This book just talks about the same common sense attitude towards gaming that you have found on this forum. However it flies in the face of the hysteria that we keep hearing from a litany of uninformed self publicists.
Published by Simon & Shuster on April 15 this book will change our industry forever. Here are some of it’s findings:
Video game popularity and real-world youth violence have been moving in opposite directions. Violent juvenile crime in the United States reached a peak in 1993 and has been declining ever since. School violence has also gone down. Between 1994 and 2001, arrests for murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assaults fell 44 percent, resulting in the lowest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes since 1983. Murder arrests, which reached a high of 3,800 in 1993, plummeted to 1400 by 2001.
Well that’s one in the eye for Gordon Brown (who has said that video games cause knife crime) and all the other idiots who don’t understand video games and so blame them for all the ills of the world.
The U. S. Secret Service intensely studied each of the 37 non-gang and non-drug-related school shootings and stabbings that were considered “targeted attacks” that took place nationally from 1974 through 2000. (Note how few premeditated school shootings there actually were during that 27-year time period, compared with the public perception of those shootings as relatively common events!) The incidents studied included the most notorious school shootings, such as Columbine, Santee and Paducah, in which the young perpetrators had been linked in the press to violent video games. The Secret Service found that that there was no accurate profile. Only 1 in 8 school shooters showed any interest in violent video games; only 1 in 4 liked violent movies.
That totally debunks “School Shooting Expert” and misinformed anti game campaigner Jack Thompson. Is he now going to apologise for misleading the American public?
Academic research on video games and kids has typically focused on games played in isolation. Yet for many young teens in our surveys and focus groups, friendship was a major factor in their video game play. Forty percent of middle-school boys and almost a third of girls agreed that one attraction of video games is that “my friends like to play.” Roughly one-third of both boys and girls said that they enjoyed teaching others how to play video games.
According to Bill, another parent, “Most of the interaction my son has with his buddies is about solving situations within a game. It’s all about how do you go from this place to that place, or collect the certain things that you need, and combine them in ways that are going to help you to succeed.”
Wendy saw a similar pattern with her son: “Jody and Alex talk constantly in the car and everywhere else about the games and the characters, so it’s part of their friendship, part of what they do and what they like to play…. And they give each other help sometimes when they get to different levels.”
Which disproves Prince Charles and all those who have portrayed gaming as an anti social solitary activity.
The book covers many other key issues such as sex in video games and the effect of games on children’s development. And it comes down repeatedly against the ignorant doom mongering politicians and journalists who use the public stage to spout their ignorance. People like Hillary Clinton and Keith Vaz.
If ELSPA have any sense they will buy a copy of this book for every member of the House of Commons and for every newspaper editor (especially the Daily Mail) in the country. There really is no more excuse for people getting on a soapbox and spouting idiocy about Video Games. Because now, for the first time, we have a credible, properly researched academic study that explains what the realities are.
Chapter one, The Big Fear, deals with the false preconception about gaming that many have. My favourite quote from this chapter is “The strong link between video game violence and real world violence, and the conclusion that video games lead to social isolation and poor interpersonal skills, are drawn from bad or irrelevant research, muddleheaded thinking and unfounded, simplistic news reports.”
Chapter two, Deja Vu All Over Again, looks at the development of popular culture over history and how every change has been greeted with the same sort of nonsense that games now attract. “Today we view dime novels, gangster films and comic books as fanciful and harmless period pieces. Yet in the years following their introduction, they were each labeled by politicians, religious leaders, social activists and even some health professionals as bringing down the imminent destruction of moral values, culture, the rule of law_even of civilisation itself.”
Chapter three, Science, Nonsense and Common Sense, analyses previous so called research and why it has often been wrong: “Our point is simply this: be skeptical of claims about violent video games.”
Chapter four, Grand Theft Chilhood, looks at the actual results of research with 1,254 middle school students in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. It completely rebuffs the views of the scaremongers and comes down firmly on the side of common sense. They came up with a surprise: “Boys who don’t regularly play video games were more likely than even the boys who played M-rated (adult) games to get into fights, steal from a store, or have problems at school.” There is much to this chapter and it does find that in some children there can be some behavioural correlation with violent gaming.
Chapter five, Why Kids Play Violent Games, contains what it says. Interestingly they found that violent games were often a catharsis and allowed the child to vent emotions. “In our surveys and focus groups, we did something that surprisingly few researchers have done before: we asked the children why they play video games-especially violent games.”
Chapter six, Sex, Hate, Game Addiction and Other Worries, looks at issues beyond violence. Once again the view is common sense and debunks much of what the doom mongers say.
Chapter seven, I’m from the Video Game Industry and I’m Here to Help, looks at the ESRB rating system, and others. It analyses their faults and suggests improvements. Overall “Given the constraints, we think that the ESRB has done a good job.”
Chapter eight All Politics Is Local analyses the hypocrisy of politicians and journalists who have attacked video games with no evidence to support their claims. This is classic: “On October 7, 2005, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill to prohibit the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. This is, of course, the same Arnold Schwarzenegger who made his financial fortune and launched his political career by starring in such violent movies as the Terminator series, Collateral Damage, End of Days, Predator and countless others of this genre. In fact, Schwarzenegger has recorded voice-overs for two Terminator video games. His years of profiting from media violence specifically aimed at teenage audiences belie his new-found political concerns about exposing children to violent media.”
Chapter 9 Practical Advice for Parents has a big go at the real problems created by handguns and (for games) concludes: “For most kids and most parents, the bottom line results of our research can be summed up in a single word: relax.”
Overall a very highly significant book in the development and acceptance of video gaming as just another (superior) form of popular media. Anyone involved in game design, marketing or senior management in the game industry should read Grand Theft Childhood. Obviously we need to protect our children, we also need to have a realistic view based on factual research. Not the emotive lies of a self publicist politician or journalist.
Criticism
The book Grand Theft Childhood, in doing proper research and coming out with sensible findings was bound to upset the anti game pseudo science industry. The authors say they welcome valid considered criticism but take exception at unsupported attacks.
So when Joanne Cantor, Ph.D published a scathing and factually deficient article (reported here at OpenEducation.net) on PsychCentral.com the authors of Grand Theft Childhood asked the editor of the website to take a closer look at the article. He did so, asking for the advice of two outside reviewers. The conclusion was that the Joanne Cantor article “was not up to the usual standards we look for in our editorial content. There were also questions about specific assertions and accusations.” So it was pulled from the site.
And quite right too. Our industry is continually attacked by self publicising politicians, journalists and academics whose claims have no basis in fact. Grand Theft Childhood dedicates a chapter to debunking what these people have said and the false myths that they seek to perpetuate for their own narrow and misguided ends.
Loretta Micheals
Invite as author
Excellent review of an important book!