Have you ever had that satisfying feeling of finally beating the thirteenth level after weeks of dedication and effort, only to have a parent turn off the machine before the level could load? In most cases, your parents are right. Video games increase violence, increase antisocial behavior, and produce other harmful short and long-term behaviors. Keeping this in mind, it is sobering to read the statistics reporting that 87% of U.S. American children play video games daily. Video games have become more commonplace and popular than TV among the current generation of children. However, there is hope. Some researchers have found that not all video games are bad.
A study by Greitmeyer, Osswald, and Brauer in December of 2010 shows that prosocial video games can be linked with the opposite emotions of standard video games. Instead, these games increase prosocial affects such as empathy and decrease pleasure at others’ misfortunes, described as schadenfreude. In the study, experimenters had 56 students at a German University play either Tetris or Lemmings for ten minutes. Tetris is considered a neutral game: there is no violence or emotional interaction in the game. Players must simply place differently shaped blocks together to form continuous lines with no breaks, to clear the screen before the blocks reach the top. Tetris is essentially a cognitive challenge, a puzzle. In the game Lemmings, however, players must care for the Lemmings while guiding them through each level until they reach the end, at which point their lives are safe. Lemmings involves many nurturing and solicitous behaviors. To measure if these emotions outlasted the game, the researchers asked the group of Tetris players and the group of Lemmings players to read a brief description of Paris Hilton’s jail experience. After, they asked the college students questions regarding their feelings for Paris Hilton in terms of schadenfreude, relief, and happiness. Then they gave the students two essays to read. In the first, the students are led to believe that the author had broken up with his girlfriend, while in the second, the author had broken his leg. Looking at the average responses to all three situations from groups of students who played Tetris versus those who played Lemmings shows that the latter group had more empathy and less schadenfreude.
Though their hypothesis was supported in their first experiment, the authors were concerned that using such a controversial celebrity as Paris Hilton may have altered the results. Pre-existing opinion may have influenced participants’ reactions to Paris Hilton (some people love her, while others are not so fond) irrespective of the effects of any video game. Also, it is possible that some of the students did not know Paris Hilton but may have thought she deserved to go to jail as a consequence of her actions (drinking and driving). To be certain that their results were demonstrative of the effects of the prosocial video game, Greitmeyer, Osswald, and Brauer repeated the study, replacing Paris Hilton in the description with Dieter Bohlen, a German music producer who was robbed in his house.
For the second experiment the researchers also added a third video game for a new group 61 students to play called Lamers. Lamers, unlike Lemmings, is an antisocial game. In Lamers, the player must kill all of the lemmings before they are able to reach the exit and their safety. The results of this experiment matched those of the first. Also, as was suspected, the group that played Lamers reported more antisocial responses to the questions than any other group.
Grace Johnston
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