Society essay relate to video game

ISS210 Society and the Individual: Video Games

Topic #4: Video Games and Good Things

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Today’s Questions • Are there positive benefits to

playing video games?

• Research doesn’t happen in a vacuum; incentives to ask certain types of questions

• Ultimate question of interest: What are the long-term consequences of video games?

• This is the hardest form of work to do in a rigorous way

Challenge of Research

• Looks at differences between gamers and non- gamers, but not in a randomized way

• Limitation: Risk of unmeasured confounding variables (differences between gamers and non-gamers)

• Uses self-recall: How much you’ve played a (genre) video game?

• Uses self-assessment: How good do you think you are at something?

• What came first, the chicken or the egg? (reverse causality)

Observational Research

Academic Performance

Video Game Playing

Family Income

Intelligence

Perseverance

• What is the relationship between video game play and problem solving?

• Longitudinal cohort study 8-12th grade in Ontario, Canada (N = 1492)

• Video Games: Do you play role playing, strategy, fighting, action, racing games (yes/no, 1-5 point scale)

• Problem Solving: 5 questions about skills (e.g., I think hard about what steps to take, I think about the choices before I do anything)

Adachi and Willoughby (2013)

• What’s good about this: Ability to control for responses in previous year

• Example: 10th grade problem solving • Is driven by 9th grade solving • Drives 11th grade solving

Adachi and Willoughby (2013)

• Key question: Does video game play also explain changes in solving ability?

• Answer: Yes, but only for strategic (i.e., role playing or strategy) games

• Bonus! Separate work (by same authors) shows that sports game play encourages subsequent real sport play

Adachi and Willoughby (2013)

• How does video game experience impact probabilistic learning?

• Probabilistic learning assessed via weather prediction task (WPT)

• You see up to 3 of 4 tarot cards and are asked to predict, on basis of those cards, whether it will be rain or sun

• You then get feedback about if you were right or wrong…and repeat

Schenk et al. (2017)

• Completed this while in an MRI machine • How do video gamers (15+ hours/week

on Starcraft or other “action-based” games) compare to non-gamers (< 4 hours/week) [N = 30]

Schenk et al. (2017)

• Results • Overall, gamers > non-

gamers

• Gamers also less impacted by more ambiguous conditions than non-gamers

• Brain pictures look different, too (and in expected ways)

Schenk et al. (2017)

• How does video game type influence cooperative behavior?

• Subjects (N = 144 students) randomly assigned to one of 4 video games and to play solo or on a team

• Play for 30 minutes and then perform social dilemma task

Jin and Li (2017): Cooperation

• Coin task • You and a partner each get 4 coins • You can keep them or give some to a

partner (ditto for partner)

• Those that you give double in value for your partner

• Range of outcomes: 0 (you give all and partner keeps all) to +12 (you keep all and partner gives all)

Jin and Li (2017)

Jin and Li (2017) Violent Non-Violent

Jin and Li (2017) Cooperation

Effect N

eutral

V io

lent

Summary • Today: What’s good about playing

video games?

• Readings • Granic, Lobel, and Engels (2014) • Green and Seitz (2015)

• Next Time: Addiction?