Happy Nice Mall

The moral panic around video games is stuck with rock music and entertainment-induced panics like those on TV. But the evidence is not there.

A series of studies beginning in the early 2000s fueled concerns in the media that the perpetrators of mass shootings from the mid-1990s were ambitious players, and that violent games made people more aggressive. These reports show that participants “punished“opponents longer timetaste testers gave larger doses of hot sauceand it was more likely guess aggressive words It’s like “exploding” on a word completion task after playing violent games. But other researchers have since questioned how effective these studies really are in measuring violent behavior.

A meta-analysis in 2020 Royal Society Open ScienceA review of 28 studies from previous years found no evidence of a long-term link between offensive video games and teen aggression. It found that lower-quality studies that did not use standardized or well-validated measures were more likely to exaggerate the effects of games on player aggression, while higher-quality studies tended to find negligible effects.

The same pattern was repeated for studies that associated video games with poor mental health and tended to report smaller effects rather than relying on participants’ subjective self-reports when they used objective data on game time (as the OII study did), he says. Peter Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, thinks that the last 20 to 30 years of gaming research has not had a consistent take on what they are trying to measure or how they will do it.

“New work like this, all these ‘Are video games good or bad for us?’ because that question has always been the wrong one.” “It’s like, ‘Is food bad for our waistline?’ It’s like asking. It’s a stupid question.”

“My hope is, ‘Video games or are video games bad?’ but I’m thinking about that gray area in between,” she adds. “Because all the interesting stuff is there.”

Przybylski was among a group of academics. write to WHO In 2016, he opposed the “early” inclusion of gaming disorder in ICD guidelines, citing the poor quality of the research foundation and the fact that scientists were unable to reach a consensus. Six years later, not much has changed, and researchers are still divided on how, for example, addiction to games can differ from addiction to drugs or gambling.

Gaming, gambling, and digital balance at the Trimbos Institute in the Netherlands. Another valuable area of ​​study, he says, is the predatory business models that game makers use to put pressure on players’ behavior, including encouraging them to make microtransactions to skip pesky levels, play at fixed times, or log in daily to avoid missing out. on something.