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Concerns about sex

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:50:28 -0500

Along with swearing, the other issue that struck close to home with the young teens and preteens in our focus groups was sex—but quite differently from the way that many parents expected or feared. The children's normal adolescent awkwardness and concerns came out in the way they responded to the sexual content of some of the video games.
Researcher: "Are there any games that you think you shouldn't be allowed to play at age 13?"
Patrick: "Sort of like…The Sims” [a nonviolent game in which the player creates computer-simulated people and their environment].
Ramon: "Yeah, The Sims. 'Cause they go to people and, like…." (pause)
Patrick: "They go to, like, people and, like…." (pause)
Ramon: "Kiss."
Patrick: "Yeah."
Researcher: "So, because of the kissing, you don't think you should be able to play that game. How old should you have to be?"
Ramon: "Kissing. Like, 15."
Patrick: "15, yeah. Maybe 14."
Josh: "I agree with both of them."
Randy: "Also, BMX XXX.” [This game combined a BMX bike competition with videos of naked women in a strip club. It was a public relations disaster for the publisher, which soon filed for bankruptcy.]
Researcher: "How old would you have to be to play that game?"
Randy: "20."
Josh: "I disagree. You could be like 17 or 18. If you're 18 and you still live with your mom, and your mom comes in the room and you just beat the level and she sees the girl pull up her shirt…."
(There's nervous laughter from the kids in the room.)
Researcher: "So, obviously you've played this."
Patrick: "See, he's played it!"
Josh: "No, I haven't!"
Researcher: "Well, how do you know what she did?"
Josh: "'Cause in a magazine…."
Researcher: "You read about it."
Josh: "Yeah."
Ramon: "There's this new game coming out called Playboy: The Mansion.” [The player takes on the role of Hugh Hefner in both his business and private lives.]
(Some of the kids in the room gasp.)
Ramon: "That's not good for 8 year olds."
Patrick: "That's for, like, 20 year olds."
Josh: "That's for, like, 100!"

Can video games train snipers?

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:45:32 -0500

“Fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal steals a gun from a neighbor’s house, brings it to school, and fires eight shots into a student prayer meeting that is breaking up. Prior to stealing the gun, he had never shot a real handgun in his life. The FBI says that the average experienced law enforcement officer, in the average shootout, at an average range of seven yards, hits with approximately one bullet in five. So how many hits did Michael Carneal make? He fired eight shots; he got eight hits, on eight different kids…. Nowhere in the annals of law enforcement or military or criminal history can we find an equivalent achievement. And this from a boy on his first try.
“How did Michael Carneal acquire this kind of killing ability? Simple: practice. At the tender age of fourteen he had practiced killing literally thousands of people. His simulators were point-and-shoot video games he played for hundreds of hours in video arcades and in the comfort of his own home.”
Descriptions like this one (from the book Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill by Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano) of the 1997 Paducah, Kentucky school shooter are dramatic, even breathless. Whenever such horrible incidents take place, pundits and attorneys are quick to raise the claim that first-person shooter video games can turn a novice into an accurate and deadly marksman with a real weapon. That issue was put forth following Columbine, Virginia Tech, the DC snipers, and a host of other shootings. But does it make sense? We tried to find out.
There’s no question that George Harris can make you a better marksman. As the director of Sig Sauer Academy in New Hampshire, he designs and teaches a wide range of firearms courses for federal, state and local law enforcement officers as well as for the public. He’s run seminars for the firearms instructors at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and has been a nationally ranked competitive shooter for many years.
As we drove around his sprawling facility, Harris proudly pointed out the sniper training area used by police departments from throughout New England, and the “shoot house” used to train SWAT teams. A group of federal air marshals practiced firing at a gun range next to the classrooms. At another range down the road, a police unit worked on tactics. The reports of their high-powered rifles and large-bore pistols punctuated our conversation.
Harris has devoted his life to studying how people learn to shoot. His eldest son, a former police officer, is now an executive with a major video game publisher. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that when we asked what seemed to us like a simple question, he gave a thoughtful, complex and nuanced answer.
“Playing some types of video games can help you identify and respond to targets quickly,” he said. (His observations are in line with the experimental work of Daphne Bavelier, Ph.D. that we describe in Chapter 9.)
But what about the traditionally taught components of good marksmanship such as stance, balance, breath control and follow-through? Clearly, those aren’t components of video games.
“Those are important for competitive target shooting, but not for combat situations,” said Harris. Through the window we could see an air marshal a few dozen yards downwind. The instructor had him on his back, shooting targets from unusual positions. It seemed to emphasize Harris’s point.
He added that linking video games to the supposedly precise aim of the shooters in school shooting cases misses some critical factors. The first is that hitting a large target, such as a person, is not difficult at all. It takes little more than the ability to point, especially if the victims are not moving quickly and are close by, as was the case at the schools.
“Beginning shooters have a self-preservation response—a flinch—when they fire a gun. But in these school shootings, the victims are so close to the shooter that jerking the trigger really doesn’t matter,” he added.
As for Lee Malvo, the young DC sniper, Harris said that those shots were also pretty easy for a beginner, especially one who, like Malvo, had practiced with the real rifle. “He had a stable position, a telescopic sight, lots of time to aim, and targets who were standing pretty still,” Harris said.
Which leads us back to the claims made by Grossman about Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old school shooter in Paducah, Kentucky. First, he’s making inappropriate comparisons. Unlike the situations described in the FBI’s statistics, Carneal was not involved in a “shootout.” He was the only one with a weapon; no one was firing at him. He was also much closer to the other students than seven yards. He simply walked up to them and fired.
Grossman also has his facts wrong. According to a report published by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, Carneal did have experience firing guns. “He snuck into a friend’s father’s garage and stole a .22 pistol and ammunition, the gun he ultimately used in the shooting. He had previously fired guns with this young man and his father….After school on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving [five days before the school shooting], Carneal went to a friend’s house, and they used the pistol for target practice on a rubber ball.” (page 140)
But what about his supposed remarkable accuracy? Picture the scene: It’s 7:42 a.m., the start of the school day. Students crowd the lobby of Heath High School. A prayer group has gathered in that lobby for its daily meeting. “Just as the group was finishing its morning prayer, Carneal slowly fired three shots and then five in rapid succession, making an arc around the lobby. He would later say that he was not aiming the weapon but simply firing into the crowd.” (pages 141-142)
So it was not precise marksmanship at all; just bullets shot into a crowd of helpless students.

Are girls missing out?

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:43:52 -0500

Research suggests that on average, boys have an edge over girls in several types of cognitive skills, such as imagining how three-dimensional objects would look from various perspectives, and calculating the trajectory of an object (such as a bullet or a football) toward a moving target. This makes it easier for boys to immerse themselves in the shooting, fighting and sports games that require these skills—and may be another reason that boys are more likely than girls to prefer these genres. (Girls tend to have superior skills in other areas, such as remembering colors and object locations, and working with and recalling words.)
Although superior visual-spatial skills may attract boys to action video games, research also suggests that video game play can substantially improve those skills. Daphne Bavelier, Ph.D., a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, chanced upon this while studying brain plasticity, the ability of the brain to adjust and improve its functioning by rewiring its connections.
"We noticed that some of our subjects were very good at some of the things we were testing, and they played a lot of video games," said Bavelier, who had been looking at ways to improve people’s ability to process complex visual information. She decided to see if certain types of video games helped teach the brain better ways of identifying and analyzing what a person’s eyes see.
Earlier studies had shown that it’s possible to improve the brain’s ability to handle a particular visual task. But that training was very specific; the improved skills did not transfer from one task to another. After having subjects play different types of video games and then testing their brains’ abilities to process visual information, she found that some types of games could improve multiple visual skills simultaneously.
“Not every game has the same effect on the brain,” she says. “In the case of vision, action video games are good. We suspect that they are good because they require you to monitor your visual environment—you can’t know when or where things will happen. It’s a very challenging task. You have to distribute your visual attention.” She’s using these findings to explore whether video games can help the elderly improve their attention and visual processing.
Bavelier adds that these games can also help children with tasks that have little to do with vision. “Video games can help children learn to make decisions, use strategies and anticipate consequences.”
Other real-world studies appear to support this link between playing certain video games and visual-spatial ability. A study of 33 surgeons (including 18 women) found that past experience playing video games for at least three hours a week, and scoring high in video game skills (based on playing three different games) was related to their ability to perform laparoscopic surgery with greater speed and fewer errors. Game skill accounted for almost one-third of the difference in surgical performance, past experience with games accounted for ten percent, and gender of the surgeon only two percent. In other words, while men were more likely to have played games in the past than women, "correction for actual game playtime showed there was no sex difference in skill acquisition."
A study of college students at the University of Toronto (Feng, Spence & Pratt, 2007) confirmed a significant gender difference in spatial abilities between video game players and non-players, and between male and female students among the latter group. They then recruited six men and 14 women who had not played video games during the previous four years, and assigned half to play a popular 3-D first-person shooter game with lots of action (Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault) and half to play a 3-D puzzle game.
The students' spatial attention and mental rotation skills were tested at the beginning of the study. They then played their assigned game for ten hours, one or two hours at a time over a four-week period. At the post-test, puzzle game players showed no improvement, but the action game players improved substantially; their spatial attention abilities approached those of experienced game players. What's more, the women showed greater improvement than the men. Given these results, the researchers suggest that training with appropriate action video games could potentially lead more women into science or engineering careers.

Racist games

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:42:06 -0500

Today there are a lot of games—many of them available for free—that make no bones about spewing racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic beliefs, often wrapped in attempts at humor. Many are quite simple. In The Suicide Bombing Game, players use a computer mouse to direct an Arab suicide bomber along a city street, timing the explosion to maximize the carnage. After each explosion, the scoreboard lists the numbers of men, women and children killed and injured by the blast. The start page of the game shows a caricature of the late Yassir Arafat; all of the people killed on the street except the suicide bomber are white.
Border Patrol has slightly more sophisticated graphics and a related plotline. The game is set along what is presumably the Rio Grande on the border between Mexico and Texas. A sign, filled with bullet holes, is stuck in the sand. It says, “Welcome to the United States.” In the American flag depicted below those words, the 50 stars have been replaced by a large Star of David, thereby awkwardly combining anti-Semitic and anti-Mexican sentiments. A nearby handwritten sign points the way to the “Welfare Office.”
The player points a rifle sight at any of three types of caricature cartoon targets as they run across the desert: an armed “Mexican Nationalist,” a “Drug Smuggler,” or a “Breeder”—a pregnant woman dragging two young children behind her. When a player hits a target, it spurts blood for a second, and then disappears from the scene. With each killing, the player gets a higher “wetback” score.
There are hundreds of similar games: Virtual Drive By 2 (“Feel what it’s like in the ghetto.”), Watch Out Behind You, Hunter (“Shoot the fags before they rape you.”), NES KKK (“The original Mario Brothers with a good ol’ Ku Klux Klan twist.”), Amor Caliente (an animated low-budget porn film).
You should expect your children to run across these games, either by themselves or with the help of their friends. As with all generations of children, there’s a particular thrill in doing something that you know your parents don’t want you to do. (We’ll see how one group is exploiting that feeling in a few pages.)
Don’t assume that playing these games occasionally reflects your child’s true beliefs. More likely, he’s exploring what it might feel like to be someone who has different values from his own and different perceptions of the world. It’s like using a major league baseball video game to see what it’s like to be a manager, or a flight simulator to try out being a pilot.
Talk to your child about the values being promoted by the game. Listen more than you lecture. Explain why you disagree with the assumptions built into the game and the actions taken by the characters. Encourage your child to think about why someone might find these games funny or rewarding.
Link the games to real-world problems. Illegal drugs and drug culture, for example, are routine themes of homemade games, and even some commercially produced games. If you find your child playing Drug Pusher on-line, use that as an opportunity to talk about the larger issue.

We Want YOU: Recruitment Games
The National Socialist Movement (NSM), an American neo-Nazi organization, offers links to free downloads of several games, including Concentration Camp Rat Hunt, in which the player shoots Jewish “rats” inside the Auschwitz death camp. The NSM website promotes these games specifically to children:
Yes, these free computer games will drive teachers and parents crazy, because they are politically incorrect, and even downright NS [neo-Nazi]. So much the better! Some people just don't know how to have a good time. But YOU do! So do your friends.
These free computer games are real collector [sic] items. Lets face it, the retail stores do not carry these computer games. And you won't see them advertised on TV or in your local papers.
The NSM in joint cooperation with the NSDAP/AO [Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/Auslands-Organisation, the National Socialist German Workers Party/Foreign Organization] are launching a mass literature distribution of flyers announcing these video games.
All Pro-White groups and activists are urged to assist in this project and get the word out to the Public. Any NSM or NSDAP/AO activists willing to pass out these leaflets in large amounts are urged to contact us asap. Hail Victory!
We printed some of the marketing material for Ethnic Cleansing at the beginning of this chapter. The game is produced and sold by Resistance Records, which is a division of the National Alliance, another neo-Nazi and white-supremacist group in the United States. The premise for Ethnic Cleansing is outlined at the beginning of the game:
The Race War has begun. Your skin is your uniform in this battle for the survival of your kind. The White Race depends on you to secure its existence. Your peoples [sic] enemies surround you in a sea of decay and filth that they have brought to your once clean and White nation.
Not one of their numbers shall be spared....
Unlike other games of this ilk, which can be downloaded for free, this one is sold for a token amount of money. While the money received by the National Alliance is relatively small, much greater value comes from being able to build a list of contact information from children and adults who purchase this material. Indeed, recruitment is a key goal behind this type of game development.

What should parents do?

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:40:39 -0500

The first step is to reframe the often-asked question, “How do I protect my child from violent video games?” to “How do I help my child make the most of time spent playing video games?” It’s not boxing, it’s aikido. You don’t want either to meet force with force or to abdicate control. Instead, you want to work with and redirect your child’s skills and interests.
Stay involved. The majority of the teenage boys we interviewed said that their parents were ignorant about video games in general and about their own game play in particular. (Before undertaking this research, we counted ourselves among that group.) Our survey found that only five percent of boys and six percent of girls said that they played video games “always” or “often” with a parent, stepparent or foster parent. More than three-quarters of the teenagers said that they “rarely” or “never” did so.
A good place to begin is by learning some of the terms gamers use. How is a “first-person shooter” such as Doom or Halo structurally different from a “third-person shooter” such as Grand Theft Auto or Tomb Raider? (In the former, you see the game environment as if you are a character enmeshed in it. In the latter, you see the body of the character you’re controlling as that character moves through the game environment.) What’s a MMORPG? (A Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game like World of Warcraft is a game in which many players interact online in a complex virtual world.) What’s a cheat code? (These are programming codes used by game testers and players to alter the behavior of a game or its characters, allowing you to skip a level or get unlimited ammunition, or preventing you from being killed.)
Have your children tell you about these game genres and terms. Why do they like some types of games but not others? When and why do they use cheat codes? Get the conversation going.
For many parents, using the game interface can be a barrier, whether it’s a computer keyboard or a game console. It’s intimidating to see a child fluidly manipulate a joystick or a set of buttons, especially when our own first efforts usually result in our on-screen characters repeatedly walking into virtual walls or crashing cars. Our children rapidly toggle between views of the game’s landscape. We see all the data on the screen, but we don’t know where to look. Experiences like this leave us feeling as frustrated as toddlers trying unsuccessfully to take our first steps.
As 13-year-old Terry told us, “We actually attempted to teach our mom how to play ESPN Football once. Mom turns my controller on, and then she says, ’How do I choose my team?’ My brother says, ’Oh, just press the analog stick.’ ’But where is the analog stick?’ ’There’s two of them right there.’ ’Which one do I use?’ It was hilarious, really.”
Trisha shared her sense of incompetence with the other parents in her focus group: “I know how to turn the PlayStation on. But I don’t know how to use the controllers at all.”
Michael Jellinek, M.D., professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, says that parents’ awkwardness and hesitancy with video game controls and lack of familiarity with the games can be used to your advantage when it comes to strengthening relationships with your children. He’s sometimes “prescribed” video games that parents and kids can play together. “I’ve used golf, football or car racing games,” he said. “It changes the dynamic of the parent constantly teaching the child, to the child teaching the parent.”
At home, Jellinek plays a variety of video games with his children. “We’ve played Grand Theft Auto and a lot of football and racing games. We played Sniper; it’s a pretty exciting game. I like the technical aspects of it. We’ve played U-Boat. We used to have family contests on Caterpillar.”
Daphne Bavelier, Ph.D., professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has preteen twins who play video games. “They will do 15 minutes of back-and-forth argumentation about moves, and how this Pokémon would have been better than the other in that situation.” For parents who are uncomfortable with game controllers, she suggests looking for games that allow you to talk about strategies and decision-making with your child as a way to connect and teach.
Research conducted in the Netherlands by Drs. Peter Nikken and Jeroen Jansz found that parents who played video games themselves had a different perspective on the risks and benefits of those games on their children: “[They] were more optimistic about the positive effects and less worried about the negative effects.” They also were more likely to play video games with their children.
Reframe your perspective. As we mentioned in Chapter 4, violent video game play can be a marker of increased risk for certain behaviors. For example, girls who played any M-rated game “a lot” were three times as likely to say that they’d damaged property just for fun during the previous year, compared to girls who played E or T games. M-gamer boys were more than twice as likely as non-M-gamer boys to do so.
But there are several important things to keep in mind, even though these differences sound dramatic and perhaps even frightening. First, the category of behavior is broad, as are many categories of delinquent behaviors. There’s a big difference between throwing a rock at an abandoned building and setting fire to someone’s car, even though both acts would qualify as damaging property.
Second, the actual number of kids who do these things is pretty low. While 15 percent of the M-gamer girls said that they’d damaged property for fun, that also means that 85 percent of the M-gamer girls said that they had not. For almost all of the problem behaviors we measured, the majority—and often the vast majority—of M-gamer kids didn’t do those things.
Third, remember that we can talk about relationships or correlations, but not causality. We don’t know if playing M-rated games inspires some kids to act that way, if acting that way inspires kids to play M-rated games, or if something else is going on.
The best approach, we believe, is to look at violent game play—especially if these constitute the majority of games your child plays—as a sign that you should be paying closer attention to a host of potential behavioral issues. Most of the time there won’t be any problems. But it’s a marker of increased risk.
Focus on media literacy. No matter how many or what restrictions or controls you may place on your children’s video game play or their access to the Web, odds are that they will be exposed to the type of material that concerns you, whether it’s violence, sex, radical politics or anything else. Children need the tools and perspective to handle (or ignore) that material.
In fact, focusing exclusively on restricting your children’s access can backfire. The “forbidden fruit” can become more attractive. This doesn’t mean you should not use the parental controls that come with most new game systems, or that you should not set standards for what your children might play at different ages. We encourage both of those things. But they’re not enough.
Children, and especially teenagers, need the tools to make informed judgments about media content when you're not around, no matter what or how inflammatory that content may be. They also need to understand and to be able to identify likely motives behind the creation and distribution of that material. We touched on this in Chapter 6 with respect to advergames and recruitment games. The concept applies just as much to commercial games.

Violent video games and friendships

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:37:05 -0500

"We absolutely had no video games in our house,” said Wendy in a parents’ focus group. “We had a ’no video games‘ rule for years. When my son was in 4th grade, we finally broke down and got a video game system, because he kept coming home from school saying, 'I’m completely out of the conversation. I don’t have anything to talk about. I don’t have anything to add.”
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."
Research conducted for the British Board of Film Classification found differences in the ways in which boys and girls approach playing video games. “More broadly, the social rewards of gaming—talking about how you are doing, playing together, helping or beating each other—are less a part of the attraction for females than males.”
Nick Yee's surveys of (mostly adult) online game players also found that socializing was an important motivator. They enjoyed being part of a team, helping others, and forging solid relationships. This suggests that video games could play a role in healthy friendships for children and adults.
But what about violent games? The image of a friendless child holed up in his bedroom, practicing his sniper skills on a bloody video game is a parent's nightmare. Our survey found that children who play Mature-rated games are not more likely than other children their age to play games alone. In fact, compared to children who don't play M-rated games regularly, M-game players were significantly more likely to play games in social settings, with one or more friends in the same room.
According to researcher Jeffrey Goldstein, Ph.D., "Violent entertainment appeals primarily to males, and it appeals to them mostly in groups. People rarely attend horror films or boxing matches alone, and boys do not often play war games by themselves. These are social occasions, particularly suitable for "male bonding" and communicating a masculine identity to your mates."
Boys often use rough-and-tumble play fighting to explore aggression. They aren't out to hurt each other, but to establish dominance and a social pecking order. Video game play could serve as another arena to continue that healthy battle for status among one's peers.
C.J., age 12, comments: "Usually me and my friends, when we’re over at each others’ houses, they’re like, ‘Oh, I’ll kill you in Madden NFL.’ It’s fun to beat them."
In early adolescence, boys also use play fighting as a way to test budding relationships with girls. This could easily translate to play fighting in video games. We'd like to see studies done to explore this, and how video games might be used to promote healthy boy/girl friendships as well as same-gender friendships.
Even though "I like to compete and win"—a very popular reason for video game play—could refer to beating one's personal best, or a computer-generated foe, challenging and defeating a real person has definite pluses when it comes to helping young teens figure out social relationships. "I like to play with a friend better because then when you win, you can gloat," said Mike. "But then, if you lose then they gloat, too. So it’s fun, and it’s pretty even matched, when you play versus a friend. And I like playing versus a friend better 'cause you can talk. You can’t talk to the PS2 or the XBox or anything."
Boys also gain status among peers by owning or mastering a popular game. "My 12-year-old son isn’t a particularly good athlete," says Richard Falzone, M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist in the Boston area. "But he’s very competitive on video games. It gives him a certain social status and a certain respect among other kids. And it expands his peer group."
Roberta, in another focus group, said, "One of my son's biggest pleasures is to have a couple of guys sleep over, and ask me to take them to the video store and rent a game that they’ve never played. You'll see them all sitting on the couch together almost having a conference, and they’ll take turns manipulating the figures."
W. George Scarlett, Ph.D., a psychologist at Tufts University who's an expert on children's play, has two sons who are video gamers. "Video games are a foundation for many kids’ relationships. It impresses me how one kid can be playing a video game and as many as five kids can be around him and participating in what’s going on."
In our survey, relatively few children chose "to make new friends" as a reason they played video games. But in focus groups, several boys mentioned that video games helped them structure conversations with potential friends.
"You say, 'Do you own a system, a game system?'" explained Carlos. "If he says 'yes,' then, 'What kind? PS2, Gamecube, Xbox?' Like that."
“When kids first meet, they’ll often ask, ‘What games are you into?’" adds Falzone. "The common language and common experience is an instant icebreaker. It allows them to be interested in somebody else and to share a part of themselves. It’s a vehicle for connection."
We've observed the icebreaker role of games in our own family, at holiday gatherings. Cousins who had been apart for months (an eternity for a child) could settle in with a video game and quickly resume their friendship.
Given the role of video game play in starting and maintaining friendships, there is potential for games to help socially awkward children gain acceptance and self-esteem. Game developer John Feil described how a friend's child, who was born prematurely and suffered a number of problems with overall health and coordination, has benefited from involvement with video games. "He had trouble walking for many years. But he’s smart intellectually. Getting him video games let him be Batman and Superman. It helped him feel empowered," says Feil. "It also let him feel competitive, without having to develop a lot of physical strength."

Senate Hearings: Are Batman and Robin Gay?

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:14:48 -0500

Cultural historians consider the late 1930s through the 1950s to be the golden age of comic books. Characters introduced in that era, such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Crypt Keeper, are still cultural icons and have been reinvented for other media and new generations of children.
In 1953-54, more than 75 million ten-cent comics were bought and traded each month. Concerns about these comics’ influence on children led to articles with titles like “Horror in the Nursery” and “What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books” that appeared in national magazines. A child psychiatrist, Fredric Wertham, M.D., led the charge against crime comics in his best-selling 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent.
Wertham, a social activist and classically trained psychoanalyst, railed against the criminal behaviors portrayed in the stories. He also pointed out a partial image of a nude woman that was seemingly embedded in an illustration of a man’s shoulder, and warned loudly and repeatedly about the influence on youth by what he claimed to be the homosexual relationship between Batman (Bruce Wayne) and Robin (Dick Grayson).
They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown…. It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend's arm. Like the girls in other stories, Robin is sometimes held captive by the villains and Batman has to give in or “Robin gets killed.”
Robin is a handsome ephebic [adolescent] boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. He is buoyant with energy and devoted to nothing on Earth or in interplanetary space as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.
In these stories there are practically no decent, attractive, successful women. A typical female character is the Catwoman, who is vicious and uses a whip. The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine. If the girl is good-looking she is undoubtedly the villainess. If she is after Bruce Wayne, she will have no chance against Dick. (p. 190-191)
Because of these and other concerns, at least 50 cities tried to prevent or regulate the sale of comics. The New York State legislature passed a bill to make it a crime to sell comics that might incite minors to violence or immorality, but the governor vetoed it out of concern that the ban might be unconstitutional. The U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on juvenile delinquency held hearings in 1954 about the pernicious influence of comics. Its interim report stated,
It has been pointed out that the so-called crime and horror comic books of concern to the subcommittee offer short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality, and horror. These depraved acts are presented and explained in illustrated detail in an array of comic books being bought and read daily by thousands of children. These books evidence a common penchant for violent death in every form imaginable. Many of the books dwell in detail on various forms of insanity and stress sadistic degeneracy. Others are devoted to cannibalism with monsters in human form feasting on human bodies, usually the bodies of scantily clad women.
Dr. Wertham’s testimony at the subcommittee’s hearings in New York City started with that premise, and took it even further.

Are video games addictive?

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:06:10 -0500

Richard Falzone, M.D., is a child and adolescent psychiatrist in suburban Boston who specializes in treating teenagers who have substance abuse problems. Most of the time, they use alcohol or street drugs. Some abuse prescription drugs. A growing number, he says, act as if they’re addicted to video games.
“I’m seeing a 15-year-old boy who has been hospitalized for depression and for cutting himself. He’s bombing out of school, not because he wasn’t smart, but because he couldn’t cut down on the time he spent playing Worlds of Warcraft. He would spend 10 to 12 hours a day playing the game; he would play until somebody made him get off the computer. His parents would put controls on the computer to limit its use, but he would figure out ways to bypass them. He would pretend to go to sleep, and get up in the middle of the night to play. It turned into a battle of wills. He would get very upset and angry until he got his fix. Sometimes he wouldn’t make it to school and would sleep through the day because he’s been playing video games all night.”
Clearly this young man has significant problems that are interfering with his life. But is it really an addiction? That’s a term bandied about freely; we describe some people as “addicted to food” and others as “addicted to eBay.” There are three diagnostic hallmarks of an addiction:
A compulsive, physiological craving for a substance
Increased tolerance (needing a higher dose to get the same effect) following early use
Well-defined and uncomfortable physiological symptoms during withdrawal.
Among drug addicts who use heroin, for example, these three hallmarks are obvious. We also see them clearly among alcoholics. With these and other classically addictive substances, we can see changes in the brains of addicts in response to both the substances’ introduction and their withdrawal.
Does this hold true for video games? The best answer today is: We don’t know. Playing video games that involve a lot of action has been associated with increased levels of two neurotransmitters in the brain, dopamine and norepinephrine, that help brain cells send messages to each other. These neurotransmitters are involved in both learning and in addiction.
Some of the children labeled as addicted to video games may be struggling with a compulsion similar to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Their game playing behavior may be out of their control and interfering with their lives, but the underlying mechanism may be different than that of someone addicted to a drug. Others said to be addicted to games may simply be responding to the powerful reinforcements they receive every so often (a “variable-ratio reinforcement schedule”) when they play. These children may have more in common with recreational lottery players and casino gamblers than with drug addicts.
Some supposedly addicted game players may be behaving normally—but not in the ways that the adults around them believe to be normal. For example, many young children and preadolescents have difficulty making the transition from one activity to another, especially when the initial activity is pleasurable. We can see this when a parent asks a child to stop playing a game or to stop watching television in a minute, and get ready for dinner. The child promises to do exactly that, and makes that promise with great sincerity. But ten minutes later he’s still playing the game or watching TV, unaware that so much time has passed.
Is this a sign of addiction? No. It’s normal. In fact, it’s a reflection of brain development. But parents sometimes interpret this type of behavior as anything from spite to laziness. It’s not.
Finally, as parents we may unconsciously apply different standards to different behaviors. If a child plays basketball or plays the piano for four hours per day, we may describe him as a dedicated athlete or musician. A teenager who knows all the game statistics and trivia about a local professional football team, and who spends a lot of money buying jerseys and other memorabilia, is considered a true fan. It’s a socially acceptable hobby; in fact, it’s encouraged. But if that child takes the same approach to playing video games, spending hours each day at the computer and reveling in the details and strategies of play, we may worry about an addiction.
This concern leads parents and clinicians to focus on easily measured behaviors, such as the amount of time the child spends playing video games, instead of more useful indicators of a potential problem. Is your child finishing his schoolwork? Is he establishing balanced and reciprocal friendships with peers?
The danger in calling some children’s behavior a video game addiction if it’s not is that we might miss underlying problems such as depression. That’s a classic case of treating a symptom (e.g., a fever) and not the disease (e.g., a bacterial infection). On the other hand, if we don’t identify the behavior as a video game addiction when that’s what’s really going on, we may be distracted by other behavioral problems and miss the opportunity to treat the underlying cause.

Video games and learning disabilities

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:56:49 -0500

Our survey of 1,254 middle-schoolers included 78 students with mild learning disabilities who could fill out the survey with extra time or assistance from staff (while still keeping their answers private). As a group, these kids tended to play games for more hours per week than others. They were more likely than other children to play games to feel less lonely, to get their anger out, and because they liked "the guns and other weapons."
They were also more likely to be victims of bullying, and to report being left out or excluded by their peers. Their overall top reasons for playing games reflect their needs to connect with friends and cope with feelings: playing because their friends did, to make new friends, or to teach others; or playing because they're bored and games are exciting.
Child psychiatrists and psychologists have found that children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) are often particularly attracted to media, including television, video games, and computers. Surveys, including ours, support the idea that kids who have problems paying attention or sitting still spend more time with video and computer games. Some parents worry that video games are a cause of ADD symptoms, or make them worse. But it's more likely that for kids who already have ADD, games have greater appeal.
Many of these children find school stressful, demanding, and—even with an individualized education plan—not very supportive of their self-esteem. One of the things they value about electronic games is that they offer interaction without criticism.
“That feels great for most of us,” says Michael Jellinek, M.D., professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, “but it's especially important to kids who have learning disabilities. A lot of people don’t appreciate how much these kids get criticized, and how self-critical the kids themselves are. They don’t understand how liberating it is to be in control of something like a computer where they can pause and start over, where their work comes out neat and organized instead of messy. They don’t understand how much of a relief this is. The computer is unconditionally accepting, while most parents and teachers aren’t."
Our middle-school survey gave other hints about how children with attention or hyperactivity problems use video games. We incorporated five questions from the Pediatric Symptom Checklist, a standardized survey used by pediatricians to screen for behavioral and other problems. Boys whose responses put them over the threshold level for ADD symptoms were more likely than others to use games to cope with angry feelings. Among girls with ADD symptoms, twice as many (almost one in four) played games to make new friends, compared to other girls. In moderation, these are probably healthy uses of video games.
Because skill with video games or computers can be an important source of self-esteem for a child with ADD, Jellinek encourages parents to support this. He notes that coming home from school and immediately starting on homework can be too much for these kids; some kind of afterschool activity, such as a sport, can help. Once children are home, video games can serve as a useful transition to or break from homework.
Like children diagnosed with ADD, developmentally delayed kids may use video games to pass the time, especially when they have few social relationships. Parents of children with developmental delays need to keep a closer eye on media use, however, because these children may have more trouble than their peers with distinguishing a fantasy game world from the real world. This could lead them to mimic language or behavior from a game in socially inappropriate ways, possibly getting themselves into trouble. When using age-based ESRB ratings to choose games, parents need to consider their child’s developmental age as well as their calendar age.

The video games and violence Study

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:37:11 -0500

In 2004, we began a two-year, $1.5-million multifaceted study of violent video games and children at the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, a division of the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. The U.S. Department of Justice (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention) funded the research.
Our researchers came from a variety of fields: child and adolescent psychiatry, adult psychiatry, public health, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, public policy—we even had an evolutionary biologist working with us. This allowed us to look at the issue from a broad set of perspectives. (Our research assistants, who were recent college graduates preparing themselves for doctoral programs in psychology, relished telling their friends and parents that they had found a job that actually paid them to play video games!)
Two things separated our study from most of the research that came before us:
We didn't have a political or social agenda, or other vested interests. We weren't out to prove a point or to defend an industry. Studying video game violence was only a small part of what we did professionally, so the outcomes of the research didn’t affect our careers. We didn’t own stock in the companies that developed the games or sold the hardware. Although we each had ideas about what we might find, we disagreed amongst ourselves. Some of us were gamers; others were not. Some of us were the parents of teenage children; others were not. As researchers, we simply went wherever the data took us.
We interviewed and surveyed a large number of children and parents to find out what they actually did, why they did it, how they felt, what they thought and what they feared. Much of the earlier research on violent video games involved artificial situations, such as having college sophomores play a new game for a few minutes in a research laboratory, or measuring fraction-of-a-second differences in how long someone blasts an air horn or triggers white noise from a computer (a surrogate, the researchers claim, for aggression or for violent behavior) after playing a violent game. Instead, we studied real families in real situations.
Much of what we found surprised us. The data were both encouraging and, at times, disturbing. The more we analyzed our own data and looked at other research, the more we realized that we—parents, politicians, researchers and child advocates—are probably worried too much about the wrong things, and too little about more subtle issues and complex effects that are much more likely to affect our children.
It's clear that the "big fears" bandied about in the press—that violent video games make children significantly more violent in the real world; that they will engage in the illegal, immoral, sexist and violent acts they see in some of these games—are not supported by the current research, at least in such a simplistic form. That should make sense to anyone who thinks about it. After all, millions of children and adults play these games, yet the world has not been reduced to chaos and anarchy.
It's also clear that parents are both concerned and confused about violent video games. They are the first generation of parents to deal with children who use this technology. (Although, as we describe in Chapter 2, their own parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had similar fears about the new media of their day.) We want to protect our children from potentially harmful consequences, but we don't know how to do that or what those consequences might be.
We may be asking the wrong questions, and making the wrong assumptions. For example, instead of looking for a simple, direct relationship between video game violence and violent behavior in all children, we should be asking how we might identify those children who are at greatest risk for being influenced by these games.
We should look at why children say they play both violent and nonviolent video games. (Some of the most popular games, even among teenage boys, are not violent. Our research also found that, contrary to popular belief, a few of the most popular games among teenage girls are extremely violent.) We should ask whether children who spend a lot of time playing video games are failing to learn important interpersonal and social skills, or whether they're using the games to improve their social relationships with peers....

Vice city in 1872

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:07:27 -0500

Enter Anthony Comstock, the Chief Special Agent for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock was a media darling of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His crusades against pornography, alcohol, tobacco, birth control and abortion made headlines for more than 30 years.
In 1872, Comstock accompanied a police captain and a reporter for the New York Tribune on a raid of two stationery stores where he had purchased pictures and books that he declared obscene. Six people were arrested, and Comstock made headlines. Eager to build upon his success, he took a suitcase filled with the pornographic items he had collected to Washington, DC, where the Congress was dealing with some much more serious scandals of its own involving bribes of its members by the construction company Crédit Mobilier and fraud involving congressional underwriting of the expansion of the Union Pacific Railroad.
The legislators seized this opportunity to divert the attention of the press and the public from these growing political scandals and crimes. They embraced Comstock's cause, and passed legislation which he had written (known today as the Comstock Act) that prohibited the possession, advertising, sale and interstate transport of "obscene" materials, as well as information on contraception and abortion.
Then, as now, politicians and other public officials recognized that they could gain tremendous political leverage by rallying to protect children from both real and imagined threats to their innocence and virtue. The press flocked to such stories, no matter how little data supported the sometimes-outrageous fears and claims. Few people dared to point out the flaws, for doing so exposed them to the risk of being labeled “anti-child.”
The Congress of 1872 took full advantage of this hysteria to deflect attention from its members’ financial and ethical transgressions. They appointed Anthony Comstock a Postal Inspector, which gave him broad police powers that he exercised with great vigor and much press coverage. His motto was “Morals, not art or literature.” By the year 1900, according to a report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, he had arrested 2,385 people and destroyed 73,608 pounds of books, along with many other items.
But Comstock's concerns were not limited to sex. He worried that the crimes depicted in dime novels—including those stories aimed specifically at girls—would lead to copycat murders, burglaries, abductions and counterfeiting. In his 1883 book Traps for the Young, Comstock referred to dime novels and storypapers as "evil reading [which] debases, degrades, perverts, and turns away from lofty aims to follow examples of corruption and criminality." He added with typical melodramatic flair that such "vile books and papers are branding-irons heated in the fires of hell, and used by Satan to sear the highest life of the soul."

Media that really frighten teenagers

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:31:31 -0500

Marcy told the other parents in her focus group that her concerns went well beyond the contents and immediate effects of violent video games. “I think it also creates for children—and they may not admit it—a real sense of terror, an underlying sense that life is just violent; that awful things happen all the time to people.”
Could violence in games or on TV make children feel less safe, and see the world as a scarier place? A quarter of the teens we surveyed (24% of boys and 26% of girls) reported being afraid of getting hurt by someone at school at least once in the previous month. One in three girls and almost one in four boys didn’t feel safe walking alone in their neighborhood at night. However, we didn't find any significant link between game play and perceived danger.
Boys in several of our focus groups were more concerned about violence on television news than about gore in video games. For some, TV news violence could make video game violence more upsetting.
Ryan: “I don’t really think video games will influence kids as much as, like, the news. That can influence kids, and that’s real.”
Shawn: “Yeah.”
Researcher: “How do you think kids who watch a lot of news might feel different about the world?”
Ryan: “Like, I don’t like to watch the news.”
Shawn: “I don’t either.”
Ryan: “I’ll tell my dad to shut it off, if I’m in the same room, or I’ll just leave.”
Researcher: “But, how does that make you feel, when you watch the news?”
Ryan: “Well, I play video games, and I go, ‘Oh, that stuff won’t happen.’ And if I see it happen on the news, it kind of freaks me out, cause, like, I just….”
Researcher: “Like, 'Oh, but it’s not a fantasy after all'?”
Ryan: “Yeah.”
Shawn: “It's scary, 'cause you don’t feel safe.”
Parents don’t generally think about news as harmful to children, or that children even watch news programs. But surveys show that children and teens watch TV news regularly; sometimes, they just happen to be in the room when an adult turns the news on. A child who sees a lot of violence on television, whether it's Law & Order reruns or news programs, is more likely to see the world as a scary place with lurking dangers far out of proportion to reality. But realistic depictions of violence, such as those on the news, are thought to be more likely to scare or desensitize children. As one child told us, "In video games, you know it's fake."
Given that older children and teens believe that news represents reality, and that TV news programs increasingly show graphic or sensationalized violence, there is a real risk of harm. Parents can help by keeping track of their kids' exposure to TV news, and helping them put it into context—for example, that stories get on the news because they are rare, and that events on the news—whether it’s losing your house to a tornado or winning the lottery—are not likely to happen to them.
Research on television coverage of war shows that children of different ages are upset by different aspects, with younger ones more bothered by the visual images and teens by the complex issues, such as morality and justice, that are raised by news events.