On April 26 the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear a case involving California’s efforts to ban the sale of “violent” video games to minors. The ban had been struck down by a federal appeals court on the basis of both constitutional issues and skepticism about research purporting to link violent games to harm in youth. “None of the research establishes or suggests a causal link between minors playing violent video games and actual psychological or neurological harm, and inferences to that effect would not be reasonable,” said Judge Consuelo Callahan, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The State of California, apparently having found a font of money to dump on the issue while cutting social services to those in need, is taking the case to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case in the fall, as I understand it. Legally speaking, the issue of violent video games appears about to come to a climax. It’s just too bad that it’s largely a climax of fear, misunderstanding, and, too often, shoddy science, in which weak and inconsistent effects are irresponsibly communicated to the public as definitive proof of harm. The controversy over video games reflects past hysterias, whether over jazz, Elvis Presley, Harry Potter, or Dungeons & Dragons. Yet society seems destined not to learn from past mistakes.
The video game, that modern entertainment medium in which players save worlds and conquer them, defeat bad guys or pretend to be them, is a force that is here to stay. Research from multiple sources makes clear that the vast majority of youth, particularly boys, play video games. The release of the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in 2009, was the largest entertainment launch in history, beating initial sales of even blockbuster movies. Although policy makers and some scholars regularly wring their hands about aggression and addiction, youth have thrived in the era of video games, with violence rates plummeting and educational success improving. Some of society’s elders, most of whom are not acquainted with the games, may wish they would simply go away. But the genie is out of the bottle: Video games, even the violent ones, are a facet of the modern world. Rather than indulge in fruitless efforts to disparage them, I’d argue that the time has come to consider how to harness this popular medium for important social purposes.
To that end, a number of video-game scholars have come together in the June 2010 issue of the American Psychological Association journal Review of General Psychology to report on video-game research in fields such as health, education, child therapy, and cognition. I had the honor of serving as guest editor of this special issue, and I believe that the findings it presents may serve as guideposts for future work with video games. Research in some of these fields is well developed; in others it remains nascent. Nonetheless, general agreement exists among the scholars that video games may be an important platform for a variety of interventions and initiatives, particularly with young people.
A good deal of attention has focused on “serious games.” Much like “political ethics,” the term may seem to be an oxymoron. However, serious games are those developed specifically for some nonentertainment purpose, such as education. Perhaps the most “famous” of these is the game Re-Mission, which received positive mention last year in a speech by President Obama. As Pamela M. Kato notes in her essay in the journal, Re-Mission is a first-person-shooter “action” (i.e., mildly violent) game in which players take on the role of a miniature female robot that is injected into the bloodstream and fights off cancer cells and bacteria. Research published in the journal Pediatrics by Kato and others has found that the game improves self-efficacy, knowledge of cancer, and treatment adherence in teenage and young-adult cancer patients. Re-Mission provides the ideal template for a serious game. Without reservation, Re-Mission takes advantage of the wildly popular first-person-shooter format and imbeds important information into the game play.
That is an important point to consider. A dull game is valueless. Arguably the strength of video games is not their inherent ability to teach. Rather it is the ability of games to attract attention that is the greatest source of their worth. They can lead the horse to water far better than a traditional lecture or scholarly book can. The secret is to figure out how to imbed important educational information into a highly playable game. As T. Atilla Ceranoglu notes in his essay, teachers, scholars, and even some game designers may shy away from certain elements of video games, action formats in particular. Yet opportunities may be missed when players who gravitate toward such games are left out of their benefits. Indeed, the young boys who particularly like action games, and tend to fare worse educationally, may be left behind if serious games are sanitized as a part of society’s current emphasis on bubble-wrapping childhood.
One of the fundamental challenges I see for serious games in general is competition with commercial games. (In fact, serious games adopted for educational purposes cannot compete in the marketplace with commercial games.) Yet to the degree that serious games prove a disappointment to youth accustomed to the finest graphics, smooth action, and easy engagement, they may fail to provide the flow state necessary to “hook” players so that they are exposed to the educational content. To that end, I would advise developers of serious games to remain attuned to the trends in commercial games’ popularity.
Even commercial games may have some unintended educational or cognitive value. The Europa Universalis series may be the epitome of an educational commercial game. Ruling one of several nations from the 15th through the 18th centuries, players must guide their countries through real-life historical scenarios. It is difficult not to learn history and geography while playing. Of course, the majority of games do not have such a blatant educational component. However, as noted by the scholars Ian Spence and Jing Feng in the special issue, first-person shooter games are especially capable of teaching various aspects of visuospatial cognition and attention. Those kinds of cognitive tasks involve visual attention, processing, mental rotation, and spatial recognition—tasks important for careers as varied as architecture and surgery. That probably has less to do with the violent content of the games in question and more with the kinds of cognitive tasks required of the player in order to succeed. Players must quickly attend to and process visual information, develop spatial representations of mazes and labyrinths, and develop faster reaction times in order to progress positively. Associations between video-game playing, particularly for action games, and gains in visuospatial cognition among players have been one of the most consistent in the video-game literature.
As Jane Barnett and Mark Coulson note in their article, vast multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft, appear to provide a variety of verbal and other learning opportunities for players. World of Warcraft in particular has been hit with the “addiction” label so hard that even many players refer to it as “World of Warcrack.” While scholars and treatment professionals must naturally be alert for players who pathologically overuse MMO’s and other games, no mass wave of “addicted” youth has yet materialized. Standardized educational scores and civic engagement among youth has increased rather than decreased in recent years, according to one 2008 study.
In all of this, it may be reasonable to ask: If video games do not seem to be very effective in teaching aggression (as most assuredly they are not, given plummeting rates of youth violence and the lack of association between game playing and highly validated aggression measures), how can they function as educational tools? If one kind of learning fails, how can another kind succeed? Fundamentally, that question is a matter of comparing apples and oranges. The belief that video games foster aggression was based on the assumption that games imbue elementary changes in a person’s motivation and personality. These are fairly major changes; they require the player to essentially become a different person after playing. For games to function as educational tools, they require no such radical change. A player who succeeds at a serious game (or an educationally loaded commercial game) remains the same person after playing; he merely knows more than he did before.
Action games foster visuospatial cognition by increasing the cognitive load on the brain, making it work harder. Like a muscle being exercised, it becomes stronger under moderate strain. In serious games, good play merely brings players to the table and then provides them exposure to educational material in a frame of mind in which they may be more engaged than they would be, say, passively listening to a lecture. Games merely provide a more engaging platform in which learning may occur.
Young people have now been playing video games for more than 30 years. During that time, they have become more academically successful, less violent, and more civically engaged. It is time to lay to rest our fears of video games, even the violent ones. Our darkest forebodings have clearly not come to pass. Should the U.S. Supreme Court side with the State of California, its will be a triumph of ignorant fear over careful reasoning. Banning violent video games will do nothing to address youth violence; more likely it will distract society from true contributors to youth violence, such as family environment and mental-health problems.
By contrast, research is increasingly identifying video games as a potential force for good. Their very appeal among youth indicates their potential value, should they be harnessed for education and other positive purposes. To be sure, I do not mean to imply that video games are some sort of mystical savior for all our woes. By and large, the average video game remains merely a game, a distraction devoid of either positive or negative value. Yet many clever designers, from fiscally strapped start-ups to scientific powerhouses such as NASA, are turning to games as one potential tool in the education of youth. Developing innovative tools for enhancing the education experience for youths: I say, “Game on.”