BusinessWeek
09-14-06
It's Addictive! Or Is It?
Video games have perennially faced fire for their graphic violence and undue
influence on tender minds. It's time for a sober revaluation
Fear of new technology, anxiety about cultural change, and the desire to confirm
our own prejudices can cause even the most dogmatically anti-scientific among
us to turn hungrily to natural philosophy for “evidence.”
We may not believe in evolution, but give us some popular science that cobbles
a bunch of dimly related research into a seemingly coherent whole and we’ll take
notice. Spice it up with factoids and slick graphics, and we won’t even chew
before swallowing. In this respect, articles like NewScientist’s August 28 cover
story, ‘Hooked: Your Brain Is Primed For Addiction’, is nothing short of mana
from heaven.
Onslaught 1.0 focused almost exclusively on “games with violent content.”
Among other things, it allowed most of the industry to take a giant step backward
(or as far away as possible) from studios like Rockstar and Running With
Scissors.
Onslaught 2.0, however, will target the medium in general. There’ll be no
slouching back to Tiburon this time round. And thanks to the kind of uncritical,
sensationalist popular science that has found its way into places like
NewScientist, the crusaders have acquired precisely the ammunition they need
to stoke the stigma against videogames and renew their campaign to make
gaming a sin that demands government temperance.
Cultural Landscape
Almost as soon as they exploded onto the cultural landscape in the early 1970s,
videogames became the object of intense cultural ‘concern.’ At first the concern
was relatively mild—worries about children trading time in the sun for the digital
joys of the cathode ray cathedral. But in the 1980s, just when cultural
Cassandras everywhere thought videogames might quietly go the way of the
hula-hoop and the pet rock, Nintendo came along and resurrected gaming, its
blinding success lending new force to the idea that games had the power to turn
happy, well-adjusted kids into vapid husks umbilically tethered to pricey, largelyforeign-made consumer electronics.
In 1993 Mortal Kombat sparked a sizable backlash against violence in games,
but it wasn’t until 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold failed in their attempt
to blow up their school and their classmates in Columbine, Colorado, and
murdered 13 children in the process, that family-friendly vigilantes, poll-wearied
politicians and media effects mavens started to take serious regulatory aim at
gaming culture.
Around 1999, roughly coinciding with an appearance on 60 Minutes the Sunday
after the Columbine shooting—the same episode that introduced the gaming
world to Jack Thompson—retired Army psychologist and former Ranger, Lt.
Colonel David Grossman, began offering a view of videogames that would drive
regulatory legislation into the next century. “I sincerely believe that if [legislation]
is not passed we will pay a tragic price in lives, just as surely as if we had failed
to keep guns or alcohol or tobacco out of the hands of kids.”
Jack Thompson, among others, took the idea—as well as Grossman’s favorite
phrase, ‘murder simulator’—and began shopping it around state legislatures,
resulting in the passage of myriad videogame bills over the next five years. The
basic strategy was to press the claim that rather than being protected speech,
violent videogames should be considered ‘harmful products’ just like alcohol,
tobacco and firearms. As such, the government is within its jurisdiction to restrict
their access by children. It was a novel and bold approach—no expressive
medium in the history of American society had been so radically recast as
dangerous contraband.
The problem, however, was demonstrating that violent videogames are actually
harmful to kids. Although Grossman and Thompson and people like National
Institute on Media and Family founder David Walsh had seen enough to convince
themselves, they needed science to back up their claims and win over
recalcitrant politicians, frightened parents, and bored pundits.
They hit the jackpot with Craig Anderson.
On March 21, 2000, Dr. Anderson—Chair of the Department of Psychology
at Iowa State University—testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce
Committee’s hearing on the “impact of interactive violence on children.”
Anderson introduced himself to the committee as an expert on videogame
violence and children, testifying that
Social Psychology
“My first publication on videogame violence appeared in 1987. Next month the
American Psychological Association will publish a new research article on
videogames and violence that I wrote with a colleague of mine (Karen Dill). The
article will appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the
premier scientific outlet for research in social and personality phenomena.”
Dr. Anderson, however, neglected to tell the committee that out of 46 scientific
publications he authored between 1987 and the Columbine shootings in 1999,
only two involved videogames and violence and only one (published in 1987)
sought to analyze the media effects of violent games. In fact, while Anderson had
indeed dedicated much of his research to aggression, almost none of it outside
these two articles had anything to do with media effects in general.
Regardless, Dr. Anderson confidently told the U.S. Senate Commerce
Committee that , "Though there are many complexities in this realm of behavioral
research, there is one clear and simple message that parents, educators, and
public policy makers such as yourselves need to hear: Playing violent
videogames can cause increases in aggression and violence.”
Thompson and crew were ecstatic.
Despite his slow start, and beginning less than a year after Columbine, Anderson
was listed as an author on at least nine articles over the next five years that
specifically linked videogames to aggressive thoughts and behavior.
In fact, when Judge Matthew Kennelly struck down Illinois Governor Rod
Blagojevich’s stab at game regulation, he noted that of the 17 scholarly articles
submitted to support the statute, Dr. Anderson authored or co-authored no fewer
than 14. The remaining two, the only studies of the bunch that employed brain
imaging techniques, relied on Anderson’s research for their experimental design.
The rest of the nation’s videogame legislation has succumbed to similar analysis.
Onslaught 1.0 did not fail because its underlying strategy was rejected. The
courts have accepted that state legislatures have a compelling interest in
protecting children from harmful products. Instead, the courts have consistently
found that the evidence supplied in support of video game laws is insufficient.
The science was simply not there.
Enter Onslaught 2.0: The Addiction Game.
In retrospect, Onslaught 1.0 bit off more than it could chew from the beginning.
Media effects are notoriously difficult to establish, and despite 50 years of
studying television no one has been able to show negative effects compelling
enough to justify anything more than restricting broadcast of certain programs to
times of the day when children are unlikely to be viewing.
Onslaught 2.0, however, is not a claim about the effect of videogame content, it’s
a claim about the medium itself: Because videogames are an addictive product,
2.0 goes, they belong in the same class as tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, all of
which are subject to regulation restricting access. And while the science is not
there, the pure sensationalism of the claim is frightening enough to compel many
to accept the claim blindly.
Of course, videogame addiction is in itself anything but a new idea. Throughout
its history, the incredibly compelling nature of games has moved gamers to use
‘addictive’ as a term of praise. In 2005, as 2.0 began to gather force, Ernest
Adams pleaded with gamers to cease referring to their pastime as an addiction,
since it’s so easily confused with psychological use of the term. In a recent
review of the science, Neils Clark pointed out that there is an important
distinction to be made between people getting addicted to videogames and the
claim that videogames are in and of themselves an addictive product. Current
science seems to support the former and has almost nothing to say about the
latter.
None of this, however, stopped NewScientist from including videogames among
crack, nicotine, gambling, and nymphomania as things to which our brains are
“primed for addiction.”
Experience cravings
Consider the presentation. An extremely underexposed image of three
adolescent men before a suite of three, huge flatscreen monitors displaying a
first-person shooter is accompanied by a caption that reads: “Some gamers
experience cravings that are just as powerful as those felt by recovering crack
addicts.” To the left is a breakout box entitled ‘The Computer Addict’ which
details a ‘case history’ of a 16-year-old who spends 70 hours a week socializing
with his friends online.
Pepper this with giant pull quotes of statistical factoids—83% of 18-year-olds
have a videogame player, 2 hours spent gaming each day in US households, 31
hours average spent online per month worldwide—sandwiched in among sinister
stats about gambling and an illustration of a brain outlining dopamine release to
the frontal lobes, and its hard to stave off an impression of impending DOOM.
The problem is that the research cited in the article isn’t anywhere near
compelling enough to justify the claim that games are genuinely addictive, yet
there it is anyway, sandwiched in among drugs and gambling, both of which have
been studied far longer and much more thoroughly. Nevertheless, it’s gaming
that is consistently slipped into the article to make the piece seem interesting and
urgent.
For example, although it’s titled ‘The Computer Addict,’ the case history is taken
almost verbatim from a journal article written by Mark Griffiths, a psychologist
and longtime gambling researcher at Trent-Nottingham who is quoted in the
piece. But in the original article, which reviewed five case histories of patients
exhibiting ‘excessive computer use,’ Dr. Griffiths concluded that while two of the
cases, including the one cited by NewScientist, could possibly be considered
cases of addiction, it was not at all clear that they were in fact examples of
addiction. In other words, the ‘computer addict’ might not have been an addict at
all. But by making the case into a sidebar next to an ominous image of shadowy
gamers playing violent videogames and titling it ‘The Computer Addict,’
NewScientist encouraged an altogether different interpretation.
Then there’s the brain studies. Sabine Grüsser–Sinopoli, a researcher who uses
a form of time-course EEG called evoked response potential (ERP) to study drug
addicts, is quoted extensively throughout the piece, including the astonishingly
flat proclamation that “addiction is all the same.” Grüsser–Sinopoli has used ERP
to compare the ‘arousal’ reactions of drug addicts, gamblers and gamers to both
neutral images and images associated with their compulsive behavior.
If the acronym ERP looks familiar to you, it’s because ERP has been hailed by
the proponents of Onslaught 1.0 for showing that “chronic exposure to violent
videogames has lasting deleterious effects on brain function and behavior.” Last
year Bruce Bartholow published a study where he showed neutral images,
positive images and images of actual violence to a group of ‘violent videogame
players’ and compared the resuts with a control group. The study, whose
experimental design relied on Craig Anderson’s research, found that certain
characteristic EEG peaks were diminished when players of violent videogames
were shown images of actual violence. The control group did not exhibit this
feature. Bartholow took this as evidence that violent videogame players were
physiologically desensitized to actual violence.
But an ERP study conducted by sports researcher Stephen Radlo that compared
novice, intermediate and advanced batters’ responses to pitches found the very
same relative diminution in characteristic peaks among advanced batters that
Bartholow found with violent videogame players. Yet, instead of concluding that
the advanced batters had become desensitized to pitches, Radlo concluded that
the lack of reaction in the batters was due to cognitive efficiency—the advanced
batters were able to quickly extract relevant cues in a dynamic situation and
identify the pitch, using less cognitive power. This is consistent with previous
findings that have associated the amplitude and latency of the characteristic peak
(called the P300) with semantic evaluation, information processing and
calculation of subjective probabilities.
Plausible hypothesis
A similar hypothesis could easily explain Bartholow’s findings—rather than being
desensitized to violence, the violent videogame players’ brains were just more
adept at extracting relevant cues and identifying violent images. It’s a very
plausible hypothesis and one that Bartholow never even entertains in his paper.
Although her ERP studies focused on a different characteristic peak, the failure
to consider competing hypotheses also undermines many of Grüsser–Sinopoli’s
claims. What she interpreted as signs of drug addict like emotional ‘arousal’ in
gamers presented with surprise images of videogame cues could easily be
accounted for by supposing that the ‘compulsive’ gamers responded strongly to
the game images because they simply contained more semantic content that
was relevant to them than the neutral images. The similarity in reactions among
gamers and drug addicts shown images of places where they formerly used
drugs, for example, could say more about the similarities among learning
processes and addiction than they do about games being addictive.
And that’s the rub with these kind of studies. ERP, for example, is extremely
useful but it’s also incredibly low resolution, which makes it very easy to conflate
distinct phenomena that yield similar experimental results.
Despite numerous reasons to be skeptical about the conclusions drawn from
research into games addiction, NewScientist devoted nearly a third of its space
to policy changes that should be considered in light of this kind of ‘suggestive’
research, gaming included. For example, after describing studies where she
observed that children are “more likely to turn to computer games when they are
unhappy,” Grüsser–Sinopoli is quoted as saying that “We need to be made more
aware of the potential risks, and we need as a society to worry about what we do,
and remove subsidies for addictive behaviors, tobacco, gambling, state
lotteries—it’s absurd.”
Of course, scientists like Grüsser–Sinopoli aren’t Jack Thompson, to be sure.
Grüsser–Sinopoli’s a well-respected scientist who has dedicated her career to
the study of addiction. But the rising interest in videogame effects coupled with
increased public apprehension about the ubiquity of videogames creates a
climate that strongly encourages people to find ‘evidence’ that supports big
claims—claims that make headlines, get one asked to testify before legislatures,
and invited to make television appearances. Pretty soon, it becomes ‘accepted
wisdom’ among the public and before you realize it, an expressive
communication medium is transformed into harmful contraband.
The NewScientist cover story closes with a sinister, if entirely vague quote from
Peter Whybrow, author of American Mania: “If politicians and leaders understood
how the brain works, they would not be building society as they are doing.”
You can almost hear the family-friendly videogame vigilantes whispering, “I told
you so.”
Aaron Ruby is co-author of the book Smartbomb: The Quest for Art,
Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution.