Warning: This is an opinion piece. It’s not objective reporting. Happy Saturday.
Professor Laura Padilla-Walker (seen on the left) of the College of Family, Home and Social Sciences at Brigham Young University recently published a study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence titled More Than a Just a Game: Video Game and Internet Use During Emerging Adulthood. When asked about the study, Padilla-Walker commented “The most striking part is that everything we found clustered around video game use is negative.”
Everything? So NOTHING good comes from playing video games? That’s crazy talk. Is it negative that games generally make for better surgeons and fighter pilots? Is it negative that Rock Band and Guitar Hero World Tour kinda/sorta teach people how to play the drums? Is it negative that all the groomsmen at my wedding were guys I met on Xbox Live? They weren’t, but you can imagine if they were. That would have been weird!
The impetus behind the study – which you can download for $34 – “was to gain a clearer understanding of the pattern of video game and internet use among college students and to examine how electronic leisure was related to risk behaviors (i.e., drinking, drug use, sex), perceptions of the self (i.e., self worth and social acceptance), and relationships with others (i.e., relationship quality with parents and friends).”
Participants included 813 undergraduate students (500 young women, 313 young men, M age = 20, SD = 1.87) who were mainly European American (79%), unmarried (100%) and living outside their parents’ home (90%). Results suggested that (a) video game use was linked to negative outcomes for men and women, (b) different patterns of video game and internet use existed for men and women and (c) there were different relations to risk behaviors, feelings about the self, and relationship quality based on the type of internet use, and based on gender. The discussion focuses on the implications of electronic leisure on the overall health and development of young people as they transition to adulthood.
According to the Telegraph, the study found the following:
- People who play video games at least every other day were “around 10 per cent more likely to drink alcohol and take drugs than students who rarely played the games.”
- “Those who played computer games every day were three times as likely to use cannabis as those who never played.”
- “Most of the men asked, 55 per cent, were regular players, using their games console at least every other day. By contrast, only around 7 per cent of women admitted that they played computer games that often.”
- “Female gamers were more likely to suffer low self-esteem than other women, an effect not seen among male players.”
- “As the amount of time spent playing the games increased, the quality of relationships with friends and parents deteriorated… although the effects were described as ‘modest’.”
Padilla-Walker further commented:
“It may be that young adults remove themselves from important social settings to play video games, or that people who already struggle with relationships are trying to find other ways to spend their time,” she said. “My guess is that it’s some of both and becomes circular.”
Allow me to explain to Professor Padilla-Walker how college works for most kids. Video gaming is at an all-time high on campuses everywhere. I’ve never played so many video games in my entire life than in the four years that I was in college.
Know what goes great with playing video games when you’re in college with all your buddies? Beer. Also, booze. And for some, cannabis. The fact that the study only found a 10% increase in alcohol and drug use among college-aged gamers is, frankly, shocking. I’d expect it to be much higher than that.
Your study, Ms. Padilla-Walker, should have looked closer at those who don’t play video games habitually. Sure, you’ll find that fewer women play games than men but you should have asked women how much time they spend watching men play video games in college. Ask any of the women who lived in my house or next door to my house how many times they’ve witnessed a game of Mario Kart 64 (this was back in 2000 or so, mind you) while drinking with everyone else.
The students who aren’t playing video games or at least watching people play video games are the ones you should be more concerned about. What are they doing? If you can walk down a dorm hallway on a Friday night and not hear the gunfire from a first person shooter or the whistles from any EA Sports title intermingled with the clanking of beer bottles, something is wrong.
And the whole “female gamers have lower self esteem” thing? You surveyed 500 women and only 7% admitted to playing games at least every other day. That’s 35 women in college likely to suffer from low self esteem out of 500 – pretty good if you ask me. Sounds like they’re just being honest, though. The Entertainment Software Association puts female gamers at about 38 percent, according to CNN. So consider that the 31% of women in your study who didn’t admit to gaming might be trying to mask other stuff as well like, oh I don’t know, low self esteem.
Finally, back to the “everything we found clustered around video game use is negative” piece. You can’t say things like that and have people take you seriously.
High-fiving after a one-timer builds camaraderie. Yelling joyfully after returning the enemy’s flag to your base is therapeutic. Laughing hysterically after your buddy botches the landing of an impossible trick releases endorphins.
Sure, there’s a sadder, darker side to video games but that only pertains to people who play MMORPGs – like when I used to lock myself in my room and play Everquest eight hours a day. Yes, that’s a bad time in every gamers life, but we all emerge from it much stronger than ever before and eventually return to playing games because they enrich our lives. So does beer.
in the words of Bugs Bunny: “What a maroon”.
Further proof that the field of sociology is complete junk science.
amen, brother.
ditto
Have you ever considered the fact that measuring human interaction is a much more complex process than that of a relatively simple chemical reaction or mathematical equation? While I don’t think her study is particularly strong, nor does it make its case very well, that’s not to say that the whole field of sociology or social science is junk.
That’s like saying that Physics is junk because of Cold Fusion studies that have been published.
Show me a significant number of sociologists who have failed to prove their hypotheses, and I will start to accept sociology as a science. Yes, I said *failed*. Science is about creating experiments to test an hypothesis for consistency against observations, whether or not it proves the hypothesis to be true. I have seen far too many sociologists who were clearly shoehorning their observations into their pre-conceived hypotheses to accept that they are properly applying the scientific method.
Got to love it when Professors publish half-baked results without giving the full story. It’s easy to tell this report is trash starting right at the point where she sampled 500 women and only 313 men. What the heck? You have to at least use an equal number of both sexes. No wonder some of the percentages were jacked up for the men.
She works at BYU, owned/funded/controlled by the Mormon church. Historically churches have never liked competition. Anything that draws people out of church is viewed by the church as evil or sin. Churches have always gone after liquor, drugs, porn, Sunday shopping, and now video games. In the churches eyes, every dollar spent on these “sins/evils” is a dollar not going to the church and less influence the churches have have over people. It is sad and funny how some people will twist and distort using academia and god to get what they want. This report is about as useful as a Microsoft sponsored researched paper on how Linux or Mac is junk and Microsoft is the best.
I guess you figured that I am not a church kind of guy.
Are you kidding? Liquor/drugs= negative affect socially and mentally. Porn? = encourages fornication and lust, which the church obviously discourages. Sunday Shopping prevents people from… guess what… being in church.
Now the church really doesn’t discourage video games as much as it discourages playing extremely violent video games like… Fallout 3. I mean, my church used to host Street Fighter parties back in the day.
Fallout 3, is a good game and I’m a normal well adapted twenty something male. Would I recommend children play it, absolutely not but I feel common sense is the best tool not some biased half baked study about beer, pot and low self esteem.
wait are YOU kidding? Alcohol, in moderation, is actually good for you. Drugs in moderation do not affect you socially or mentally, and all of these things affect everyone differently. Too much iron or any vitamin can actually kill you. Moral of the story all things in moderation, and know how these will affect you. And as to porn, I don’t think we need porn as a reason for lust and fornication, our genetics and sexual evolution do enough encouraging on their own, thank you very much.
Someone needs to stick it in her mouth.
She’s a witch! Burn her!
Yes, she is right. Whatever. Who cares anyway?! Sorry, gotta go back to CoD5 to shoot some n00bs.
Also, p-l-e-a-s-e next time post a picture of either Jessica Chobot or Jade Raymond.
I can bet she wrote that crap because her boyfriend/husban, who she is obsessed with, prefers playing games than having some sexual intercourse with her…Or maybe because she is the alcoholic, drug-user she actually writes about and wants to blame games instead of blaming herself for being an anti-social witch-B
I will take anything coming from Erica Sadum :D
You all are just jealous because she made a study and you didn’t!
On a more serious note… the real question is which part of the demographic is she?
Just read an article that the video game industry made round about 3 billion more than the movie industry last year (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=201068).
With these facts in memory it is pretty simple to assume that video games and especially gamers are sooo “bad”. Probably, if you play video games you also support terrorism and you are responsible for the economical crisis.
Well, if you want my whole scientific look-a-like opinion you can also download it for, of course, 34 bucks….
A very entertaining weekend article. Thanks.
I wonder if she ever really played video games herself – excluding solitaire and minesweeper
What a fox! me-ow
haha, bleuuuuuuuuuuggghhhh!
Another gaming study by another gaming hater.
“Is it negative that games generally make for better surgeons and fighter pilots?” – This is my job. I wouldn’t have it if it didn’t give positive results.
Most people who resort to playing games cannot deal with the real world and want increasing levels of more sophisticated escapism. If they’re not on the net or gaming, they’re using their cellphone/ipod.
As for the “better surgeons” link, is there evidence for this? People think that weed causes paranoia and other mental illnesses – turns out that people who are more likely to suffer from mental illness are more likely to smoke weed in the first place, creating the statistical illusion that one causes the other.
I think that people who have mental problems and find real world socialising difficult will resort to gaming. Before gaming they were still there, they just did something different.
“like when I used to lock myself in my room and play Everquest eight hours a day”
Amen brother. Amen.
Since when is taking drugs a *negative* thing?
Wow…just wow…
Yeah, I wouldn’t discredit all churches because of this. Some churches I know of use video games to bring in youth because they know that kids enjoy them. A Baptist church in my area had a “Halo Fest.”
Although it doesn’t suprise me that someone from the Mormon church would publish something like this. They’re a whole different story…
Very amusing study was it conducted in the early eighty’s it gave me such a laugh I almost peed my pants thinking back on those day’s.
I imagine that “everything we found clustered around video game use is negative” refers to a statistical cluster analysis and is not her personal take on the study. So yes, I can take her seriously when she says that, because it’s likely true within her study.
The study is still meaningless since there’s no causal link between gaming and any of the “negative” behaviors (i.e., students who get straight As probably drink less and play fewer games than those who get Ds, but the gaming isn’t responsible for the bad grades). I also seriously suspect the results if they did this at BYU — it’s not exactly a profile of an average college student.
This “study” goes against the findings of many other, similar studies. Furthermore, all of these things are correlations, perhaps, but certainly not causes. And I agree with the poster that if this study was done at BYU then it’s hardly representative of what the rest of the country is experiencing.
*sigh*
I’m sure Jack Thompson enjoyed reading the study, at least.
Omfg They did it to music now they are doing it to games…. fuck whats their next escape plan reading??? Beslan school hostage crisis”There’s been a lot of talk about that, but if there are radical feelings in people anything can wake them – a painting, a picture, whatever. It’s just a coincidence that it happened to be our music. It’s important to think about what caused them to make their decisions, how they became animals, not their taste in music. Whenever something like this happens it’s like ‘Okay, let’s blame the artist’. Such bullshit. ” (Till Lindemann)”Our music is made to release aggression, and people listening to it are also needed to do that, but it’s not our fault. Should we stop making hard music because bad people might like it?” Its the same fucking arguement with games… if you play them your gonna be a serial killer, rapist, terrorist…. Did you forget about all the people smoking pot, killing, maiming, raping, fornicating and drinking BEFORE we had games? Your nothing…. you money hungry half assed bitch
Well, we live in a free world, everyone can write wahtever he\she\it wants. The one and only thing I can not understand, is why the hell they expect that someone will pay to download that stupid research.
Problem is with statistics. It’s like a bikini: reveals a lot, but hides the most important parts :)
I do not want to sound snobbish, but usualy people that are not directly involved with mathematics and physics have trouble using statistics properly.
I know that in a certain scientific medical journal they have employed a person whose only job is to check mathematical part of each and every submitted article.
From my parsonal experience, people form social sciences have great difficulty comprehending math and statistics is a b*tch if you do not know all aspects of the problem you are tackling.
For example – how do you know that 500 people you interviewed is a credible sample? In a sample description it did not say whether all participants are from the same university. If yes, how can the same statistics be true for all universities in the states?
Are participants natural sciences majors, or social sciences? Maybe arts?
Did she correlate drug use with area people who admitted drug use come from?
I mean, every statistical analysis of this kind is necessarily faulty because one simply cannot take into account all the aspects of the sample one is dealing with.
To make an example: I know a woman who is 92 years old – vital, brain working incredibly, self-sufficient, you name it.
She smokes a pack of cigarettes every day, and she did so for the last 60+ years.
Make a sample of people like her (go to a retirement home(s) and make a sample) and you’ll get tobacco industry’s dream sample – it proves that people live longer if they smoke!
Of course, this is BS, but so is research of prof. Padilla-Walker.
@Dave Freeman
Amen to that. What a bunch of junk. I play a certain MMORPG that has gained *some* polularity over the past few years and while I realize that playing for 8 hours at a time is “bad” for me (at least it makes me feel guilty sneaking up the steps at 5:30 AM) I also realize that there are lessons to be learned from the buying/selling/trading/farming supplies actions that can be applied to real life and had I played games like this as a kid I would have learned about supply and demand and had a better grasp on money management.
But that’s just my 2 cent run-on.
FTH!
I see what you are saying so allow me to retort: “The most striking part is that everything we found clustered around Laura Padilla-Walker, BYU and Mormonism is negative.” Go back to your cult, Laura. No one cares about you, what you have to say or your university.
What the?! Well. if that’s a study better go back to pre-school and review again. How can you possibly play and do drugs at the same time? Gimme a break. And what are you saying about female gamers? Sheesh, if I had that face I don’t need to play a game to show I have a low esteem.
Hey Miss Laura Padilla-Walker… F Y I …. I am a female gamer and I paly different games. Most of the time I play two games at a time. Mind you, I don’t just spend 4 or 5 hours per day. I admit that I am an addict but your study is so ridiculous.
* I never like to drink alcohol and I definitely won’t take drugs. I don’t even take pain killers.
* I have never met a girl who plays video games denying that they do play.
* I felt I had higher self-esteem when I leraned to play video games.
* Time spent with friends and parents were lessen but those times spent are always happy.
* I always attend important social gatherings and even manage to organize a party. Upto this very moment my boyfriend is still happy having a relationship with me.
There are more than 11 million gamers girl and that is just for WoW.
Get it right:
She didn’t say everything was wrong, she said everything she tested for came out negative.
Big difference.
Why did she not talk about VGs helping surgeons and pilots? BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T TEST THAT.
gee.