CRD701: History and Theory of Communication Technology

This week's readings were interesting for me for several reasons. One: I used to be a video game addict, though my playing decreased as I discovered the drums and a social life in high school.  Not that you can't have a social life and play games, obviously; we've touched on this topic this semester. For me and many others, however, there's always been an inverse correlation--spurious, perhaps, but a correlation nevertheless--between the two. Like Jordan, I've made it a point to avoid video games, but it's a more recent development.  Second: obviously, I am quite knowledgable about games from about 2000 back. There were no new terms in this week's reading for me, unlike last week, where I learned what Web 2.0 (yes, Jamie, you were not the only one) and mash-ups were. I had never seen a hypertext story till a few weeks ago, and despite how much we've talked about GPS technologies, I have no experience with them: I don't know anyone who has one!

There's some issues with Jenkins (2006) argument I must address. He too easily writes of the "effects" argument without really exploring the research or data that supposedly supports it. The problem as I see it is that he makes a lot of the same straw-man arguments against behavioral research that those not too familiar with the scientific study of behavior, or, for that matter, quantitative studies of human behavior make. Criticizing Grossman's position, he states, "He reverts to a behaviorist model of education that has long been discredited by among schooling experts" (p. 211). He explains that as a teacher he knows that "real-world education" is not so simple, because in reality different learners vary in what aspects of a lesson they pay attention to, their previous experiences influence what they make of the educational experience, and they have cognitive capacities that allow them to come to different interpretations. Context, he adds, matters. In short, cognition, experience, and context all play a role in education.

This is all true, of course: the problem is that I really doubt that the Grossman and the other researchers he's criticizing disagree with him. Social scientists using quantitative research make generalizations based on means obtained from their data. Of course they're aware that the mean effect that independent variable A has on the dependent variable B (here, A=violent content of games, B=violent behaviors) is just a mean: A didn't have the same effect on every person in the study. Individual differences matter to the social scientists, and most would be interested in exploring how cognition, experience, and context influence the correlation between violence in games and exhibited behaviors. Follow-up studies often explore different variables that could influence the results of previous studies: that's how science works. Granted, without having seen the writings of the people Jenkins' cites or the research they base their thoughts on, it's hard for me to say that a.) these authors have sufficiently considered factors that influence the transfer of violence in video games to violent tendencies in users' behaviors, and b.) they don't really make broad generalizations based on limited data (that happens in all disciplines, not just behavior research). Often times, researchers' statements are taken out of context to make their conclusions sound more certain, or the press may otherwise downplay the amount of hedging on the researchers' part. Jenkins' doesn't give us sufficient grounds to tell what's going on here, but I do hope he read these authors with the above considerations in mind. If a great body of research shows that violent video games do have significant "effects" on children's behavior, shouldn't we be concerned, even if these effects do not apply to every child?

But I must stress that overall, I agree with Jenkins here; I just couldn't let some of his statements get by. My guess is that these contextual and cognitive factors Jenkins speaks of make so much of a difference that concern over violence in video games is insignificant. A lot of similar research has been done with the effects of other media on behavior, and I know that often times the researchers will often do make big generalizations based off of their results. Many of us could speak anecdotally (sp?) here. I, like one kajillion others, played violent video games as a child, and I have turned out...well, I don't know if "normal" is the word; I may not be the best example. But I did not become violent. I was able to able to distinguish fantasy from reality when playing games Neilson, Smith, and Tosca (2008) mention , such as Wolfenstein, Doom, Mortal Kombat, etc. At the same time, these games were often more interesting to me than "educational" games, which Jenkins is big on. Education researchers can talk about how great video games are for educational purposes, but many kids I remember did not want to play these games back in the day--maybe it's different now. Oregon Trail may have been an exception: even then, I only played sparingly in the computer lab at my elementary school, then went back to action/fighting games at home....

Turkle's chapter is interesting just to get some perspective on how research on video games and behavior began. First off, she questions whether we could really think that Jarish will play Pacman or Joust when he is thirty: I don't know about Jarish in particular, but I offer The King of Kong as evidence that at least some people really do cling to these games when just about the rest of the world seems to have moved on. I also think it's interesting how many of the people she interviews long for consistency in the games. One guy even notes the consistency helps him gauge how well he's concentrating when playing: he knows that if he starts playing poorly, it's because he's not playing well, not because of other variables. She notes how games want the same game to keep repeating to infinite. Turkle's exploring how a certain longing for rules carried over from D & D works in video game players and how this could be like meditation or some analogous Zen-like experience. I wonder what Turkle would find doing this research now: with less technological restraints, game developers now create games that are less predicatable, and on-line gaming puts players in interaction with human players whose actions are not as easily predictable. As I go back and play old games now, my biggest criticism is that they are so repetitive, and I like others, want my aptitude judged not by simply memorizing patterns but by being able to adapt to different situations.

Finally, I thought Liestol's interpretation of Duke Nukem was interesting. I remember getting a shareware version of the game: I played through the first mission and was not compelled to get the rest of it. The ultra-masculine overtones of the game are as true as she presents them. I should note that I think Jenkins' point about meaning is significant here, though: we should consider the meaning users actually take from the game. Even in junior high I found the game distasteful, but I also understood the game as purposefully campy; it seemed to me that the creators were sort of poking fun at action movie cliches, not just filling in the void in a young boy's psyche left by growing up without a father (how many of the game's players does that represent?). Plus, while she makes a great case for comparing the final scene of the game to the story of St. George and other tales, I think she misses a more obvious comparison: the mother alien from Aliens who spawns numerous other aliens in a particular nesting area. To a certain extent, I'm pretty sure the creators of the game had that movie in mind when creating the end of Duke Nukem. (Interesting detail: in that movie, it is a female character that destroys the alien mother.)  Though I haven't seen the movie in years, so I would need to go back to it in order to test it as a frame of reference. This all doesn't detract from the crux of Liestol's argument, but it seemed comparative media work would give some more context for what she's trying to look at.