In this issue’s Face Off, two experts debate the idea of whether or not violent video games are bad for our children and their social and psychological development.

Video Games are Good for Kids

By Marc Prensky

Kids around the world are playing video and computer games to the tune of $30 billion per year in sales. This has raised concern among parents, who are struggling to determine if they should let them play these games or not.

Having watched kids play games for years and having talked with them at length about their playing, I believe parents should allow—and even encourage—them to play any video games they want, because these games teach them valuable lessons that prepare them for their 21st-century lives.

There are enormous amounts of positive learning that come from video games—even the violent ones. Learning to work in teams, make effective decisions under stress, make ethical and moral decisions, employ scientific deduction and think laterally and strategically: These clearly are skills our kids will need and use in the future, and they are rarely taught in school.

Many researchers will tell you that playing violent video games leads to increased aggression. Although many disagree, let’s assume for a minute they’re right. The question becomes: Do the findings of this research warrant stopping our kids from playing these games and changing our public policy of free speech to ban or modify them, as many suggest? I don’t think so.

The fact is, these researchers never tell us precisely how big the threat actually is, because they really don’t know. Increased aggression sounds bad, right? But lots of things lead to that—playing contact sports, driving in traffic, even living in New York City.

But unless it reaches certain thresholds, such as serious bullying, it’s not completely unacceptable—it’s just a tradeoff for other benefits. In fact, it’s clear that playing violent games alone is not going to cause any normal kid to do anything seriously wrong, because it takes a variety of interrelated factors to influence behavior in this way.

We all learn to control our aggressive fantasies through the counter-messages to violence that society constantly provides. Whatever desensitization results from playing video games must be balanced against the sensitization messages of society. If kids don’t get these messages in some societies, they will become violent, regardless of the games they play.

In fact, if managed in the right way, the violence in video games can actually be positive. Game violence typically represents a set of moral dilemmas, and if treated correctly by adults, these choices can open up fantastic discussions between parents, teachers and kids. Rather than banning violent games, adults need to be asking game-playing kids questions like, “just because you can hit someone over the head with a baseball bat in the game, should you?”

There is also much more depth to video games than non-playing adults typically observe.

Video games actually have five “levels” of experience for players. Of these, the How (e.g. the fighting) is all that non-playing adults typically see. But that is only the surface.

Underneath the How is the What (i.e. the rules, which the player has to deduce); the Why (i.e. the strategy, which the player has to formulate); the Where (i.e. the context of the game); and the When or Whether (i.e. the moral and ethical questions, like “Do I shoot this character, or am I better off going stealthily around him?”). These deeper levels are what really teach our kids.

Kids playing video games are learning valuable skills and not just the ones we see on the surface. Furthermore, the research that has been done hasn’t demonstrated that the magnitude of any increased aggression—even if it’s statistically significant—is really enough to worry about.

So we can all relax. Parents should focus on learning to talk to their kids about their games by using the troubling parts as moral discussion points. They should also keep an eye out for signs of any real trouble in their kids—something they should be doing anyway.

 

Video Games’ Dangerous Lessons

By Dr. Karen Dill

When people hear about media violence experts, they think we are all trying to tell them something extreme; that if your child sits down and plays a game like “Grand Theft Auto,” he or she will grab a gun and go firing at the neighbors. Ultimately, people reject that as the kind of crazy notion it is.

Because while it’s true that our experiments show media violence can cause aggression, it typically isn’t going to be extreme violence, like murder and assault.

In fact, my research has shown that what is actually going on is much more subtle, although no less powerful.

I did a study recently in which college students were exposed to either images of male and female video game characters or images of respectable, professional men and women. Afterward, we had them read a true story about a college student who was sexually harassed by her professor.

The results of the study showed that the men who saw the video game images were significantly more tolerant of the sexual harassment of the young woman in the story.

In a way, this kind of subtle impact is even more insidious than the more blatant effects of video games. We don’t all get guns and start firing away at each other for obvious reasons, like getting arrested and going to jail.

But something like sexual harassment, which is an act of aggression, is much more ambiguous. In fact, about half of all college women say they’ve been sexually harassed at some point. Unfortunately, it’s also something you can get away with, whereas you’re a lot more likely to get caught if you commit an extremely aggressive act, like shooting someone.

So if video games are at the root of these subtle and less obvious kinds of anti-social behavior, then we as a society need to start addressing the issue.

One problem is that video games teach kids gender and racial stereotypes.

I researched the characters in some of the top-selling video games and found that male characters are portrayed as physically dominant, powerful, muscular and highly violent.

As for females, not only are they a lot less likely to be in a game at all, but when they are, they are typically portrayed as scantily clad sex objects.

With regard to race, I’ve been surprised at how blatant stereotyping is in video games. We’ve found that black male characters are much more likely to be portrayed as athletes. They’re also much more likely to be portrayed as thugs and criminals and less likely to be depicted as army soldiers.

Imagery is a great social teacher, whether it’s still images in a magazine or characters on television or in stories or video games. But we need to remember that when you portray someone in a certain way, you’re teaching children social lessons about those people.

We don’t think about it this way, but when our kids are little, we read them books like The Little Red Hen and have them watch TV programs like “Sesame Street,” because this is a way to teach them positive social lessons.

But when they get a little older, all of the sudden we decide it’s OK for them to start playing games like “Grand Theft Auto.” We miss the idea that video games tell stories as well, and that “Grand Theft Auto” teaches its own kind of lessons.

People are naturally resistant to believing they’re affected at all by the media. Nobody likes to hear about the negative side—that if you let your kids watch this or play that, there could be adverse effects.

If kids play video games and get these negative messages, it doesn’t mean they’re going to go shoot someone. It just means they’re learning some sort of lesson, because the brain is always working.

That’s why I think early education about the impact of media on children is key; if you understand from your childhood how media is designed to affect and teach you, you’re going to be more open to those issues as you move through life.

This will allow you to  make your own decisions instead of being unconsciously manipulated by other people’s agendas.