Science often needs a good dose of common sense
Until yesterday I didn’t know what ‘‘gibbing’’ meant. I didn’t know how to load and reload an assault rifle, how powerful you feel looking down the sights of a gun or how easily you can get used to the sound of shrapnel puncturing human flesh. You see I’ve been gaming (first time for everything); Call of Duty: Black Ops. Which is how I know that ‘‘gibbing’’ is gaming slang for killing a character with such force that their body explodes, scattering ‘‘giblets’’ on the floor.
Don’t be alarmed. Half an hour in that blood-spattered alternate universe won’t make me a psycho. In fact, according to a team of researchers in Germany, I could spend two hours-plus a day, year after year, gibbing and flaying away and it would be borderline wholesome. The study – published this week in Frontiers in Psychology and conducted by Dr Gregor Szycik and his staff at Hannover Medical School – examined the brains of long-term gamers and non-gamers with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and concluded that playing violent video games doesn’t desensitise you, numb your empathy or turn you into a bloodthirsty murderer. In fact, it can be cognitively beneficial.
Cue triumphant blogs by the kind of gaming experts who look like they wear adult nappies – which is actually a thing: if you’re serious about your ‘‘kill ratio ranking’’, nothing, even the call of nature, should take you away from your game. “I wouldn’t expect the mainstream media to acknowledge any of this,” writes one. “In their eyes, video games are competition and therefore evil. So they’ll be grasping at any excuses they can find to demonise gaming.”
Here’s a bit of grasping for you. Remember the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who gunned down 13 people in 1999? They played violent video games. As did Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik (death toll, 77) and the Aurora movie theatre gunman, James Holmes (12 dead). Jared Lee Loughner (who killed six and injured 13, including politician Gabby Giffords) in Arizona in 2011 was also an active gamer, along with Adam Lanza, the troubled 20year-old who shot dead 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School the following year.
Excuses? If that’s what the above are, then they’re excuses used by the monstrous products of violent gaming themselves. From the Alaska correctional facility where Evan Ramsey is serving 198 years for a school shooting back in 1997 (the then 16 year-old used a pump action shotgun to shoot two people dead) the young man said: “I did not understand that if I… pull out a gun and shoot you, there’s a good chance you’re not getting back up. You shoot a guy in Doom and he gets back up.”
So how about instead of functional magnetic resonance imaging technology (fMRI) we use (POCS): plain old common sense. It’s possible that if you spend all day killing people, killing people may – humour me here – become ordinary, banal. It’s also possible that if you don’t leave your room, let alone interact with others or read, you’ll end up with the social skills of a pupa and the IQ of a pillow. But all of this is secondary to the possibility that you may no longer be able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. And it’s this last point that makes violent gaming dangerous enough to warrant banning – whatever the scientists tell you.
With scientists now so virtuosic that they can prove or disprove anything they like on a whim, challenging the obvious seems to be of increasing enjoyment. ‘‘Proving’’ that sugar doesn’t make you fat and pornography helps men respect women is like the concert pianist’s trill for them. They do it because they can. And with science you’re not in a position to argue, are you? We buy products because we think that science equals truth. Only it never has, not when the scientists who worked for Hitler ‘‘proved’’ his evil theories and not now.
Scientists are human. They’re fallible and they have agendas. Not that I’m accusing Dr Szycik and his team of either of these things. His findings were his findings and he’s clearly a man who takes his responsibilities seriously. Why? Because he acknowledged that the study was prompted in part by a rise in patients seeking clinical help for game addiction and he also made a point of saying: “We hope to encourage other research groups to focus their attention on the possible long-term effects of video games.” Which to me reads like code for: “These findings will be disproved next week.” But hey, that’s science. So maybe let’s stick with reason.