Video-game Values

Yesterday, I attended an elegant cocktail party. I wasn't exactly invited; in fact, I had to kill 11 people to get in. Great thing was, I got to collect their weapons-mostly M-16s and Uzis-as I went along. The party was held at a large castle where an important announcement was going to be made. It turned out two of the babes there (the way they dressed and acted made one skip right past "women" to "babes") not only had information for me, they seemed pretty interested in getting it on. (I'm not gay, but did look pretty good in a tux.) Unfortunately, after going to all that trouble, I was taken by surprise in the library and killed. Darn. Back to the last level for me.

I was playing "007 Nightfire"-my son's video game-and at the time, I was the Pierce Brosnan incarnation of James Bond. I talked like him, walked like him, saw things and shot people from his point of view. Oh-and today, I'm feeling a little more visually astute.

Last month researchers at the University of Rochester found that players of violent video games have a marked increase in their visual abilities. They can see, focus on, and process what is happening around them 30 to 50 percent better than non-gamers. These sorts of skills can be very useful in everyday settings such as driving and test taking, even grocery shopping-and in less everyday skills such as flying an airplane, radiology, security screenings, and air traffic control. This study got lots of attention, with one article calling it "the news every parent dreads."

Why the firestorm? What's wrong with a few kids shooting pretend bad guys? Didn't we all play cops and robbers growing up? And we're not really shooting people. What's the big whoop?

Well, first of all, it's not "a few" kids. According to CNN, last year video games took in more money than the movie industry-$10.3 billion compared to 9.5 billion. And according to researchers at the University of Chicago, 79 percent of American children play computer or video games on a regular basis, averaging 8 hours a week. But perhaps most surprising is the fact that most players aren't kids-the average age of video gamers is 28. And that's average, mind you-for every kid under 28 playing, there's a grown-up in his 30's, 40s or 70s, glued to the screen. Thom Gillespie, a professor at Indiana University, says, "Like rock music in the 60s and 70s, the game industry is driving culture at the moment."

So it's time to look at the physical, emotional, moral and spiritual effects of playing video games-paying special attention to these headline-making violent games.

Let me start with a disclaimer-most psychologists agree that the majority of kids who play limited amounts of video games, the choice of which is monitored by their parents, are doing just fine. There are even potential benefits. We'll get to those.

The Bad News

It turns out that video-game playing can be highly addictive. In fact, studies show that one in four teenagers who play video games feel addicted-and researchers suspect the percentage is even higher for adults. And we're not talking about just heavy gamers-people who play for more than an hour a day. These are people who have all the classic symptoms of addiction-they can't stop playing if they want to.They find themselves lying to cover their use; it affects meal and sleep patterns, disrupts family relationships and friendships, throws their lives out of balance, affects school or work. One in four. That means that if nearly 80 percent of American kids and adults play video games, and one in four is an addict-one of every five Americans is addicted to video games. This is obviously a serious problem-a clinic affiliated with Harvard Medical School is devoted to treating computer and video game addicts.

The addiction issue is even more intense for the players of violent video games-games in which the player is a "first-person" shooter-having to kill electronic people to stay in the game. Tests have shown that players of these games-the overwhelming majority of whom are male-have a powerful physical response to playing. Their heart rate increases, their blood pressure increases, their adrenaline and testosterone levels soar. Their body and mind are in the same heightened state as someone in actual physical peril. Asking them to turn off the game is like asking them to walk away from the middle of a fight and go to bed. It's nearly impossible-emotionally or physically.

Add to this findings that flickering video game images confuse the brain's waking and sleeping signals, and lack of sleep can become a common ailment for the heavy player. This can be part of the explanation for a Japanese study that found that people who played video games more than two hours a day were found to be more irritable and less able to concentrate on other tasks than non-gamers.

The Emotional Fallout

Violent video games have been found to alter players' emotions in marked ways. Researchers at Harvard have determined that children and adults use different parts of their brains in playing video games. Adults process the game in their analytical forebrain, while young players process the game in their amygdala, the seat of emotions. In other words, children enter these virtual worlds emotions-first, experiencing success and failure, joy and sorrow with the same stakes and feelings as they do the real world. They can't differentiate yet. Attorney Jack Thompson, who has represented parents of kids killed by teens who, like the Columbine killers, were heavy video-game users, testified in Congress, that "teens who see violence and emotion-laden images are more likely to copycat the entertainment they consume, because the images are then wedded structurally to the part of the brain that controls emotions and behaviors and uncontrolled behaviors." Another study found that youths who are heavy gamers can end up with "video-game brain," in which key parts of the frontal region of their brain become chronically underused, altering moods.

Another frightening emotional response to violent video games is an increase in "hostile attribution bias." That means that gamers are more likely to read ambiguous social cues as hostile. The driver in the next car glancing over at you, kids whispering in the cafeteria, laughter in the classroom-people who spend hours trying to survive in a virtual world where everyone is out to get them soon begin attributing the same motives to real people in everyday life. And they react to this perceived-hostile world with increased aggression. Studies show that prolonged use of violent video games bolster aggression in both children and adults. Researchers at used standard measures to categorize children as aggressive or non-aggressive. Then they measured the number of fights in which they were involved over a year's time. They found that non-aggressive kids who played lots of violent video games were more likely to have gotten into fights than "highly hostile" children who did not play such games. And children deemed "highly hostile" to start with increased their likelihood of actual violence from 28 to 63 percent if they played violent video games.

Why is this?Dr. David Walsh of the University of Chicago cites four reasons: 1) Children are more likely to imitate the actions of a character with whom they identify. In violent video games, the player actually takes the point of view of the shooter or perpetrator. 2) Video games require active participation rather than passive observation; 3) Repetition increases learning. In these video games, you tend to repeat the same violent actions over and over. 4) Rewards increase learning, and video games are based on a reward system-whether it's earning points or progressing through levels.

The Morality Question

What these studies don't reflect is the moral variations among violent video games. "First-person shooter" games can range from T-rated games (deemed suitable for young teens) such as "007," in which the player kills mostly faceless "bad guys" in an attempt to save the world, to M-rated games (realistic gore and violence suitable only for adults) like "Medal of Honor," which simulates a World War II-style military operation, or the deliberately morally heinous world of "Grand Theft Auto," in which, for example, you can hire a prostitute, have sex with her (depicted as a car shaking), then choose to murder her and take her money. Is there a moral difference between shooting unidentified bad guys for the good of the world and choosing to torture and kill characters for the fun of it? And does the level of gore make a difference? Do we respond differently as human beings?

Physically, at least, it seems the answer is yes. Researchers have found that subjects' blood pressure increased significantly when playing "Mortal Kombat" with the blood "turned on" versus playing the same game with the blood turned off. And virtually all of the studies of violent video games are based on "M" level games-which, though written for adults, are surprisingly easy for kids to get their hands on.

Are There Any Redeeming Qualities?

Some gamers interviewed by CNN at the Electronic Entertainment Expo thought so. One noted, "It's the violence and sex that brings us in. It's like everybody loves to do that, that's the thing. You can't do that in the real world so you might as well do it in the virtual world." To him, it was letting off steam without real-world consequences.

Dr. Thom Gillespie, who teaches game design at Indiana University (his students are the ones interested in coming up with future games) uses the popularity of "Grand Theft Auto" to initiate class discussions about the morality of video-game violence. He hopes students will see the possibilities of isolating what makes games like GTA so compelling and use it to create "life-enriching programming" that invites players to make choices that are "fun, ethical and moral."

Recently "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic" has taken up the standard, forcing players to make moral choices and live with the consequences. And a Toronto gaming company has launched Pax Warrior, putting gamers in the shoes of United Nations peacekeepers in Rwanda. "Our aim is to tell peace stories rather than war stories," says one of its producers.

Even the authors of the aforementioned studies on violent video games are finding positive uses for information they've garnered about the brain. Some have used the information about biofeedback and brain activity during play to find ways to teach ordinary folks how to destress their lives. By putting players into stressful situations (not necessarily violent ones) dictated by popular games, participants then find that their control pad or joystick works more easily the less stress their body feels. Consequently, they learn to calm themselves while stress levels remain constant. So far, this work has been especially helpful for children with ADHD.

And that study about gamers who play violent games having better visual attention skills? Lead study author Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive neuroscientist, is thrilled by the idea that video-game playing can help stroke victims regain their vision much more quickly. (Often, strokes don't actually physically harm the optic nerve; they cause parts of the brain to destimulate-the same areas stimulated by violent video games.) She and her colleagues are working to replicate the result without the violence.

What About the Kids?

Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told Beliefnet: "In general, I think we overestimate the malleability and fragility of children. We think that any or every bad event will leave some trace or scar. It doesn't. What does matter is longstanding conditions of childhood, activities that go on for hundreds of hours, that encourage or discourage certain virtues and values. When these longstanding conditions or activities match up with other parts of a child's experience, we have the major ingredients of socialization."

Haidt continued, "So I think that playing violent video games may have few or no harmful effects if the rest of the child's world is well-socialized, full of clear moral exemplars and good relationships with adult moral exemplars. That of course is a very big if. For children who are surrounded by scenes of violence and callousness in the rest of their lives, and in the TV and movies that they watch, I think that long-term participation in shooter games will probably contribute to a kind of moral coarsening or degradation.

"[The young] of all species love to play," Haidt added, "and they play to practice skills they will need as an adult. Warfare and conflict has always been an important human skill. My favorite toys when I was a kid were guns, yet I went on to run a gun-control group. I think it would only be the antisocial games that would (if played over a long period of time) lead to some degradation of the moral sense."

Dr. Paul Pearsall, author of The Beethoven Factor, takes a more spiritual approach to the question. "We are becoming really good at doing but not so good at being, at winning rather than cooperating," he told Beliefnet. "Regular tapping on a controller that zaps opponents to their death may indeed develop very fast and accurate visual skills and hand-eye coordination-but the coordination that we have found needs much more practice is not hand/eye but head/heart. It is the journey between the head and the heart that remains the longest and most difficult one, and I doubt that sitting alone killing imaginary beings and monsters is going to do much to help us negotiate that path."