When you hear politicians etc saying "there's too much violence on TV" they are talking ver simplistically. Violence is not just a single category. There are different types, and levels (verbal, physical, etc). There are different levels of it's relationship to reality (eg cartoon violence is different to Home Alone violence, which is different from action movie violence, which is different from violence on the news - this is called the "modality" of violence). THEN even more importantly, is WHO commits the violence, against WHOM, and with what outcome. That is, issues of CHARACTER and NARRATIVE. Is violence commited by a villain different to that commited by a protagonist? Is the narrative outcome important (are they punished, etc). In computer games, you also need to explore these questions...
Is watching violence good for you? Is playing at violence good for you??? Are you learning about right and wrong, authority, society etc? Or is it just "mindless"?
Sean
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Image
An example of a violent image from a video game. Participants are asked to rate these images in terms of their violence.
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
useful studies
'The team recruited 39 experienced gamers, and used questionnaires to assess the amount of violent games they played. They then showed them real-life images, mostly of neutral scenes, but interspersed with violent or negative (but non-violent) scenes, while recording EEGs.'...
'This may not be surprising - video games have been used to desensitise soldiers to scenes of war. But when the players were subsequently given the opportunity to "punish" a fake opponent in another game, those with the greatest reduction in P300 brain responses meted out the most severe punishments.'
MY STUDY
I will conduct a questionairre for teenage youths from age 12-18 and ask how often they play video games and what games they tend to play.
I will then show the participants a number of video game scenes ranging from not very violent (1) to very violent (10). I will then compare the questionairre to the ratings to see if there is a positive correlation between the amount of time they spend playing video games and which games they are to how high they rate violent video game scenes.
'This may not be surprising - video games have been used to desensitise soldiers to scenes of war. But when the players were subsequently given the opportunity to "punish" a fake opponent in another game, those with the greatest reduction in P300 brain responses meted out the most severe punishments.'
MY STUDY
I will conduct a questionairre for teenage youths from age 12-18 and ask how often they play video games and what games they tend to play.
I will then show the participants a number of video game scenes ranging from not very violent (1) to very violent (10). I will then compare the questionairre to the ratings to see if there is a positive correlation between the amount of time they spend playing video games and which games they are to how high they rate violent video game scenes.
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