Category: Computer Games

Steve sent me short story, Do Video Games Equal Less Crime?. The story raises the possibility that the drop in crime rates is due to increased video game usage. Video games might be cathartic. Unfortunately, Anderson, in the science brief I blogged last has a fairly thorough answer to this possibility:

Myth 11. If violent video games cause increases in aggression, violent crime rates in the U.S. would be increasing instead of decreasing.
Facts: Three assumptions must all be true for this myth to be valid: (a) exposure to violent media (including video games) is increasing; (b) youth violent crime rates are decreasing; (c) video game violence is the only (or the primary) factor contributing to societal violence. The first assumption is probably true. The second is not true, as reported by the 2001 Report of the Surgeon General on Youth Violence (Figure 2-7, p. 25). The third is clearly untrue. Media violence is only one of many factors that contribute to societal violence and is certainly not the most important one. Media violence researchers have repeatedly noted this.

Note, however, that for Anderson media violence (including violent games) is “certainly not” the most important contributing factor. (I wonder what the others are?)

I should add that in Freakonomics it is argued that legalized abortion led to the drop in crime rates.

I came across a Science Brief from the American Psychological Association to the effect that it is a myth that there is no good evidence linking video games and violence. The brief by Craig A. Anderson is titled, Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts, and Unanswered Questions, (October 2003.)

Some studies have yielded nonsignificant video game effects, just as some smoking studies failed to find a significant link to lung cancer. But when one combines all relevant empirical studies using meta-analytic techniques, five separate effects emerge with considerable consistency. Violent video games are significantly associated with: increased aggressive behavior, thoughts, and affect; increased physiological arousal; and decreased prosocial (helping) behavior. Average effect sizes for experimental studies (which help establish causality) and correlational studies (which allow examination of serious violent behavior) appear comparable (Anderson & Bushman, 2001).

How will it change game studies if there is increasing evidence that violent video games lead to aggressive behaviour? What would it mean for those of us fascinated by games if games become the smoking of the next generation? Anderson concludes by calling for more research on large scale effects – as in whether violent media leads to subcultures or nations behaving more aggressively.

Finally, more research is needed to: (a) refine emerging general models of human aggression; (b) delineate the processes underlying short and long term media violence effects; (c) broaden these models to encompass aggression at the level of subcultures and nations. Several different research groups around the world are working on these various issues.

Willard, on Humanist, asked about an article titled, Whatever happened to Second Life? ,

Does this decline in popularity matter? What, do you suppose, does it tell us about VR techniques generally?

According to the article Linden Labs is making more money than ever,

Money is, of course, what makes the world go around – even the virtual ones. So has the Second Life economy suffered the same nervous breakdown as the real-world markets over the past year or so? Amazingly, it appears not.

Linden Labs claims Second Life has turned over more than $1 billion in its six-year history. Nor is it slowing down; quite the opposite in fact. Linden claims the in-world economy grew by a staggering 94% year-on-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009.

It sounds like it may be sex that is making money for Linden Labs.

Another answer to the question Willard poses about VR is that now we have tools like the OpenSimulator which allows us to build and adapt virtual worlds on our own server. OpenSimulator is compatible with the Second Life client, but we can customize it to do different things, for example, we can turn it into an authoring environment for an Augmented Reality Game platform. Place your items in virtual space and they show up in the corresponding real space.

There is a discussion about SL and this story at iDC https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2010-January/004138.html . In particular. Simon Biggs points to a report on education and SL (PDF) he wrote.

Humanist pointed me to a review in The New York Review of Books by Garry Kasparov titled “The Chess Master and the Computer” (Volume 57, Number 2; February 11, 2010) that reflects on how computing has been applied to chess. We all know that Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue in 1997, but then what?

One followup experiment that Kasparov mentions was a “freestyle” competition sponsored by the chess site Playchess.com where teams of humans and computers could compete against each other.

The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

I find it interesting that it is a hybrid of human machine that played best not pure AI. This is Engelbart’s augmentation outperforming experts or AIs.