Negative Gamer Interview: Professor Doug Gentile

NG: The ESA Response?

The ESA is to some extent doing their job, that their job is to be a lobby, to try to defend games. There is a minor error in the way the study is reported ‘“ without being able to specify the theoretical sampling frame from which the population of potential respondents was drawn, we cannot know what the margin of error is. So I was in error saying it’s plus or minus 3%, because we don’t know.

Regardless of that, all we need to do to correct the mistake is to take that one sentence out of the paper. We don’t know whether it’s plus or minus 3%, 2%, or 5%. We don’t know. That’s fine, every other number in the study is correct. And it is still a national study, done by Harris Polls using their standard methodology that everyone agrees with.

The ESA response was a way of trying to cast doubt on the whole study, because I calculated a confidence interval that we don’t really know what the theoretical sampling frame was to be able to know whether that’s the right number.

NG: Back to being emailed, any large organizations?

The ESA has threatened to sue me before. [laughs] If I say things negative about games, they threaten to sue, and yet they post some of my positive game studies on their web site. So they like it when I report “good” studies, and not when I report on “bad” effects.

That’s the funny thing, your site is part of the problem honestly, which is that people always reduce this to if it’s “good” or “bad.” But that’s not what it’s about. The world is not black and white, or us versus them. Hopefully we’re smarter than that. The issue is that games have effects. In fact, games have really powerful effects and if they didn’t there wouldn’t be so many people who loved playing them.

If you play a game and it doesn’t affect you, what do you call it? Boring. You want to be affected, so don’t pretend they don’t affect you. And that’s what most gamers who get really defensive are doing. They’re telling this little lie. Games don’t affect me, but of course they only want to play games that do affect them. “I get this big rush when I played a violent game.”

Well what is that rush? That’s you dropping glucocorticoids and catecholamines such as adrenaline, cortisol, and testosterone into your bloodstream, which is exactly the same thing that would happen if I hit you. You know it’s “just a game” but your body is preparing for an actual fight. That’s one of the effects that we would say would happen from a violent game – that you would have a physiological reaction and think aggressive thoughts. In fact, you know that when you play the game. [laughs]

And yet you as a group of male gamers that want to ignore that pretend somehow that’s not an aggression effect. Well it is. So it’s a really funny thing, because somehow admitting that is threatening to people. Back to your question, I don’t understand why the industry finds these types of studies threatening, actually. Because on the one hand they show just how powerful games are. Games are great teachers, and they like to talk about that. Great teachers at math, reading, health behaviors, visual attention skills, hand eye coordination. You know what?, Then they’re also going to be good teachers of aggression.

It doesn’t magically stop and only have affects on these things but not this. So if we admit they’re effective, and they’re powerful then we can choose better. This is an argument I’ve had with Pat Vance. The ESRB gives this double message to parents, saying we have a great rating system, but there’s no reason you need to use it because there’s no evidence that games could ever have any harmful effects. And then we wonder why parents don’t use the ratings.

I argue that the ESRB should say, we have a great rating system and here’s why you need to use it because there is evidence that games have effects. How would the ESRB be harmed? They would be perceived as being very responsible. The research shows that games have both “positive” effects and “negative” effects. I don’t even believe in those terms either. Because you know what, the aggression effect is really good if you’re in the army. And that’s why all branches of the armed forces now use video games to train soldiers. They recognize how well violent games can train those skills. [laughs]

So in fact the increased willingness to aggress is a good thing in certain context. So even that’s not always a negative from all standpoints. So once we admitted all that, we could actually perhaps get parents to use the ratings better. And then game designers could more thoughtfully use some of these effects intentionally. Right now most of these effects are unintentional. People aren’t designing violent games with the intention of training aggression skills or visual attention skills. That’s not what the games are designed for. But everyone should understand that the science on game effects is serious and real. The science is what the science is.

I would love for my studies to not come out the way they do. That’s the funny thing – on the game sites they claim that I have my mind made up about it, and I’m just trying to show what I think. If I did that I’d lose my job, I’m a scientist. I just have to report what the data says.

NG: What are you trying to prove/find out?

I study all media – music, advertising, movies, music videos, and games. I study any medium because what I’m interested in is how powerful are the media at affecting us. We all pretend; ads don’t affect me, media violence doesn’t affect me. We all pretend these things that we actually deep down know must not be true. If ads didn’t affect people, they wouldn’t spend billions and billions of dollars every year on them. Ads must work, so let’s find out how much they work, and how they work. That’s what I’m interested in: how do media have effects and how is it they have an effect without you knowing? They influence us, yet we don’t see it. So how is it working without our conscious awareness? That’s really interesting to me. So that’s what I’m trying to find out.

Then there becomes a bigger broader goal of how can we use this power to get more of the benefits? And how can we be aware of what the power is so that we mitigate some of the negatives? As a child psychologist I care a whole lot about what leads for healthy outcomes for kids. So I would love to tell parents violent video games don’t have any effects. I would love that to be true, it just isn’t.

In all of my violent game studies the kids could be less aggressive after playing the game. They aren’t. I can’t say the games have no affect on aggression. Here’s one of the ways the industry tries to marginalize the researchers. I’ve got clips of Doug Lowenstein (past-president of the ESA) saying “Every independent researcher, that is, every researcher who has come to this question without a preconceived idea that games are harmful has looked at the evidence and said there is absolutely no evidence that violent games have any harmful effects.” I think I got his quote almost verbatim there.

What’s he saying? Every “independent researcher, that is every researcher that has come to this without preconceived notion.” He’s claiming that any researcher who finds aggression affects is biased. Only researchers that he agrees with are “independent.” He’s basically claiming that I make up my data. You know, there is no greater insult to a scientist. If I ever made up any of my data, I would get thrown out of the APA [American Psychological Association]. I would lose my job.

I really have no agenda, other than to find out what the effects are. One of the only times I had an agenda was on the video game addiction idea. I thought it was wrong. I said I’m going to do a study to show it’s wrong. It’s one of the only times I came with a preconceived idea of what the data would show. The joy of science is that opinions don’t matter. Whether I like the result or not, I just gotta report what the data show.

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