Poll: Supernanny takes on video games.

[Snotnarok]

That's really a fair thing to go by. I hold doors open for everyone, give away stuff to friends, I help people as much as I can, and I play violent as hell games. Hell I was watching Terminator 1 and 2 in early grade school.

I'm not sure who this super nanny is but her and half the media has the most screwed up ideas on games.

 

[link within]

Well its been years since I've seen Super nanny, but from what I remember she would always discipline younger children who shouldn't be playing violent video games in the first place due to their age. Still I'd say their level of politeness would be deeper than a few hours of video games.

 

[Split Moon]

Spoiler

http://memegenerator.net/1034615/Ramirez-pick-up-those-pens

see what i did there? hur hur hur

 

[JSR]

I think if i was made to play a football game i would do the exact opposite and go nuts. (I live in england but prefer american football).

 

[Ben Legend]

Ok... so that passes as science nowadays?

20 kids? And the kids on supernanny are always little shits, hence why they don't pick the pens off.

One day, when the older generations have kindly 'died' we'll only have a generation that understands that gaming doesn't influence anything.

...and I cannot fucking wait!

 

[Darth_Dude]

Thats ridiculous, experiment my ass,

 

[Chaos-Spider]

What a shitty experiment. Whoever was conducting it has obviously never heard of the "correlation does not imply causation" thing. :| Which is someone I wouldn't want conducting an experiment in any case.

If this applied to the actual shooting of the show, and not the possible legions of post production editors and scriptwriters, it would mean that super nanny and the other project orchestrator's only got as far as high-school science.

 

[AngloDoom]

What a crock of shit.

How have war games got the slightest influence over social etiquette? That's like telling the children to make a joke, and concluding the ones with the best jokes had less brain-damage due to games.

Also, if you drop a pen in front of a child it will never pick it up. If you do it in front of it a second time, however, it'll feel compelled to help since you're such a useless cretin. At least, I would have as a kid.

 

[Spectre39]

A far more interesting experiment would be to sneak up on the war game kids to see if their twitchy reflexes carried over to real life. Like, silently toss a ball from their peripheral field of vision and watch the kids do some sort of outrageous ninja maneuvers to dodge the unknown object.

I was playing MW2 for a bit too much, then went to the 24 hour Walmart to get some supplies. Some guy was walking next to me in an open area of the store. I didn't hear him coming, so when he brushed by my shoulder completely out of the blue, my instincts screamed through my head [Push the right stick before he knifes you!]. I wouldn't dream of instinctively punching somebody in real life, but I did evasively shirk away. I soon returned to my senses and apologized, but I doubt he noticed either action.

 

[lex1000]

i would honestly like to find those two people who voted yes, she is 'spot on' and give them a nasty wet cock slap.... thats a with a cockerel not my penis ¬_¬ a cockerel will do much more damage

 

[mrbones228]

wow... Im glad I live in Australia where we only get that shit on pay tv.

OT:I play voilent games all the time and i'm one of the most polite people I know, but on the other hand some of the people who go to my school and have never touched a game are some of the biggist dicks you'll ever meet.

CONCUSION: This "experment" is stupid, supernanny is stupid, parents who blame there childs behaviour on games instead of there bad parenting are stupid

 

[Queen Michael]

In my humble opinion, this is an excellent example of how pseudo-scientific people are about video games while still being taken seriously.

 

[Daniel_Rosamilia]

20 participants is a fair amount but the type of test on the half who played violent games and the half who played non-violent-esque video games is ridiculous. The person performing the test purposely knocked the pens to the floor. The boys who didn't pick them up must've though that the person was crazy or something.

I played violent video games since the dawn of the Nintendo and I've been polite because my parents taught me to be polite. This experiment is invalid.

I'm in the same situation:
I play violent video games pretty much all weekend, and am still one of the kindest people you could ever meet, and that is all because my parents brought me up that way.

 

[aPod]

Better test:

20 kids play violent games and 20 kids play wii gold.

Then withhold food and water from them all for 5 days.

Put them all in a room together.

Give the nonviolent kids food and water.

Give the violent kids bats.

Did violent video games cause our children to become murdering beast... or bats?

Discuss.

I blaim the games though.

 

[Darth Caelum]

I don't know if any of you watch the show Supernanny (UK)
But today's episode (which has finished, catch it on 4oD if you're interested in watching it) Supernanny took part in an 'experiment' (I only caught the last few minutes, but got the gist of what they were doing) where she separated 20 boys. One half played a violent War game and the other half played a non-violent football game. After they played for a while, they were taken to a separate room individually to be interviewed. The interviewer purposely knocked some pens over to see how the children reacted. She wanted to see if the children who played the violent games were polite and kind enough to pick up the pens. None of them did, but a couple of the non-violent players did, so they concluded that playing violent war games influences children to be less polite.
I just don't understand.
Surely, parents have the most influence over the children? I was brought up to be polite as I'm sure many of you were, so I don't understand why they are purely blaming video games. Why not music? Or TV?
It actually angered me; I may be saying this as a gamer,but if they changed it to "shoe shopping makes children violent" or something I equally hate, I'd still be ranting about it.
So I ask you, do you agree with this? Or are they just out to scare the parents and stop kids playing video games? And if you pay violent games yourself, do you become influenced by them? Have you became a less polite person because of it?
I personally think it's down to parenting as the child as an individual.

This is the only article I can find on it

First childcare megastar Dr Tanya Byron came to the earth-shattering conclusion that "violent videogames are harmful to children, but it's the parents fault they've got them in the first place" and tomorrow night, Supernanny Jo Frost will also tackle the thorny subject of kids and videogames - and how to limit Little Johnny or Jenny's intake to acceptable levels

Wait..Pens...HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Just because a few kids picked up PENS means that Video Games are the SOURCE of that? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! *wipes tear from eye* Oh Humanity, you never cease to amaze on just how unbelievable you are.

 

[Jenova65]

I don't know if any of you watch the show Supernanny (UK)
But today's episode (which has finished, catch it on 4oD if you're interested in watching it) Supernanny took part in an 'experiment' (I only caught the last few minutes, but got the gist of what they were doing) where she separated 20 boys. One half played a violent War game and the other half played a non-violent football game. After they played for a while, they were taken to a separate room individually to be interviewed. The interviewer purposely knocked some pens over to see how the children reacted. She wanted to see if the children who played the violent games were polite and kind enough to pick up the pens. None of them did, but a couple of the non-violent players did, so they concluded that playing violent war games influences children to be less polite.
I just don't understand.

God if that's what passes for 'science' in these shows I'm glad I don't watch TV anymore.

Couldn't have voiced my opinion better than that! *TUTS* I do love pointless and arbitrary social experiments...............
Everyone knows that if you really want a microcosm of society's shortfalls 20 young boys is all you need to make your point! Yeah, real reflective of the nation there, lady, you sure have your finger on the pulse and no mistake!
EDIT - Maybe it is just me and my weird thought process, but had I been part of that experiment I might consider the possibility that the boys are sitting there thinking ''Why did that interviewer just knock those pens over on purpose and leave them there''? Because accidentally, and accidentally on purpose, are two very different things and subliminally something that most people past 5 years old can pick up on, actually scratch that, I have 3 kids and trust me, even very young kids are wise to this kind of ploy.

 

[Jordi]

I didn't see the show, read the article, or pages 3-6 of this thread, but it seems to me like a lot of the people here are not much better than SuperNanny. Yes, the experiment appears flawed. And it definitely cannot say that videogames are responsible for impoliteness, because there was no control group. However, it does appear to be the case that shooters might make children less likely to pick up the pens than football games do. Perhaps the sample is too small to say this with statistical significance, but it is at least an indication that shouldn't be dismissed so readily. "I play violent videogames since the day I was born and I've never killed anyone / not picked up pencils" is not in any way a good argument. Maybe you're an outlier. Basing conclusions on one person's behavior (your own) is a lot worse than basing it on what the baheviors of 20 people suggest. Also, "it's not the (violent) video games' fault, but the parents'" is a little bit shaky if the kids were randomly assigned to the conditions, because it is unlikely that all the polite kids will get assigned to the same condition. Randomisation also helps against the "correlation does not equal causation" argument. Perhaps more test subjects were necessary, so without statistical significance I can understand why some people would doubt the conclusions. However, they should realize that it's pretty much their (probably unproven) gut feelings against a (more or less) scientific indication to the contrary.

Now I'm not saying this is good research. I'm just saying it shouldn't be dismissed so readily with arguments that are even more stupid than the experiment itself.

 

[Dungus]

I totally agree with you. I played videogames since I was a little boy. I play violent videogames, and I played them when I was a kid, but I have always been polite and kind to people, because that is what my parents taught me.

This 'experiment' is a complete failure because of 2 things:

1. For empirical research you need AT LEAST 100 test subjects, who are randomly picked from society
2. It's pretty obvious that parental teaching has more influence on how a child behaves than videogames

 

[richasr]

For me it's another sigh moment, as i've gotten used to bollocks like this over the years. For me, if they took just 20 lads and split them, doing this test, then you can't ever get an accurate result to the initial question. Even if they took hundreds and thousands of boys and did the same thing I'd still have no faith in the test.

Everyone is different, so you can never come to such a vague result, the only thing you can do is test a large number of people and come up with some numbers: the amount out of the total that became impolite and the amount out of the total that did not become impolite.

I play a ton of violent games, non-violent games and countless others, yet I do have manners (towards people that deserve it) and I have not become an angry zombie.