Videogames Study

Here is the article writing up the study of videogames and anger, published in yesterday's Ars Technica. Here's the part describing the experiment:

They designed a study in which measures of anger levels acted as a proxy for violent behavior. They recruited 135 children, but were forced to kick some out of the study due to bad behavior, leaving them with about 110 boys and 15 girls with a mean age of 14.6 years, all of them familiar with the game of choice, Quake II. The children were given personality profile tests and measured for anger levels, at which point they were set loose for 20 minutes of gaming. Anger levels were measured again following the gaming session.

Crunching the numbers indicated that there were three clear groups. The anger levels of 77 of the subjects remained unchanged after the gaming session. In 22 of the subjects, anger levels nearly doubled from a starting point similar to that of the unaffected children. But 8 of the test subjects started out at this high anger level; for them, 20 minutes of gaming dropped them down to levels similar to those seen in the unaffected group.

The research team then correlated these groups with the personality profiles, and an clear pattern emerged. Those with personalities that were scored as stable largely wound up in the unaffected group, while the remaining two groups were populated by personalities that were considered less stable.

You might also be interested in the lively (though not totally civil) discussion of this article at the link-sharing site Digg.

One more thing: Henry Jenkins, whose ideas we have been discussing, has a blog in which he writes about pop culture like videogames and TV shows. One recent entry is about American Idol, Sanjaya, and the "Vote For the Worst" phenomenon.