First off, this isn't a study, it's a summary of studies (which, mind you, are entirely cherry-picked and avoid any mention of the studies that contradict the hypothesis.)versoth said:
Second, the writers name a ton of studies, but huge chunk of their bibliography consist of a handful of the same writers, two of whom are writers of the paper. Not looking good already, especially since they faceplant in the first study directly testing games:
Influence of violent media on youth:
Flops right out of the gate by employing a slippery-slope argument in the introduction with no reference or citation.
Is itself a summary/aggregation of studies, and those studies deal entirely with aggression (not violence), and makes the rather tired refrain of linking short-term aggression from games/media to long-term aggression (by means of that uncited snowball effect) and from there linking to established knowledge that aggression in youth progresses to aggression in adulthood.
I tried looking up and reading more of the studies cited, but could only find abstracts or summaries. The vast majority of Anderson's work, though, stems from tying the short-term aggression seen in many of these studies to long-term effects through that slippery slope nonsense mentioned in the beginning. And when the authors are heavily citing their own work...well, it really smacks of someone/s pushing an agenda.
Part 1
Tiny sample size of an enormous demographic (65 20-year-old young men? Really??)
Measured heart rate during play and aggression levels after 15 minutes, which completely ignores the whole point: long-term effect of violence in video games on those that play them
Part 2
Even smaller sample size
Same testing method as Part 1 (i.e. not what it should have been)
I've seen the whole "violent games increase aggression" thing plenty of times by now--and yes, violent games increase aggression during play and for a short time afterward. But they have no evidence to tie that aggression to IRL violence, even in the short term. Moreover, none of these studies have done a multiple-thousand subject, long-term study of consistent, moderate-to-heavy violent videogame play. Remember last week's Jimquisition? The horrified responses to it came from just such a sample: thousands of gamers across both genders and an enormous variety of ages, social/economic backgrounds, an overwhelming majority of which have hundreds to thousands of hours logged into violent games.
Most damning of all, violence is definitely going down in society, despite the massive influx of violent games. Kinda hard to say "violent games => IRL violence!" when violence is not only not increasing, but also decreasing.
