One of the top questions of the decade: Do violent video games make people act more violently? According to associate professor Padilla-Walker, of the School of Family Life at Bingham Young University in Provo, Utah, they just might! Professor Laura M. Padilla-Walker and some of her academic collegues conducted an observation of 500 female and 313 male undergraduate students in order to see what sort of behavior they might exibit after a typical twelve-month period rife with internet and video game usage. The article covering this event makes me reconsider the things my parents have been saying for years, but I am also curious about various other unmentioned factors that may have been involved in the real study. How well does the sample population observed represent the undergraduate demographic as a whole? Does location play any factor into the behavior of the students observed?
Also, what percentage upholds Professor Padilla-Walker's statement, that ""This does not mean that every person who plays video games has low self-worth, or that playing video games will lead to drug use"? I wonder if such a percentage has ever been measured. I also wonder what such a study indicates for the future.
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One way to measure this would be to look generally at reported incidents of violence and look for trends. Can one document a large increase in on-line bullying or violence in middle schools, junior-high schools, or high schools? If not, it would seem that the phenomenon is confined to carefully constructed experiments designed by academics. If so, one still cannot conclude that violent video games led to the violence short of thousands of interviews with those who initiate violence in schools. Reseachers made the same claims about TV violence, but one struggles mightily to see dramatic long-term social consequences.
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