory.

People are aware that they are playing a game at every moment. You have a joystick in front of you or a computer keypad - there is always something to tell you that you are playing a game. The confusion of games with reality may occur at some very young age, say young children watching cartoons who don’t know they are not real. But virtually anyone who can control a controller is aware they are playing a game - and is aware that what they are experiencing is something other than reality.

There is a kind of publication bias in the research that is published on video games, especially violent video games. Journals’ editors are more likely to accept and publish a paper in which some significant results are obtained, so if someone does a study and finds that aggressive video games have some effect on aggressive behaviour that is more likely to published than a study that finds no effects. Because of this publication bias, we don’t know how many experiments on violent video games there are with no or insignificant results, since these things are simply never published.

You can find out more above the conference (this year saw only the second one of its kind) here and although many of the debates are not particularly "layman" friendly, it's encouraging to see the industry and regulators hold sensible talks such as these, to examine the impact of gaming on the public. After all, it's in their own interest to ensure that the mass media's panic train doesn't derail the very products that help pay their salaries.
A transcript of Goldstein's speech can be found here.