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By The Gamer, January 3, 2010 7:41 pm

A new article in the journal Psychophysiology presents findings regarding cognitive control–the authors define this as “the ability to maintain goal-directed information processing in the face of distraction or competing response alternatives” (Bailey, West & Anderson, p. 34)–and video game usage. Here is the abstract for the article, “A Negative Association Between Video Game Experiences and Proactive Cognitive Control”:

Some evidence demonstrates that video game experience has a beneficial effect on visuospatial cognition. In contrast, other evidence indicates that video game experience may be negatively related to cognitive control. In this study we examined the specificity of the influence of video game experience on cognitive control. Participants with high and low video game experience performed the Stroop task while event-related brain potentials were recorded. The behavioral data revealed no difference between high and low gamers for the Stroop interference effect and a reduction in the conflict adaptation effect in high gamers. The amplitude of the medial frontal negativity and a frontal slow wave was attenuated in high gamers, and therewas no effect of gaming status on the conflict slow potential. These data lead to the suggestion that video game experience has a negative influence on proactive, but not reactive, cognitive control.

The authors base this on previous findings that “high levels of video game consumption may be associated with a reduction in the efficiency of those processes supporting cognitive control that arise from interactions between anterior cingulate and lateral frontal cortex (Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, & Cohen, 2001)” (p. 34). The theoretical framework upon which these findings rest is called the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control Theory, which states one’s cognitive control is limited to being either proactive or reactive, depending on environmental factors.

So what does that mean? The study seems to suggest that those who play video games a lot (the authors chose the unfortunate moniker “high gamers” for these people) are less proactive in their cognitive control. This seems to be the trade-off when considering there is a large amount of literature–much of which Bailey, West & Anderson address–that supports the improvement of, as they say in the abstract, “visuospatial cognition”, reaction time and, in some cases, general intelligence. It will be interesting to see where this research goes.

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By The Gamer, September 28, 2009 12:08 pm

I’ll preface this by saying that I do have an addictive personality, so this is something I take very seriously. In the past I’ve struggled with alcohol, mostly, but have gotten that completely under control thanks to the support I receive from my family. However, I’m not going to preach. Having said that, for those who played (or still play) MUDs, get ready for some nostalgia.

When I was younger (we’re talking 11, 12 years old) I played a lot of MUDs and continued to do so well into college. To be fair, I played a lot of two MUDs: Apocalypse IV (which graduated to Apocalypse V and is now known as Apocalypse Forever and located at telnet://apocmud.org:4000) and Enertopia. Apocalypse you may have heard of; Enertopia, probably not.  In fact, I just logged on Apocalypse for the first time in quite a while and, to my surprise, there are 6 people online! Granted, this is considerably less than in its heyday when 100 unique people would be logged on at any given time. I would spend hours upon hours in front of the computer leveling my characters, trying to pop equipment, bartering and what-have-you.

I had no internet connection aside from the multiple free accounts provided by my local library, which only provided accounts that timed out after two hours, resetting after 24 hours. Not just two hours per day; two hours every 24 hours. It was brutal. Eventually I found another provider that offered unlimited time (thanks, friend’s brother’s friend I didn’t know). I would spent eight hours a day playing one or more MUDs, mostly using the zMud client (couldn’t stand TinTin++) and playing multiple characters simultaneously.

I still have the character files with all my triggers and aliases and variables, not to mention a (very outdated, surely) equipment database. Ah, the good ol’ days.

But, like all things, that too passed. That, and I honestly wasn’t very good.

Text-based MUDs gave way to the MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game; a mouthful, I know), but the chance for addiction never ebbed. In fact, it seems to have grown considerably and branched out beyond adolescents and college kids.  The October 2009 issue of the American Journal of Family Therapy contains an article by Dr. Kimberly Young, the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery, called Understanding Online Gaming Addiction and Treatment for Adolescents. There’s not a whole lot to say about it, really. It’s a good resource for what to watch for if you’re concerned someone may be addicted to gaming (it’s really no different than the tell-tale signs of alcoholism: preoccupation, losing interest in other things, lying about/hiding usage, becoming defensive or angry when confronted, and withdraw, both social and psychological). Abstract:

Massive Muti-user Online Role-Playing Games or MMORPGs as they are often called are one of the fastest growing forms of Internet addiction, especially among children and teenagers. Like an addiction to alcohol or drugs, gamers show several classic signs of addiction (Grusser, Thalemann, and Griffiths, 2007). They become preoccupied with gaming, lie about their gaming use, lose interest in other activities just to game, withdrawal from family and friends to game, and use gaming as a means of psychological escape (Leung, 2004). This paper explores the emergence of online gaming addiction and its impact on individuals and families. This paper reviews the nature of online games and what makes them addictive among some players. As computers are relied upon with greater frequency, detecting and diagnosing online gaming addiction may be difficult for clinicians, especially as symptoms of a possible problem may be masked by legitimate use of the Internet. This paper reviews the warning signs of online gaming addiction, adolescent issues involved in gaming addiction, especially as the industry targets youth, and parenting and therapy considerations for this emergent client population.

When you think if MMORPG, what do you think of? Yep, you got it. World of Warcraft. South Park did a great episode on WoW in which the boys become addicted to the game. It’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it. Their addiction is a noble one, however: they dedicate all day, every day to beefing up their characters in order to kill a superpowered character who gets his kicks by pkilling lower-level players. In the end, they decide it’s a better idea to just go outside and play.

Some people never come to that conclusion.

In fact, there’s an entire chapter devoted to “information overload” in Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser. On page 187 they write the following:

Some recent headlines from around the world:

• “A South Korean games addict died after playing nonstop for 86 hours.”
• “An overweight 26-year-old man from north-eastern China has died after a ceaseless gaming session over the Lunar New Year holiday.”
• “A 30-year-old man has died in the south China province of Guangzhou after apparently playing an online game continuously for three days.”

A 2007 poll found that 8.5 percent of youth gamers in the United States could be classified as pathologically addicted to playing video games. In an online British study that same year, 12 percent of gamers demonstrated addictive behavior. In summer 2006, the first inpatient clinic for computer game addicts in Europe opened its doors; Korea, meanwhile, already has more than forty game-addiction counseling agencies registering thousands of cases per year.

While the generalized title is “internet addiction” it’s clear the focus is on MMORPGs, as, regardless of how addicting Stumbling may be, there’s only so many times you can run across Charlie the Unicorn.

Addiction really is nothing to be scoffed at. Thinking something is innoculous or “just a game” is a dangerous thing, too. People can become addicted to nearly anything and adolescents are particularly prone to this sort of behavior as it can provide them without an outlet they, perhaps, can’t find anywhere else. In WoW, for instance, the unpopular teenager is a well-known and respected guild leader.

Still, I’m not entirely sure you need to pay $14,000 to kick the habit.

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By The Gamer, September 17, 2009 1:47 pm

Violent games do not create violent children. There. I said it.

A good researcher reports findings that support his or her position, as well as those that fly in its face. The October 2009 issue of Issues in Mental Health Nursing contains an article titled “Young Children’s Video/Computer Game Use: Relations with School Performance and Behavior” by Erin Hastings at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL, and Tamra Karas, Adam Winsler, Erin Way, Amy Madigan and Shannon Tyler, all from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. As always, the abstract:

This study examined the amount and content of children’s video game playing in relation with behavioral and academic outcomes. Relationships among playing context, child gender, and parental monitoring were explored. Data were obtained through parent report of child’s game play, behavior, and school performance. Results revealed that time spent playing games was related positively to aggression and negatively to school competence. Violent content was correlated positively and educational content negatively with attention problems. Educational games were related to good academic achievement. Results suggest violent games, and a large amount of game play, are related to troublesome behavioral and academic outcomes, but educational games may be related to positive outcomes. Neither gender nor parental monitoring emerged as significant moderators of these effects.

There is a fairly sizable collection of research that supports the claim that violent video games (or television, for that matter) are related to higher levels of aggression, both in children and adults. However, speaking frankly, this is akin to saying that owning many books is directly, causally related to a high frequency of reading. There is very little support for a direct causal link between violent gaming and violent behavior. Reciprocation is more likely; a feedback loop. Violent is as violent does.

It’s important to remember–and I say this with all sincerity–that the most important aspect of a child’s development is the parents. No amount of video game or television curtailing by watchdog groups is ever, ever going to replace the effects of just one good parent. If a parent truly believes that violent video games will turn his or her child into a raving, homicidal maniac, then guess what: be an adult and say No to that child. Parental responsibility is nothing to be shrugged at. Television producers and game designers are not out to make upstanding paragons of civility out of your children; they’re out to make money by producing consumer-based materials that people buy. Two things sell, unequivocally: sex and violence. That math isn’t hard to do.

An interesting aspect of research like this is the number of variables involved. In just the article there are:

• Gender
• Age
• GPA
• School  competence
• Time playing games
• Violence level of games
• Parental monitoring of content
• Parental monitoring of time
• Social context
• Previous behavior of child
• Media type

Any researcher worth his or her salt, given that list of factors, would never try to make a causal link out of all that. This is not to say the authors did; I’m just pointing it out. The authors list a number of limitations on their study, as per usual in academic articles (all citations found on page 646 and are not found immediately following one another):

First is the fact that only parents reported on their child’s video/computer game playing habits.

In addition, parents may misreport the amount of monitoring that they actually do.

Finally, to obtain child grades, parents were permitted to either (a) submit a grade report from school, or (b) report their child’s grades. It is conceivable that the self-report option may have introduced some error, presumably due to parents inflating grades to enhance their child’s academic standing.

Also, our sample was limited to generally high-achieving children from relatively well-educated, mostly middle- to upper-class families,

Another limitation is the correlational and exploratory nature of the study. Although links among game playing and children’s aggression and academic achievement were found, the direction of the causality is unclear. It is likely that, as previously mentioned, the relationship between aggression and violent media is reinforcing.

When splitting the sample to analyze by gender, [the limitation of a small sample size] became clearer, as correlations that were significant overall with the enter sample only approached significance when the sample size was halved to look at boys and girls separately.

It is not my intent to rip apart this article and I apologize if it comes across that way. However, I feel it’s important to point out that when articles like this are published (that show a correlation between one thing and another) it’s all too easy for people to that correlation to causation and assume a causal link. We’ve all seen the Tipper Gores and Zackery Morazzinis and even the Hillary Clintons hell-bent on preventing violent video games from falling into the hands of impressionable, moldable youth.

It reminds me of an old George Carlin bit: “It’s a great country, but it’s a strange culture. This is a country where gun store owners are given a list of stolen credit cards, but not a list of criminals and maniacs! Where tobacco kills millions of people every year, so they ban artificial sweeteners! Because a rat died! And now they’re thinking about banning toy guns . . . AND THEY’RE GOING TO KEEP THE FUCKING REAL ONES!”

Coming up next: addiction.

Citation:

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By The Gamer, September 6, 2009 4:06 pm

May contain spoilers. Beware.

It’s pretty obvious that I’m a big Silent Hill fan. I’m hoping to do a lot with the series (along with the Fatal Frame series, Rule of Rose, the Final Fantasy series and Ico/Shadow of the Colossus/Unnamed New Game) academically. I’m thinking up topics for papers right now actually. Anyway, whenever I come across a scholarly look at a video game, I take note. Well, guess what I found.

The May issue of Camera Obscura contains an article called Masculinity in Video Games: The Gendered Gameplay of Silent Hill. Ewan Kirkland, a lecturer at Kingston University in the UK, has written a number of articles on video games and seems to focus on the Silent Hill series and survival horror in general. Here’s the abstract for the forthcoming (I say forthcoming because it’s not available to me yet) article:

The article looks at the concept of masculinity in the video game “Silent Hill 2,” created by Konami. It delves in the issues concerning the ending to “Silent Hill 2,” such as the player agency, the structuring of gameplay, and the gendering of the role that video-game players are invited to perform. It notes that the only way to finish the game is for the protagonist James to kill his wife Mary. The author points out that such portion in the game may be perceived as a video-game misogyny which features a male protagonist killing creatures of monstrous femininity, or presented a perverted world defining the psychological interior of a tortured man consumed by bitterness, resentment, and conflicting feelings of love and hatred toward a woman he had to kill at the end.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the author’s claim, or even what his opinion of it is. Unfortunately, right now, I can’t access the full article. Whenever I can, I’ll be sure to do a write-up. I suppose it could be seen as misogynistic if you look at the face value of James killing nurses, but it’s deeper than that, as the end of the abstract indicates. It’s complicated. That’s why it’s a good topic to study.

In the meantime, Ewan has written a very interested piece on Alessa Gillespie, the child/teenager/monster/driving force behind Silent Hill in the first and third releases in the series. It’s called Alessa Unbound: The Monstrous Daughter of Silent Hill and is the first piece in section two of Dark Reflections, Monstrous Reflections: Essays on the Monster in Culture. Click here for the PDF. There’s some other really interesting stuff in the ebook, so check it out. Here’s the abstract for Ewan’s piece on Alissa:

This paper explores the figure of Alessa, the ambiguous monster of the Silent Hill videogame series. Focusing on the game’s first and third installments, Alessa is discussed as revealing interconnected anxieties surrounding motherhood and childhood. Horrific images of birth, abortion and maternity pervade the games, together with unsettling signifiers of children and childhood. Firstly Barbra Creed’s psychoanalytic discussion of the monstrous feminine is used to examine Silent Hill in terms of maternity. Accordingly, Alessa embodies the abject mother, evident in pervading imagery of bodily fluids, particularly blood and excrement, across the series. Next I explore Alessa as monstrous child, employing Robin Wood’s discussion of children in horror cinema. Here Alessa’s monstrousness resides in her horrific childhood, communicated through Silent Hill’s dark and malignant alternative dimensions. This ambiguous disposition toward the arcane mother and parental authority is partially resolved through the games’ endings, involving the re-assertion of patriarchal power. Finally, I argue, Alessa symbolises cultural fears that adult/child distinctions may be disrupted as children transcend their infant or adolescent status, by becoming parents themselves.

I will say that Kirkland takes the right approach to studying these games, inasfar as he takes them seriously.  Case in point, he says the following things in the introduction (p.74) of Alessa Unbound:

• I will not be justifying the study of videogames.
• I shall not be relating figures concerning the revenues the industry accrues, nor drawing apologetic parallels between videogames [and other] media.
• I shall be exploring [the games] as narratives….
• I shall be taking these games seriously for the complex cultural texts I believe them to be.

Couldn’t agree more. I’m looking forward to reading more of his work, especially on Silent Hill. For anyone interested, a user by the name of  SilentPyramind (and a number of others) on GameFAQs have put together a rather extensive and deep look into the mythology and logic of the Silent Hill universe which, unfortunately, hasn’t been updated since 2007 and thus is not containing the newest additions to the series. Still, as far as Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3 go, it’s worth a look.

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By The Gamer, September 3, 2009 10:21 am

Speaking of exergaming, there’s good news for all those kids out there who suck at sports!

A brand new piece from the journal Computers & Education performs a literature review of recent scientific articles regarding computer games and their utility in physical education and health education. Marina Papastergiou from the University of Thessaly in Greece is the author. Here’s the abstract:

This study aims at critically reviewing recently published scientific literature on the use of computer and video games in Health Education (HE) and Physical Education (PE) with a view: (a) to identifying the potential contribution of the incorporation of electronic games as educational tools into HE and PE programs, (b) to present a synthesis of the available empirical evidence on the educational effectiveness of electronic games in HE and PE, and (c) to define future research perspectives concerning the educational use of electronic games in HE and PE. After systematically searching online bibliographic databases, 34 relevant articles were located and included in the study. Following the categorization scheme proposed by [Dempsey, J., Rasmussen, K., & Lucassen, B. (1996). The instructional gaming literature: Implications and 99 sources. University of South Alabama, College of Education, Technical Report No. 96-1], those articles were grouped into the following four categories: (a) research, (b) development, (c) discussion and (d) theory. The overviewed articles suggest that electronic games present many potential benefits as educational tools for HE and PE, and that those games may improve young people’s knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours in relation to health and physical exercise. Furthermore, the newly emerged physically interactive electronic games can potentially enhance young people’s physical fitness, motor skills and motivation for physical exercise. The empirical evidence to support the educational effectiveness of electronic games in HE and PE is still rather limited, but the findings present a positive picture overall. The outcomes of the literature review are discussed in terms of their implications for future research, and can provide useful guidance to educators, practitioners and researchers in the areas of HE and PE, and to electronic game designers. [Copyright 2009 Elsevier]

Literature reviews are always useful in that it a) provides a scholarly look at the research pertinent to one area, and b) someone else does all the work for you.

This review, for example, finds that:

1. Gaming can be of potential benefit to students in the realms of health and physical education
2. Proof of this is limited, but that is a function of how much research has been done, rather than a lack of positive evidence
3. The relatively new “exergaming” genre deserves special attention due to its potential

I don’t want to seem like I’m focusing on exergaming, it just happens to be what I’ve come across frequently as of late. What worries me is if some developer jumps on this and starts creating games specifically for exercising (don’t confuse that with Wii Fit, as that is specifically made to be a commercial money-maker; I’m talking about something like “e-Pilates” or “Virtual Weightlifting” or something). That tends to be the problem with well-intentioned serious or educational games: the message is the focus and the gameplay is secondary. Don’t take my word for it. Take it from Ernest Adams, author of Fundamentals of Game Design: the most common fatal mistake that befalls game designers is to put the message before the game.

So, while I would champion anything that gets kids off their butts and moving, I really, really hope the games are good. First impressions are so important, you know?

Citation:
Papastergiou, M. (2009). Exploring the potential of computer and video games for health and physical education: A literature review. Computers & Education, 53(3), 603-622.

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By The Gamer, August 28, 2009 11:59 am

I’ve started a page that lists pertinent journals and publications involving video games and education. It can be found here. I hope to update it whenever I find another, and also make a post about what I’m updating. If you can think of any that I’ve omitted, please leave me a comment and let me know!

This is also where I will list Calls for Papers. Remember, you don’t need to be writing high-concept, academic, scholarly articles in order to get published! Many of these journals also take video game reviews or “musings.” Check them out.

Either click here or on the Journals and Publications page listed in the header.