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View Full Version : WRONG: Daily Mail proves once and for all: 'Violent games DO make people more aggress



wraggster
November 29th, 2011, 00:07
Right. We've been gone for a while, but that hasn't stopped the Witless and Ridiculous Opinions of those pesky Non-Gamers from populating our public spaces - and this morning we've got a good'en.
Realising that their individual reports (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/300143/wrong-the-daily-mail-its-time/) portraying gamers as frothing mentalists weren't quite ridiculous enough, this morning our friends at the Daily Mail have joined forces with the Sunday Times to conclusively confirm what Anne Diamond and co. always suspected...
'Violent video games DO make people more aggressive (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2066803/Violent-video-games-DO-make-people-aggressive.html),' reads the Mail's imposing headline this morning, alongside the obligatory photograph of a small child playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
<FIGURE style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; BORDER-RIGHT-WIDTH: 0px; WIDOWS: 2; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; BACKGROUND-COLOR: rgb(255,255,255); TEXT-INDENT: 0px; MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px 20px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; WIDTH: 300px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; DISPLAY: block; FONT: ; WHITE-SPACE: normal; ORPHANS: 2; FLOAT: right; BORDER-TOP-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-BOTTOM-WIDTH: 0px; LETTER-SPACING: normal; COLOR: rgb(68,68,68); CLEAR: both; VERTICAL-ALIGN: baseline; BORDER-LEFT-WIDTH: 0px; WORD-SPACING: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px" class="article-image article-image-alt article-image-300">http://cdn.medialib.computerandvideogames.com/screens/screenshot_272529_thumb_wide300.jpg (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/viewer.php?mode=article&id=272529)</FIGURE>The report cites a Sunday Times article pointing to research by the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, which "took a group of 22 men aged 18-29 and performed MRI scans on them".The University then split the group in half and asked one lot to play violent video games for at least ten hours a week, while the second group played none.
That's right, before we've even started, the Mail's headline is basing research conducted on 22 men - a football match - as evidence that those 6.5 million people who bought Modern Warfare 3 on day one (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/325830/modern-warfare-3-breaks-all-time-entertainment-launch-records/) will imminently transform into kitten-beating nut jobs.
Anyway, as you might expect once the Daily Mail article gets to the actual science bit, the Indiana University research doesn't specifically claim violent games make players more aggressive. It simply says games can 'alter' activity in certain areas of the brain.
The report said: "Subjects showed relatively less activation in prefontal regions associated with executive function following one week of violent video game playing.
"This investigation provides the first longitudial, experimental investigation of video game play on brain activity."
Even better, the research claims that when gamers stopped playing, their brains "returned to normal". So we suppose it's only the handheld gamers we should worry about punching us in the street.
Meanwhile, the Sunday Times chose the far more respectable headline of, 'Violent video games can alter how brain works'.
Earlier this year, a psychological study (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/300040/news/no-solid-link-found-between-violent-games-and-aggression/) by Huddersfield University struggled to find a link between violent video games and aggression in players.
The research discovered that far from being 'pumped-up' whilst playing a violent game (Gears of War 2, if you're interested), its 40 test subjects were left physically unflustered by the experience - inclusive of heart rate, brain activity and respiration. This was thought to be because the participants could easily decipher that Gears of War bore no similarity to their everyday experiences.
This lack of aggression was later epitomised when a football title (PES) caused the opposite effect - more frustration, supposedly because players could relate sports to everyday real experiences, and so were more liable to become emotionally involved in proceedings.
See? Conclusive. 'Games DO NOT make people more aggressive,' will be our headline, and unlike the Mail piece, which started off so hostile, we won't conclude the article with a hugely contradictive statement like theirs: "They found no connection between the players behaviour and game playing."

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/327590/wrong-daily-mail-proves-once-and-for-all-violent-games-do-make-people-more-aggressive/