Violent video games and public policy (Gentile, Saleem & Anderson, 2007)

This came up in my google search alert (psychology video games) and my first reaction was “how do you make a new scholarly journal?” and “Don’t we have too many to read, especially in my case as VG researcher?” Anyways, Gentile & Anderson along with their grad student Muniba Saleem wrote an interesting review article fit for a class and for the audience.

Abstract

Policymakers and the public have been concerned about the effects of media violence on children for decades. Scientific psychological research can be an important source of information for policy, as the goal of science is to separate facts from opinions. This article reviews children’s exposure to media violence, describes theories that explain the effects media violence could have, summarizes the research on the effects of media violence exposure, and describes several moderators that can enhance or mitigate those effects. These scientific findings provide useful information for public policy, yet there are many barriers to their use, including misunderstandings of how causality is determined in scientific and public health circles and how large the effects are. Finally, the implications for public policy are discussed, including what has and has not worked in the United States, what other countries and the international community are doing, and where opportunities for new approaches for effective policies may exist.

So I’ll just summarize what they wrote:

Their introduction makes references to school shootings and how the public made knee-jerk reactions for restricting anything related to these shootings, including violent video games. However, at normal times, the public seems ignorant and skeptical of media violence research. Sounds like they’re saying hypocrisy. Well that’s mob rule in this era.

Aggression is defined differently from the public and the scientific community. The public’s definition is quite varied and broad, try asking one person to the next, while scientists maintain a single standard definition so comparisons between studies can be made. IMO, the definition itself is sometimes not good enough (Dodge, Coie & Lynam, 2006) in which researchers have to define different types of aggression (relational aggression).

A definition of media violence: “Media violence refers to media depictions of aggressive and violent behavior directed at characters in the media story. Those characters can be human or nonhuman, cartoonish or visually realistic. Fictional, unrealistic, or animated violence is still considered violence if it meets the above definitions.” (p.17) This is such a good definition that I’ll like to include within wikipedia. An interesting note is that the public tend to view media violence according to content, cartoon violence vs. graphic violence. They don’t see many violent acts in cartoons because their criterion is mainly the graphicness of violence. While studies using the scientific definition have found the opposite, suggesting that humour and/or animation might be attenuating influences of seeing violent acts in people.

They addressed the issues of exposure and the contradicting views of cartoon violence between public and science. Using graphicness solely, (looking at Jack Thompson and the rest) isn’t a good indicator of media violence because it’s like scratching the iceberg and other aspects of violence are relevant and accounted for, such as the intent to harm and how media characters feel or think about harming others. IMO, I like shows and movies that while ultra-violent, respect the audience’s intelligence. Like that movie, Children of Men.

What about Japanese TV? I am such an otaku right now that I could easily switch over to cultural psychology. Contexts seemed to be a factor that differentiates Japanese and American TV violence, not the amount. (Please remember the gauging bias of using graphicness) It’s determined that while being very graphic, the emphasis is on the consequences of such violent acts, usually negative. Any manga/anime consumers would agree to that.