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First Person Shooters (Games) Entertainment Games

Gaming Violence Study Guinea-Pig Speaks Out 39

Posted by simoniker from the violence-hamster-stuck-on-wheel dept.
ViRGE writes "HomeLAN Fed has an interesting article up about the experiences of one of their writers being involved in a gaming violence study. What did they find? 'With the set-up of these games, whether the researchers did it intentionally or not, the violent games that I played anyway were set up to be frustrating to play.' Maybe games aren't as destructive as we once thought, and it's the lab techs that are?" Clearly, an incompetent mouselook technician doesn't mean an unfair rap for all violent games, although the piece does make some good points about creating a fair context for these studies.
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Gaming Violence Study Guinea-Pig Speaks Out More

Gaming Violence Study Guinea-Pig Speaks Out

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  • ...but what do i know? i blasted a way to a PB in UT yesterday, just saw today Kill Bill and want to frag some plebs with my sword.

  • "Eeepp eep eep eep eep eeeep"

  • Results of interview (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @11:19AM (#7254251)
    (AP) Bud McSchutin, the violent videogame guinea-pig, vanished today during a police interview. He was being questioned in regards to a string of car thefts that occured after he spent three weeks playing "GTA Vice City". When questioned about this, he mumbled something about going to find a hooker to boost his health. At this point, he is alleged to have entered godmode and escaped the interrogation room by floating away through a solid wall.

    Police in a neighboring county are also putting a warrant out for his arrest in regards to several indicents of vandalism involving smashed bricks at construction sites and overturned tortoises at the zoo, rumored to have occured immediately after McSchutin's "Super Mario Bros" marathon."

  • So what? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mobby_6kl ( 668092 )
    I've played most of the violent games you could imagine, starting with Doom x, Duke Nukem 3D/MP, Quake x, Unreal x, UT x, Kingpin, Both GTAs, SoF x, all those realistic Rainbow Six games, of course Postal x, and many more I just can't remember.
    and I never felt frustrated because of the violence.
    Maybe the game crased too often and THAT made him frustrated? Oh and what about real life violence, doesn't it suck even more?

    • and I never felt frustrated because of the violence.

      When hannibal lecter bit of the nurses face while attactived to a heart rate monitor, his heart rate didn't even elevate. ;-)

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @11:31AM (#7254320)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Heh, 3 inches for a 360 turn is too high...

    I can't playing any FPS without a super-high sensitivity ... approx 1 inch for a 180 degree turn. Most of the time it's just very small movements... don't want to waste time and effort having to move the mouse too far...
    • I do the same thing, and people always think I'm crazy for it. I do sometimes wish for a modifier key that would automatically drop sensitivity down for precise sniper movement, though.
      • Well, in the orig. Quake there was the m_pitch and m_yaw settings which could be easily changed/scripted. Having not kept up extensively with more recent games, I can't say much about them, though many seem to reduce the response appropriately when one zooms in.
      • In UT there is a way you can script your mouse sensitivity to be on your mousewheel, so you can crank it up and down on the fly.
  • Then, when grabbed hold of the mouse, found it absurd the sensitivity they had it set at. Three inches to the left or right would cause a 360 degree turn and you couldn't click the mouse without the crosshair jumping. The effect was dizzying and frustrating.

    3 inches to do a 360 is horrible! I have an inch and a half of travel at MOST. And I hope they inverted the Y-axis...

  • Studies (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @12:14PM (#7254549) Journal
    It's entirely possible this study wasn't at all about video game violence. Often researchers will tell you a study is about something it isn't, so as to not skew the results with bias induced by your personal feelings of what the results "should" be.

    This study may have been about human computer interaction, or the psychological aspects of dealing with something someone set up for you in a way that you don't like, or any one of a million things.

    I've participated in a handful of studies back when I was in college, and I can say I think there were at least a couple that must have been studing something other than their overt purpose.

    • Re:Studies (Score:3, Informative)

      by Naerbnic ( 123002 )
      I don't believe this is true at this moment. When I was taking my Psych 2 class, we had a few discussions on ethics in clinical trials. Aparently, it was unethical to hide the purpose of a study, in light of more famous programs like the Milgram Experiment [new-life.net], where the subjects may not desire to know how they would behave under certian circumstances. So (if I understand correctly) unless there is a pressing reason in the field of psychology, otherwise cleared with some sort of ethics board, researchers cannot

      • Re:Studies (Score:4, Informative)

        by Boglin ( 517490 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @03:09PM (#7255626) Journal
        Actually, I was in a psych experiment just last year and they did the same darn thing. The experiment sign up said that it was a test of logical abilities. I went in and they gave me a test of logic problems. Then they gave me a quiz over some fine details of my conversation with the test administrator. It wasn't a study on logic problems at all; it was a study on human memory. However, one of the things which has changed is rules on disclosure. If you lied to the subject about the purpose of the experiment, you have to tell them the true purpose after it is over. So, if this was a study on human interfaces, the subject would have been told this after the program. Since he wasn't, I think we can assume that this was an actual study on gaming.
      • It was my understanding that you could conduct the experiment as long as you told them AFTERWARDS exactly what the experiment was about. Although I have been wrong before.

  • outsiders underestimating the ease of games? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bigbigbison ( 104532 ) * on Sunday October 19, 2003 @12:34PM (#7254693) Homepage
    Perhaps what is really going on here is not that the people conducting the experiement are unintentionally skewing their results by imporperly setting up the games, but that the researchers are assuming that "games are easy!" The guy who wrote this article was an experienced gamer. He already knew how to play uT2k3. But as anyone who has tried to show a non-gamer how to play a FPS game knows, they can be very frustrating to learn. I think that these reserachers are severly underestimating the skill that it takes to become good at a game like UT2k3. If you have never played a FPS you can't sit down at one a play it for 20 minutes with the ai on hard and NOT get frustrated.

    On the other hand, in a game like Pharoh, while much deeper in terms of strategies and the like, you aren't going to die ten times in five minutes trying to learn how to play it and so you will be less frustrated in that 20 minute window of time.

    So my point is that, once again, people unfamilliar with videogames underestimate them. Videogames are not as easy as people seem to think, they take a certain amount of skill to be good at them and people constantly forget that. So what this test is really studying is if learning an action game can be more frustrating than learning a sim.
    • Or maybe they knew exactly what they were doing and were also experimenting with different difficulty levels and input setups...
      • That is possible. However, I still would think that a FPS on easy would still be more intimidating in a 20 minute sitting than a game like Pharoh. Although I've never played it, it my understadning is that it is in the civilization style of gameplay where you aren't going to totally fail and get killed as quickly as you would in UT2k3. If I am correct (and someone please let me know if I am not) then simply because UT2k3 is much more action based, you will fail more often than in a civ-like game such as P
        • Violence in games is one thing, the frustruation they cause is another. Not understanding what you're supposed to do in a civilization-style game (Pharaoh is a Caesar III clone, so it's quite far from Civ) might be just as frustruating as getting killed all the time in UT (where learning the basics is quite simple even if you've never played it before and don't have a manual). You may fail more, but (this is just my experience) the failures aren't as discouraging and frustruating as in strategy games. So,

  • For a Psychological Study... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Thedalek ( 473015 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @12:42PM (#7254744)
    Does it occur to no one else that A) The test subject is rarely fully informed on the nature of the study as it is ongoing, and B) The frustration factor may be intentional?

    I don't think any reasonable researcher expected the subject to play violent games and suddenly, without provokation, punch someone in the face. However, they might expect someone who plays violent games to be more likely to break or throw a controller in frustration.

    The "complete the following words with the first word that pops into your head" section is clearly a stacked deck, probably to increase frustration in the test subject, hopefully leading to a violent outbreak.

    Almost anyone can be pushed to an outbreak: I suspect that the researchers are checking for whether players of violent games have a shorter fuse.
    • Almost anyone can be pushed to an outbreak: I suspect that the researchers are checking for whether players of violent games have a shorter fuse.

      [obsimpsonsref]
      Homer: Ned Flanders, I mock your value system. You also appear foolish to the eyes of others.
      Ned: Well howdy, Homer! Ooh, thanks for dropping by!
      Homer: Past instances in which I professed to like you were fraudulent.
      Ned: Oh, well, I'll just have to try harder. Heh heh. Ooh! Thanks for dropping by!
      Homer: I engaged in intercourse with your spouse or
    • I don't play golf myself, but TV and movies constantly portray golfers getting frustrated and throwing or breaking clubs however no one attributes violence to golfing. Of course I don't even necessarily believe that a person acting somewhat violently is bad. I've pounded on my keyboard and desk, hit my computer, etc. in frustration though I am about the most even-tempered person you'll find. Violence can be cathartic. I'm not suggesting you go punch the next person you see, or throw your monitor out the
  • If they subjected me to having to play 'Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness', I'd be in a pretty violent mood too.

    Dr. Wu
    "Yes, There's Gas In The Car"
  • They're were actually testing for repressed homosexual tendency. The videogame stuff was just a red herring. This is a common psych ploy. Judging from your responses to the various tests it sounds like you "passed" the test, if you know what I mean...
  • But Battlefield 1942's slow engine makes me do violent things, like punch the computer case and cuss loudly.

  • Reminds me of a study I read about in the paper (Score:3, Interesting)

    by xenocide2 ( 231786 ) on Sunday October 19, 2003 @07:03PM (#7256847) Homepage
    Three groups were tested via a simple survey about their agressive traits for about five weeks. During those five weeks one of the groups was asked to play Street Fighter II on a regular basis, presumably in a controlled environment. The second group was asked to play Lemmings, on the same exposure level as the SF2 people. The final group was the control group. They were not asked to play any games in lab. I cannot recall what the rules of the outside lab behavior were, like perhaps no videogames other than during observation.

    The experiment was designed to test two different kinds of exposure to violence: violence as a means (and glorification, I suppose) and violence as a result of failure. As anyone who's played an aggrovating game can tell you, the Lemmings group was far more violent after playing than before. The control group didn't exhibit any significant difference (supposedly) and the SF2 group (supposedly) had a small increase in violent activity.

    That the SF2 people were more violent might shock your "hard-core" gamer, who argues on about how games promote catharsis, to most psychologists, it came as no little surprise. I believe the study compared it to other studies involving violent movies as being somewhat the same. What I found interesting was that the newspaper I read said the study concluded that exposure to violence as a punishment was far more damaging to the human psyche. Given the nature of Lemmings, I would imagine that the study noted that a more likely cause was the difficulty and frustrating nature of the puzzle based game.

    Of course, we all know how much to trust science from a newspaper!
  • I was actually the writer of the column. I just thought I would answer some of the comments here. I generally play on a Supermat with a sensitivity of 1.6 on Counter-Strike. The movement i use for almost all games is not quite a 360 if I cross the entire mat. The sensitivity on UT2K3 for the experiment was so high that when I'd press fire, the crosshair would jump down from the targets head to it's body. They did tell me after the experiment exactly what they were looking at. Legally, experimenters HAV

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