Funk's most recent work in this vein will be presented in public in August at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. Her study hypothesized that adolescents "with a preference for violent games would be associated with more behavioral problems, particularly externalizing problems such as aggressive behavior." But the facts proved otherwise.

As it turns out, 10-year-old gamers who preferred a lot of violence scored higher on internalizing and anxious-depressed behaviors scales -- meaning they were withdrawn, not aggressive. On the other hand, those with a preference for less violent games scored highest on the delinquent behavior scale. Shifting away from the aggression thesis, Funk concluded that future studies should focus on correlations between time spent playing computer games and subsequent depression.

This finding jibes with several older studies that correlate avid gaming with low self-esteem among boys. Oddly enough, girls who play a lot often didn't show the same problem. Cultural constructions of gender may account for the difference, with girls feeling good when they break out of the mold of timidity, and boys feeling lousy for being game geeks.

One 1985 study of fourth-graders showed positive effects. Quoting the abstract from the Journal of Child Study: "Subjects who played violent video games exhibited fewer defensive fantasies and tended to exhibit more assertive or need-persistent fantasies than did subjects who played non-violent games. For non-aggressive females, the barrier responsible for frustration was more salient in their fantasies after playing the violent video game. Results suggest that aggression in the context of a video game discharges children's aggressive impulses in a socially acceptable way, leaving the children less defensive and more assertive."

A Columbine high schooler said as much when she told the New York Times, "I know this sounds weird, but some violent games are a therapy for kids."

Why, then, the assertion in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times of overwhelming evidence? The mountains of research they are referring to was done on television and film violence -- and while it's presumed reasonable that video games would exhibit the same impact, a presumption is not exactly hard evidence. Though the few empirical studies on games are mixed -- at best -- facts alone cannot cool the media's fever.

One reason for the disconnect, argues Andrew Ross, who chairs the American studies department at NYU, is how the media handles race. Ross notes that when white suburban kids go wrong, there's enormous pressure to find a psychological cause rather than a social explanation.

"White suburban kids are assumed to have an individual psychic development that can be sidetracked into dysfunctional forms of expression, if there is some sufficiently powerful external stimulus -- a video game, a lurid Web site -- that can knock them off course." But when it comes to inner-city black kids, "the explanations are assumed to be socially determined from the get-go." By the media's lights, "Society explains their behavior in a way that strips them of their individuality and retains only their class and race attributes" -- which is why video games are never trotted out to explain homicide in inner-city schools.

In the end, says Ross, the pattern is distinctly American: "Since the early days of the republic, it has also been an elementary rule of public life for grandstanding experts and gatekeepers to hold popular culture responsible."
salon.com | May 6, 1999

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