POWER UP OR DOWN?
Video games can be pretty confusing, especially if you’re old enough to remember the 1970s, when they first hit the market. If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably been cajoled (conscripted?) to play a game on one of the latest consoles.
“It’s easy,” says your nephew, granddaughter or (heaven help you) your own child. And really, how hard could it be? It’s just some blips and bloops moving around on a screen. It’s not rocket surgery ... until you sit to down to play.
Then you discover that what was billed as, say, a “snatched” adventure game (whatever that means), is actually an unfathomable, hyperactive free-for-all of breakneck visual cues, nerve-grinding sound effects and more statistics than an overambitious presidential campaign speech. And that’s assuming you can first puzzle out what to do with the game’s controller, a two-handed enigma full of buttons, triggers, joysticks, touchpads, motion sensors and vibration motors that looks as if it were designed by NASA.
The thing is, this kind of confusion around
play is nothing new. In fact, inscrutability is actually what makes games of all kinds so appealing. Each new revelation is a thrill — one button makes you fly, another launches an unstoppable slap shot — and each thrill trades confusion for mastery.
There’s nothing quite so addicting as the combination of fresh expertise and endorphins: “One more game and I’ll get a high score.” Or: “Ten more minutes and I’ll beat this level.” Or: “Three more kilometers and I’ll hatch this egg.” (We’re talking to you, Pokemon Goers.)
And it’s precisely the idea of confusion that makes video games so interesting to study.
Wait. Study? People study video games?
Absolutely, and for good reason. Not only are games confusing to play — at least at first — but they’re also confusing in terms of what they do to players. We’ve been studying video games for nearly 20 years now, and we have only become more convinced that the one definitive thing to be said about video games is that their effects are diverse and unpredictable.
In our lab and archive at the University of Arizona, we study game-related research from across the humanities, arts and sciences. (We also a play a LOT of games.)
As it happens, there’s no small amount of research on games, gaming and the game industry, from cognitive science and art history to religious studies and language education. Depending on the questions asked and the research approach taken, such work may indicate that video games are, at turns, angel and devil: In one context, games appear to be champions of mental focus and spatial acuity; in another, they seem like villains of creativity and the well-tempered child.
To be sure, there’s plenty of dreck out there, but poorly designed research and the overblown claims it gives rise to are on both sides of the net. As if to prove this point, just last month prominent psychologists Christopher Ferguson and John Colwell surveyed more than a dozen such problematical studies before describing the results of their own more controlled work — science advances through failure and improvement after all.
According to their research, violent video games have little to no correlation with negative behaviors, such as bullying, or with positive ones, such as being civic-minded (volunteering, giving to charity). This isn’t to say that video games — violent or otherwise — don’t have effects, but rather that human beings are too varied to behave consistently when faced with particular kinds of media content. As Ferguson and Colwell put it: “It may be more crucial to understand both how people play and why they play” than to assume “that humans work like robots ... to unquestionably and, without fail, mimic whatever they see.”
In other words, humans, too, are confusing, especially when it comes to how they respond to video games.
What, then, should be made of media reports that look to blame mass shootings on violent video game play?
From our perspective as game researchers, we recommend skepticism. Not skepticism that video games had an impact on these killers (they almost certainly did), but rather skepticism that these impacts had a substantive causal role in facilitating such violence.
We understand the drive to root out the causes of such malignant behavior, but a number of predictors of violent behavior in adults are much better understood than video games. Whether or not children witness domestic abuse is one, for example, as is the chronic neglect of a child by parents or guardians.
Such information tends to be difficult to discover quickly in the hours immediately following a tragedy such as the recent attack in Orlando. However, the gaming habits of perpetrators are comparatively easy to suss out: a quick chat with a less-than-discreet investigator, neighbor or friend can reveal such a clue, as can a peek through the windows of a shooter’s home to look for any telltale blue, green or white video-game cases stacked near a TV.
Combining such signs with the common-sense (but inaccurate) implication that playing violent video games probably causes players to become violent, the story that games are a significant part of the problem practically writes itself. And thus — correctly or not — order is shaped from chaos.
That’s the thing about confusion, of course: No matter the cause — video games, crossword puzzles, life’s mysteries — the human brain will try to make sense of the details, to find patterns that demystify the problem. In other words, our brains like to be confused ... but not for long. After the rush of confusion fades, most people will pretty quickly:
1. accept whatever plausible explanation presents itself (or is presented to them), or
2. turn their attention elsewhere to search out new questions to ask and answer, if only to distract themselves from the great itch of unknowing.
Like most researchers, we have a higher-than-usual tolerance for (and even enjoyment of) confusion. New questions — which is to say unapologetic statements recognizing confusion — are what help humans better understand the world and their place within it. To us, video gaming is one of today’s least understood pastimes, at once captivating and tedious, pointless and meaningful. Play is mysterious like that, and we think it deserves to be appreciated as such.
This doesn’t mean that video games should get a free pass when it comes to criticism and oversight. Rather, we’re suggesting that even when researchers, lawmakers, journalists and guardians of young people are working hard to understand how games work — and particularly how they work on players — it’s essential to remember that the most bewildering element of all games is almost always the human one, the one that players themselves bring to the equation.
Ken McAllister and Judd Ruggill are professors at the University of Arizona and co-directors of the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive, one of the world’s largest open and working archives of game-related materials. Their most recent books are "Tempest: Geometries of Play" and "Inside the Video Game Industry: Game Developers Talk About the Business of Play."