Direction, Rigor, and Chapter 1: The Gamer

When I write, I often rewrite a paper a dozen or so times before actually developing it. It takes time to sift through the variety of ping!pong! that sifts around inside my head. After a while, arguments become so large that it takes dozens of hours of work to get them down to a workable volume. I am often criticized for trying to capture too much with what I try to write, but I still say I haven’t captured enough. There are millions of influences that each of us cope with on a second by second basis. Whether we like too admit it or not, these things express themselves in what we write, what we say, how we act, and how we treat others. Each of those things is important and each of those things is worthy of discussion. The infinite amount of work that goes on each year in the fields of sociology, psychology, and every other liberal art barely scratches the surface of the complexity of human interaction yet each year most of us in our fields have to explain what our respective fields do some untold amount of times. The influence of each field is incalculable, the definition of our social world is more valuable than most people give it credit for. It is sad that so much of our social world is not known, that so much of the strife and sarcasm that exists in the world comes from that unknown, that anomie, the gap between what our society tells us to have versus what we do have. It is sad because, despite all of the knowledge we have, we cannot answer any of the questions as to why it exists beyond some people want it, and others can’t have it.

This post is looking at that gap and how it makes its way into video games. Because this country is a psychology country, because sociology isn’t as popular as it should be, I have to talk about these things as unconscious actions. I can’t simply call them unintentional, this would be taking the action out of the actor’s hands and that would be wrong.

This post is about the unconscious traps from society game makers put into their games and the gap that exists between what a player wants to do and what a game maker has programmed the game to be able to do.

Because I rework things, because my logic follows strange paths, because I have to try and explain where an idea came from before describing an idea, I figure I will start with a summary of the blogs that came before this one, each one a part of the puzzle. Think of this as a table of contents.

Chapter 1: The argument begins here: GAMERS
On Generic Types

I felt that the generic type of gamer that companies use to create video games for was somewhat perverted by the stereotypical version of the gamer. The competing generic version of what a group identified itself as and what popular culture identified itself as, I felt, was at odds:

So in this case. I want to trace associations that gamers have (in particular, video gamers) and see where it takes me. I want to look at video gamers as a generic type. The difference I want to make is that I want to look at it from how pop culture refers to gamers and not how gamers identify themselves. It's one thing to look at this from the video gamer's perspective, it's another to look at it from pop culture's perspective. What does pop culture think about gamers and how is that perception shaping and fueling video games in general. This is not to say that I don't want to look at it from the gamers perspective as well. I want to start on one side of the definition and walk to those being defined and look back. How do gamers, how do games, react to these things?

Chapter 2: Technological Limitations are Real Limitations: GAME MACHINES What do Video Games Need to be More Culturally Relavent?

Later, I reworked that concept into a much broader category. I tried to discus what it was that the culture as a whole needed to consider when thinking about video games as a medium with which to explore cultural norms and values. I wanted to trap everything that goes into a game that the game makers do not intentionally mean to program in. I tried to look at the limitations of telling a story through a video game. As a storytelling medium, I felt that the video game and its technological makeup was sorely lacking and limiting; much like using the frame of a social theory to look at the social world. It limits as much as it permits exploration:

Like social theory, a game designer has to choose what frame they want to stick a game into (FPS, SRPG, RPG, Platformer, etc). A game’s story, a game’s narrative, isn’t really what drives the story. The story is bound to the rules of the engine it uses; certain choices, certain design decisions are dependent on the limitations of that engine. However, where social science is free to approach ideas from a wide variety of frames, video game makers are not. Video game makers are stuck on the consoles that exist and may only use the engines that are made to work for those consoles or are limited by budget to develop their own in house engine.

Consoles add another level of complication. Comparing it to social science, this would mean that I could only base my theory on ideas created from a language that wasn’t my own, using ideas that aren’t my own. Further, the lifeblood of the video game industry is money and this means that games must be made according to what the markets demand. Experimentation is low because of this.

Chapter 3: Narrative Design Works for Movies, Video Game Design Works for Video Games
Illusions of Choose Your Own Adventure

Further down the road, I redefined some of the argument and worked it into a general call-out of typical design practices here:

The basic overview (better than what I wrote) was:

Erik Hanson:
Nick seem to be looking at applying the guiding principles in Bogost and Montfort's Platform Studies theory to the basic mental models of programmers, such as the IF/ELSE paradigm and the prescriptive end-states of narrative-based games. This distinction is made wonderfully clear when he looks at Carcassonne, a game in which very little is settled after each player's turn, and much is left unjudged until the mechanics dictate that the game has ended (when there are no more tiles to play).

So it appears I’m trying to create some sort of argument that encompasses social movements as a whole, between technological systems using not only social constraints but monetary and technological constraints as well. Moving on, I want to develop these into largesque essays filled with resources from more disciplines than I am familiar with. Ludology is growing in importance in my thinking about the video game, it’s time I take some time to apply what I’ve learned. Without application, academia is lost.

Chapter 1: The Gamer
Gamers are on the fringe of society because they share a stigma. The stigma was created by the spirit of capitalism and while gamers are working to counter this stigma, there is a long way to go. They are further hindered by gamers themselves in much the same way as feminists are often stifled by women conforming to social norms created by males. While that works as a summary, the logical leaps and assumptions I make before writing are not. I wanted to try and tie all of these things together into a coherent thought. Like the chapters, I will move from gamers to game makers to game design. At each stage, the cultural relevance needed to move video games to a public sphere will be marked with more scrutiny.

In thinking about games we have to have what you do in them, you play them. The definition of play is grounded in the Platonic origin of play is, “…the need of all young creatures, animal and human, to leap.” There is a certain purity of spirit that all men and women must strive for but do not possess, as it is reserved for the after life and children. Plato says,

“God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God’s plaything, and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present…for they deem war a serious thing, though in war there is neither play nor culture worthy the name…which are the things we deem most serious. Hence all must live in peace as well as they possibly can. What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propagate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies and win in the contest.” (Huizinga 18-19)

Thus, children are revered as possessing the necessary things to maintain a peaceful existence, as animals do as well. Huizinga states:

“The Platonic identification of play and holiness does not defile the latter by calling it play, rather it exalts the concept of play to the highest regions of the spirit. We said at the beginning that play was anterior to culture; in a certain sense it is also superior to it or at least detached from it. In play we may move below the level of the serious, as a child does; but we can also move above it – in the realm of the beautiful and the sacred.” (Huizinga 19)

So, play is a thing that both is separate of and superior to culture, society, the cultures we live in. It is a thing to strive for but as it is anterior to culture, it is not something that we do as part of the cultures in which we live. Take for instance, America, the capitalist champion.

Capitalism in America is founded on the Puritan ideal embodied in Calvinism. Work is what Puritan’s do best and it is the sole force of guidance upon which the Calvinistic predestination was manifest. To be rich, to be successful is to be a pre-chosen vessel of God. To be contrary to society, to be poor, to be of a child’s mind, is to be that which is without God, that which must be smote or looked down upon by God’s chosen. The seriousness of this cultural foundation is seen in every aspect of our society. Max Weber warned of the disenchantment of society through the individual specialization of the population. Without a reason to rely on others, without a reason to find beauty in the world, Max Weber says, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. “
—Max Weber

Because the spirit of the people of the world was to take the spirit, the mystery out of the world around it, play took a further seat back in society. It was even further looked down upon. Play, after industrialization, took the form of profession; professional sports, professional athletes. Huizinga tells us of professional sports:

“The spirit of the professional is no longer the true play-spirit; it is lacking in spontaneity and carelessness…This affects the amateur too, who begins to suffer from an inferiority complex…The great competitions in archaic cultures had always formed part of the sacred festivals and were indispensable as health and happiness-bringing activities. This ritual tie has now been completely severed; sport has become profane, ‘unholy’ in every way and has no organic connection whatever with the structure of society, least of all when prescribed by the government.” (197-98)

He warns us further of the trap in professionalism at an activity.

“The old play-factor has undergone almost complete atrophy…It seems difficult to speak of it as an elevating recreation in the sense of Aristotle’s diagoge. Proficiency at bridge is a sterile excellence, sharpening the mental faculties very one-sidedly without enriching the soul in any way, fixing and consuming a quantity of intellectual energy that might have been better applied. The most we can say, I think, is that it might have been applied worse. The status of bridge in modern society would indicate, to all appearances, an immense increase in the play-element to-day. But appearances are deceptive. Really to play, a man must play like a child. Can we assert that this is so in the case of such an ingenious game as bridge? If not, the virtue has gone out of the game.” (198-99)

The professional board gamer, the professional card player, and the professional sports player: all of these things take away from the spirit of play. It causes the institutionalization of play. It has taken some untold amount of time to reach the 20th century; it took the 20th century a very short amount of time to take away the play spirit, the enchantment of the world that existed around us. Huizinga calls this moment in history as a place where play does not necessarily exist. It ebbs and flows like a river. The renaissance was a moment of immense pleasure and fun, the spirit of play was high. The enlightenment began a movement that is still going today. This is where the Video Gamer begins.

The video gamer does not have any sort of profession associated with it (yet). It is anti-spirit-of-capitalism to play a game for entertainment, the simple enjoyment of playing something, of having ‘fun’. It is looked down upon, unconsciously, by society in that the negative connotations start there, the gamer is not part of culture. Gamers do little to actively fight this negative connotation. In fact, gamers often do more to hurt their deviant, outsider status, than hinder it. Doing a Google search for “A Gamer is” leads to the following definitions:

“To be a gamer is also to spend a lot of money on the act of gaming…”

“A gamer is someone for whom games is a primary leisure-time activity. Gaming is playing a game--and gamers are generally snotty that the gambling industry”

“The stereotype of a gamer is some guy with poor hygiene and no social skills who just wants to stay in his parent's basement all day and play”

“A gamer is in fact a person who plays video games, but is not necessarily restricted to role-playing or computer games”

“A gamer is somebody who understands games, not just plays them”

“A gamer is someone (can be male or female) who plays games more than once a week (sometimes even 2 or 3 times a day).”

“Being married to a gamer is never easy, but neither is any relationship. In the end, like any good relationship, we have learned to share”

“Moreover, a gamer is probably a lot less likely to cheat on you since they will be too busy playing games.”

Each of these definitions sits inside of the stereotype of the gamer. The stereotype is best formed as:

“the stereotype of a gamer is some guy with poor hygiene and no social skills who just wants to stay in his parent’s basement all day and play (popular game here)”

This stereotype has formed over the years as games went from card and board to pen and paper battle simulations to electronic simulations of just about any type of game that had existed before it. The gamer, because the spirit of play sits opposite the spirit of capitalism, has never had a place in society. Because of its deviant nature, the gamer has never been part of society and has sat on the fringe. The fringe of society is a place for those with Stigma. Stigma was defined by Erving Goffman as the gap between virtual social identity and actual social identity. This gap is evidenced by the negative association with gaming from society and the popularity of the video game as evidenced by sales statistics and work on behalf of gamers to prove that they have something positive to say about society, that enchantment with the virtual world is the next realm of play and fun in society. This is not without its internal combatants.

Roger Travis, through The escapist mentions this phenomenon:

“As the internet grows in popularity, gaming communities are becoming more and more important to the game industry, and developers are taking note. Developers and publishers are devoting more and more resources to community management, but reading almost any game's "official" discussion boards is enough to make you wonder if game communities function more as holding pens for angry nuts than places to congregate over a mutual interest.”

So, over time, the gamer has begun to try and work its way out of the fringe. Development of communities, as it has for other fringe aspects of society, has created vast networks of like-minded people who can get together with other people like themselves. However, is the growing popularity of the gamer based on the game industry’s growth, the gamer’s stigma lessening, or the coming of technology’s ‘cool factor’ in society? Is it still around?

Globalization has been around for quite some time. The 20th century has been a period of intense growth, especially through the 30s, 50s, 80s, 90s, and going on to the 21st century. Each of these periods of growth lead to a change in the social structures.

Rebellious attitudes have often been celebrated in America due to the gap between what we are supposed to want (the American dream) and the capability of our social class (our means to attain the American Dream). The gap creates a need to achieve the dream, the means to bridge this gap is innovation, ingenuity, or deviant behavior (stealing, adaptation). With the coming of the 80s and 90s, the rebellious attitudes came in the pioneering spirit of the first to create and explore the electronic world. Video games, an ancillary impetus for creating a means to talk to others of the same mind, began to rise in popularity.

This movement was enough to create an atmosphere of success that allowed for video games to reach a much wider audience than it had when it initially failed after the deluge of Atari in the early 80s. The rebellious atmosphere of the 80s became what was eventually called the ‘hard core’ gamer. A mistake of video game makers made was to speak specifically to the rebellious folk who had created the atmosphere. Video games began to become more complicated, more life like, and harder to control. The problem was that while they spoke to the rebellious group of programmers and innovators that brought in the computer age, the romanticism created with this movement ebbed with the pioneer spirit and created a problem that wasn’t addressed until the Wii was released in 2006 – video game makers relied too much on the shrinking amount of video game fans and began to alienate the family oriented gaming experience that had been prevalent until the release of the Playstation 1. Here, we move into the Game System.

As you can see, this is still a work in progress. I have yet to mention a source from Ludology. The reason for this is that I wanted to ground the work in Social Theory and move it into a broader sphere with Ludic theory, with psychological trappings. First, however, I wanted to actually finish the chapters.

Illusions of Choose Your Own Adventure

Today I was watching Star Trek: Enterprise. It’s something of a sociological tradition to watch Star Trek. Nowhere else on television will you find a show so caught up in pushing Marxism with such positive spin. The show has gone on for so long that it’s more likely to watch an episode to demonstrate a point of almost any social theory. Science Fiction, in general, tends to push this envelope of thinking what it might be like to live in a different type of reality perpetuated and reinforced by different thinking from different systems of government. Ursula LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed is probably my favorite example of this strength in science fiction.

The unfortunate thing is that science fiction also houses a tremendous amount of things that eventually found their way to association with the gamer stereotype. But this is for another time. As I was talking about Star Trek, the thing that brought about me thinking about it was two different things, the last enterprise episode I saw and the Kobayashi Maru incident in both the original series and the new J.J. Abrams movie.

The Enterprise episode I was watching involved finding a decimated starship that was brought on board the enterprise. The interesting thing here was when they began examining the ship, they found that it was far more spacious on the inside than it was on the outside ala the book House of Leaves. They had crammed a series of sizable corridors into what was essentially a tiny closet.

This set into motion a series of aliens coming from out of nowhere to take the ship. Rather than giving the ship back to an overwhelmingly powerful species, the captain essentially gives them the finger and tells them to fuck off, each and every time. The reasoning here is that they had figured out that the ship had something to do with a story arc that involved a “temporal cold war” that was being waged throughout the general star trek time line and the captain wanted more info about it rather than play the puppet as he had in any number of the time traveling inspired episodes.

The second incident is the Kobayashi Maru from the Star Trek cannon and the new movie. This is an unwinnable situation that Star Fleet puts their commanders through in order to prove to them that not all situations are winnable and to see how they are handled. Being that he is Kirk, Kirk found a way to win by reprogramming the scenario completely and thus win the unwinnable. He’s Kirk, what are you going to do.

These two situations make me think about the effort of programming a video game. In a traditional game, there has to be a “game related” way to solve a problem. In order to defeat Dr. Wiley, I have to kill all of the things guarding a piece of the key in order to finally get at him. In order to find the right target in Assassins Creed, I have to follow the pieces of the key to the place where the target is. In order to get through all of Shadow of the Colossus, I have to defeat each piece of the key in order to free the God thing that causes the game’s end. Games can typically only solve issues in one way. Later games have tried to add more ways to do things (Bioshock), but these end up being more novelty than actual methods.  You are always putting together a metaphorical key that ends up as the thing that opens the lock of the last boss or the ending.

I am getting back to a thing I keep writing about and around, something that Ian Bogost writes about in Racing the Beam, namely, the limitations of the console and the programs that make it go (chapter 1).

“Whatever the programmer takes for granted when developing, and whatever, from another side, the user is required to have working in order to use particular software, is the platform…Little work has been done on how the hardware and software of platforms influences, facilitates, or constrains particular forms of computational expression” (2-3)

What would it take to program the freedom needed to let the commander of a star ship take whatever action they deemed worthy and make it not look like a choose your own adventure? What would it take to program the ability to just reprogram a game to more effectively meet the user using it?

If you were to program the kobayashi maru incident into a game, what would it look like now? Well, thinking about how games are, we can see that Kirk would need to wander around the Starfleet areas gathering “secrets” and doing a stealth mission that involves trying to sneak around Spock and reprogram the mission. You could also convince or seduce women to reprogram the mission for you (but that wouldn’t be very Kirk like with having other people do your stuff for you). Or you could play a mini-game involving a series of Dragon’s Lair inspired button presses and a final reward of reprogramming.

But each of these methods are a means through which 1 game would have to follow, multiple modes would seem jumpy and strange (SEE: Resident Evil 5). Programming all of these to interact simultaneously would involve a certain amount of programming that doesn’t seem possible to do quite yet, or just might be possible but not really experimented with. Even huge games with huge amounts of players are essentially a gathering of text based quests that can be done one way or through one method of doing.

I would suppose that I am talking about freedom but there is more to it than that, there is not a method for this as games do not move or want to act in this way. In order to program freedom into their games, the fundamental nature of the video game would have to change.

A lot of people say that video games are trying to emulate the movie. They want the video game to be an interactive movie. While I would venture to say that an interactive movie would be just that, a movie you interact with or in, there is a growing tendency for a video game to be built around the idea of a movie. You see characters come in and hit their marks, say their lines, the characters do their stunts, and the scene is wrapped with a cut scene.

It sounds neat and tidy until you begin to think of the main character’s action. Instead of being able to follow the path of the main character based on what I feel the main character should be doing with their time (via interaction with the movie), I am met with following a path through a series of button presses or mashes and ending with a cut scene meant to drive a story I have absolutely no control of. Any modicum of control in games that have been “innovative” or “amazing” amounts to choosing through a sophisticated version of “choose your own adventure”.

This argument has existed for ages; I would call it the Illusion of choice argument. You have multiple endings that seem to be based on a continuum of bad or good. However, the resulting ending is based on the sum total of 1’s and -1’s you’ve acquired. So, while you may feel like you’ve had any number of choices, the false dichotomy of 1. Good and -1. Bad, ends up being nothing more than a test in the latest Cosmo or Facebook test, you are not Daniel-san, but Master of the Kobra-Kai Dojo, sorry…or congrats!

“If you behead this guy, turn to page 17”

“If you choose to let him live, turn to page 240”

There is no choice there. It’s akin to the choice of, “step on this bug?” “Give back the guy’s wallet?” Punishment happens only if the game requires you to be absolutely bad or absolutely good but even then, the amount of quests versus the amount of good or bad points you need is typically balanced in favor of, “half ass it and you’ll be fine.”

So we return to the captain of the Enterprise show, Scott Bakula. Here, Bakula has decided to keep the golden goose no matter the cost. He’s tired of being taken advantage of and is willing to pay the price. He manages to fight off a wave of ships and manages to make a bomb when things look like they aren’t going his way. He’s not going to let people take advantage of him without paying the ultimate price. In the end, two of the alien species begin to fight over who gets to take the ship from “the future”.

You see this a lot in board game based simulations. Take for instance, Carcassone.

I can play the game how I choose. I can play to win and go for as many towns as I can while working for dominating farms, roads, and churches, or I can play to screw the other players. I can place pieces so that cities are never finished, I can place tiles near cities that finish other player’s cities. This is not the illusion of choice, it is choice incarnate. The amount of ways to play the game depends on my understanding of a situation and the means I have at my disposal. Yes, this game also takes place in a closed system and the story is mostly lacking, but it is the mechanic that is important.

Movie based games need to take a cue from games based on board games. Playing along a linear path with a few forks in the road is not the same as looking at the pieces I have available, at the resources I have available, and using them as I see fit. To properly emulate this Star Trek scenario in Enterprise, I would have to be able to choose to end my game at any time because I believed what I was doing was right and suffer the consequences of it. There are no consequences that are uncontrollable in a video game because all of them are accounted for. If I fail, I die, if I do the wrong thing, I die, if I do an evil thing, my morality meters slips. There isn’t a consequence that I can choose to take that doesn’t have consequences that aren’t already accounted for. It is here that video games, the consoles that drive them , and the software that steers them, need to work. 

Pleasure in the Massage, 360, Natal, e-romance. Is this the Next Step?

The issue of sex is all around us in various forms and faces but we don’t really talk about it frankly. The vulgarization of sex has been happening for a long time and while it typically makes it in to dystopian books of the future as something horrific, it continues unabated in much the same way that race, ethnicity, and gender continue down their dark path. This quote on the subject is from http://ofsex.org

Sex in America is a subject surrounded by contradictions and biased concepts. We all know that America is a place at the same time conservative and open in many aspects, and it’s not different when it comes to sex. However, researches prove that deep and somewhat alarming changes are taking place in what refers to sex in America. The so-called sexual revolution was replaced by a constant and increasingly growing vulgarization of sex both by the media and by people in general, in their customs and practices.

Taking unintended pregnancies for instance, it’s alarming the fact that today almost half of pregnancies in America are completely unintended, representing a strong social and economical problem related with sex for the country. A similar problem refers to infections by AIDS and other potentially dangerous diseases transmitted by sex contact. Just taking genital herpes as an example, we have about 45 million people infected in America, with 1 million of new cases adding up each year. When it comes to AIDS, the situation is even worse, as the people contaminated have also to face discrimination and prejudice.

On the other side of the coin, we have the media constantly bombarding youth people in America with soft porn and a highly sex oriented content, either on television, music and magazines. Adolescents are getting the wrong picture of the sexuality in America, as they tend to understand the media giving the opposite message of what their parents and educators try to pass on. Recent researches show that 70% from the top watched TV shows depict scenes containing sexual remarks, with an average of 6,7 scenes per hour. Results may be observed inside our own houses, with our children presenting earlier sexual behavior, first sexual experience rates becoming more and more surprising and in schools, where kids regard practices such as vaginal intercourse or oral sex as common ground, in the school environment inclusive.

From her we move into video games.

Sex in Video Games has been an adolescent nightmare. Lesbians, Leisure Suit Larry, most women in games using sex to get what they want, or perverse depictions of stereotypical media images (criminal black males, addicts, prostitutes, concubines). But, moreso than that, there hasn’t really been an object of sexuality in a video game with exception of the unintentionally erotic Rez Trance Enhancer.

Now, controllers have been somewhat referred to as vibrators since they gained the ability to rumble and that is nothing new but what I wanted to talk about today was Natal, Project Natal, and two Xbox Live Community Games: Rumble Massage and A Perfect Massage. We turn now to E-love. E-Love you could just define as a romance with someone over mostly electronic means that has some sort of romantic overtone. We may never actually meet this person but there is some sort of attraction augmented by feelings of love that may never get to be expressed outside of typing and/or video/Audio chat.

You see online romances becoming more and more common in normal society. As online things have become more sophisticated we’ve been able to kill boars with our e-significant others, hang out in second life and have sex, have sex in The Sims Online, and a wide variety of other sexual experiences. The thing that has been lacking is any sort of physical contact beyond one’s own hand. With the video chat of project Natal and these two games, I have to wonder if this is going to change.

First, Project Natal.

So, video chat on a console with a massage game. Is this the next step in creating a viable, physical online romance? Further, given that:

The fact that most cyber-romantic relationships are also cyber-affairs is a result of the socio-statistic composition of the net population, in which singles are the minority. Of the 9,177 people active on the net (14% women, 86% men), who participated in Cooper, Scherer,Boies and Gordon’s (1999) WWW survey, 80% had a steady partner and approximately 50% were married, which mirrors the situation outside of the net: even today’s hi-tech nations are not “single societies”.
http://www.nicoladoering.de/publications/cyberlove_doering_2002.pdf

I have to wonder what sort of implications these new technologies will have. It’s easy to write off a ‘sexual’ relationship based on masturbation (for some people), but it is quite another thing, even with a controller, to write off an encounter that is sexual in which your partner is brought to orgasm by someone else’s hands, even if those hands never touched that person.

What do you think?

Response to The Civics of Potential Video Games

This post mostly serves as a methodological criticism of the article from the Games for Change Festival titled, “The Civic Potential of Video Games.” Before I begin on this exercise, I wanted to say that the article serves as potential for public discourse on video games in a positive and constructive light. It is not very often that this happens. For years, video games have been assaulted as the cause of rising violence in children. A summary and critique of this literature can be found here entitled, “Video Game Violence: A Review of the Empirical Literature”.

There are several important concepts in this paper that make it very worth reading from a topical standpoint:

Youth, particularly teenagers, need opportunities to develop and structure their own civic/political experiences through peer-to-peer learning and reflection. Incorporating these kinds of spaces into game design could potentially contribute to teen civic identity development. (forward pg 3)

There has been a tremendous amount of literature on the educational potential of video games and video game simulators. That they mention this and incorporate it into their study is a big plus.

Although public debates often fram video games as either good or bad, research is making it clear that when it comes to the effects of video games, it often depends. Context and content matter. (8)

This is a great statement and I hope that future studies along these lines develop this idea. Looking at the violence paper, one can see that most studies revolve around violent video games when they involve a specific game. Otherwise they try and correlate violent behavior with video games to other media, like television or movies or music.

We therefore chose to examine whether the digital divide applied to civic gaming experiences…In short, we wondered whether the distribution of civic gaming experiences in video games might propagate (or perhaps redress) the inequalities in civic learning opportunities that exist elsewhere in society (18)

Their data backs this statement up. Prosocial behavior in adolescents is something of a hobby to researchers, much like altruism. The effects of poverty on prosocial behavior is well documented. While this study has its share of issues, it is worth reading: “Helping Others?: The Effects of Childhood Poverty and Family Instability on Prosocial Behavior”

Related to the quote above, the authors of the video game study say:

…fewer than 10% of teens frequently experience many of the civic gaming experiences we found strongly related to civic outcomes.

The digital divide and money required to teach in this manner, plus the difficulty in playing games that would actually foster these outcomes are all part and parcel of both the generational differences of teachers and student (teachers might not have grown up with video games) and student household’s income / school district average income. This is a much larger, broader problem but giving people with money something to spend it on is an excellent step.

Criticism
Any social science article is open for disagreement. Social Science calls itself a science because we are supposed to never take anything for granted until it is so tested and so concrete there can be no question as to the concept’s validity (SEE: Matters of Concern/Fact, Latour). This particular article has only a few methodological issues.

First, telephone studies are on their way out. Without any way to purchase huge lists of cell phone numbers, it is impossible to reach a significant amount of the population (around 12-13%). Further, the typical composition of land-line households is usually white, middle class, older families. This is the reason that they use a weighting variable for their data.

A weighting variable makes a sample seem more balanced by giving non-white respondents more mathematical power. Typically, it is an attempt to make a dataset worth using as, without it, it would not be. It is common practice, but is a reminder that cold dialing is becoming less and less worth doing.

A spurious relationship in a quantitative study revolves around the idea that a concept, while correlated or related (regression is a correlation statistic), might not be actually causing anything. The typical example that is used is (wikipedia / any stats book):

An example of a spurious relationship can be illuminated examining a city's ice cream sales. These sales are highest when the rate of drownings in city swimming pools is highest. To allege that ice cream sales cause drowning, or vice-versa, would be to imply a spurious relationship between the two. In reality, a heat wave may have caused both. The heat wave is an example of a hidden or unseen variable.

This is important to this article as it is never mentioned. Are prosocial behaviors actually influencing these behaviors or does the math just check out? Speaking of the math, let’s look at the regression statistics.

The normal regression equation is: Y=A+bX1+bX2+bX3….. This formula is basically saying that Y, the dependent variable (in this case, prosocial behavior), is being caused by the independent variables (in this case, Demographic variables, Parental Involvement, Frequency of Game Play, Type of Game). What this variable says, when calculated is just how much of an effect are these variables having on Y. R2 is the amount of change in Y that all of the variables explain.

So, for each of these, looking across, you see .046, .102, .051, .119, .065. This is how much all of the X’s account for the change in Y. So, 4.6%, 10.2%, 11.9%, 6.5%. The change is not a whole lot.

Moving on from here, we also do not have an alpha level. Alpha is for how significant data is. Typically, this is set at the .05 level. This means that if the same test these researchers did was done 100 times, this data would be wrong 5 of those times (wrong being not representative). This has to do with sampling. When you sample, the mean of your sample, the average of your sample, for any given score, will fall within a reasonable distance from the average of the entire population (in this case, the American Population). In any case, this number, while not that important, is not provided. The reason this is important has to do with substance vs statistical significance.

In the spurious relationship example, those concepts were mathematically significant. This is statistical significance. It just so happens, when data is thrown into a model, that the numbers add up and the program used, SAS or SPSS, STATA, spits out tables that show there is a significant relationship.

Looking at this data, I can see that their data was probably significant, even without their alpha levels or any sort of post-test, but what I can’t see is substantive significance. The best example of substantive relationships would be Education level and income. The more education you have, the higher your income (traditionally) will be. This data relationship is extremely strong and will reflect that in the data. For example, if you were to run these data through without the game play variables, I’d venture to guess that the models would be stronger.

Finishing it up
Overall, this data is interesting but fails to really give enough information to warrant any sort of conclusion. What the data does say is that these ideas are important enough to study and important enough to try and look at. Unfortunately, reaching respondents to do these sorts of studies is growing increasingly more difficult as represented by their 80%+ non-response rate.

I’d love to see their dataset so that I could run a few tests and see if their questions were accurately measuring their concepts. It would be nice to see if their significance (alpha) levels were all .000 or if they were closer to .05. I believe they would be closer to the later than the former. In the notes they say they are doing a panel study to look at the information here more closely and I’m excited to see what they have to say.

In the end this paper serves very well as an initial exploratory look at the effect of video games on behavior that isn’t violence and that is excellent.