Professor Doug Gentile Interview Digest

As Pyroph’s excellent interview with Prof. Doug Gentile is not only very interesting, but also rather long, I thought it a good idea to create a shorter, digest version of the interview. Basically a collection of the more interesting quotes. If you find any of this even remotely interesting, I can not recommend enough having a read of the full interview.

The topics Dr. Gentile covers, in my opinion, are among the most important issues modern gaming faces, and yet, probably the most overlooked by gamers themselves. What with them being energy drink-riddled husks of minuscule attention spans. BEES! Good, thought I had lost you there.

When asked about how addiction effects peoples’ lives, Gentile gave a quick run down of some of the symptoms that can be related to an addiction:

[Besides spending too much money] other symptoms include obsessively thinking about games, they can’t stop thinking about gaming and have a hard time concentrating in other areas of their life. They want to cut back, but aren’t able to – which shows a lack of control. When they do try to cut back, they feel restless and irritable ‘“ these are like withdrawal symptoms.

An “addiction” is generally characterized by a large number of varying symptoms that affect a person’s quality of life, rather than just one or two annoyances. Relating to the difference between gaming and just normal hobbies, Gentile explained;

Well, they don’t. What is different is how many symptoms you have. Anything you love to do you will sacrifice for. You will skip homework or chores, just because you love to do it. That’s fine, that’s normal. 1 or 2 symptoms, very normal. It’s when it’s so many that it adds up.

He also explained where gaming fits into the general scope of addictions. The DSM is basically the published methods of identifying mental disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association.

If this were included in the DSM where other addictions are defined, it would probably be included in the same place that pathological gambling is, which is as an impulse control disorder. You know you should do your homework, but you can’t keep yourself from playing the game.

Amusingly, when questioned about hate mail he receives due to angry gamers reading the reports on his research, r. Gentile replied,

I get hate mail all the time. I get hate mail from gamers who say violent games don’t affect me, I’ve played them all my life so I’m gonna come right over there and kill you. The games seem to damage some gamers’ sense of irony.

Regarding the ESA’s angry complaints against his research being published, Gentile explained they were just doing their job. A job which entails trying to show the research shouldn’t be taken seriously.

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.

He goes on to say the ESA have a very interesting relationship with him and his work.

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 ‘œgood’ studies, and not when I report on ‘œbad’ effects.

He then spoke about, in his opinion, where the problems within this area come from. And to an extend, I agree. Though I assume when he says “your site” he is referring to the video game blogs and news site as a whole.

That’s the funny thing, your site is part of the problem honestly, which is that people always reduce this to if it’s ‘œgood’ or ‘œbad.’ 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.

He also criticises the ESA for their stance, or the stance of Doug Lowenstein in particular, on the research.

I’ve got clips of Doug Lowenstein (past-president of the ESA) saying ‘œEvery 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 ‘œindependent 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 ‘œindependent.’ 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.

When talking about the media, he came up with a great analogy to how we should be treating violent video games, in relation to violent acts;

If you smoke, your risk of having a heart attack goes up. Did smoking cause your heart attack? No. Okay what’s another risk factor for a heart attack? Poor diet. Does that cause it? No. High cholesterol? No. If you ask the question what is the cause of the heart attack, there is no answer.

He also points out why video games are likely to become a target for this research, and it’s because although there are lots of factors which can lead to aggressive behaviour, we can control video games.

When you list the known risk factors for aggression in terms of size of the effect, media violence is not the biggest, but it’s also not the smallest. It’s right there in the middle of all the rest of them. So it’s one that should be taken as seriously as the others. What makes it different, however, is that it’s the one we can easily control. Poverty is also on the list, as is having been abused, but you can’t easily control those.

As I said at the start of this article, if you would like to know more (and their is much, much more), then do have a read of the full interview.