How to Talk About Games, Today

[Music] so welcome to how to talk about games today hopefully you're in the right place and we're gonna talk a little bit about how to talk about games all right oh yeah I'm supposed to tell you to silence your cellphone's I'm supposed to tell you to please fill out the evaluation thingy you can fill it out now all right it's gonna be a great talk so there you go so on and so forth and with that oh and at the end if you like or are interested in some of the things that we present and you want more information we have little cards up here with a URL on the back of them of stuff that we've put together so the folks they look like this so that you can go get more stuff if you want it alright so what why does this even matter to you right so a lot of the things that are happening right now around games and the way that we talk about games in the public sphere and the way that folks are

concerned or interested in their effects in the way that they're consumed in society that can result in a number of different things so one of the things that that can happen there is that the legislative and political bodies take a look at something and they decide that they're going to make new rules around to fix what they perceive to be as a problem in that space right it also sorts sort of forms part of the cultural basis of why and how the general public thinks about games right so when you go home and you talk to your mom about video games like what do they think about video games or what are their friends think about video games and how do we as a society sort of think about games in general and what does that mean and when certain issues hit the mass media when they hit the newspaper when they hit the talk shows when they hit the the news cycles etc that can that can start to sway public opinion this way that way what-have-you and then last but not least all of that discussion

right influences you know we're raising kids they're they're getting mixed media mixed messages from the media in and of themselves so how do they think about games and how does that sort of inform the next generation around what they think about games so we were all talking about this sort of behind the scenes with each other because we're usually friends right and and we were having discussion about it we said hey maybe we should we should throw together a panel on this because it's fairly timely right now so we did these are my esteemed colleagues and panelists they all have a great number of fancy titles next to their names they will probably introduce themselves as they get up and talk so that they'll cover what their fancy titles actually mean but in the background of all of those fancy titles there's a lot of organizational leadership in the folks that are sitting up here right now we've got a Canada Research Chair that used to

be president of DeGraw we've got leadership in global Game Jam we've got leadership in higher education video game Alliance so on and so forth right and so just a wealth of experience in different ways that these issues have impacted some of the organizations in and around games with that so what am I actually talking about when I say you know these issues stuff like that right and I'm sure that you can all name them but just to sort of put a point on it right so the games in violence debate the games an addiction debate right games are addictive now and we're gonna classify that and Health Organization games and health more generally right games and their effect on society so on and so forth one of my personal favorites was the one that were we don't you know the problem with unemployment is because we make video games and so young men don't want jobs anymore I found it particularly interesting so

why are we here so this session is about understanding the background of some of these recent discussions and then a call to action for developers to start to have a voice in and around some of these debates directly as somebody that knows something about making video games rather than not being a part of that engagement so with that okay good afternoon my name is Lindsay grace and I'm going to be talking about moral panic and misunderstanding so last year I wrote a couple of articles for CNN and some other venues Associated Press and also sat on a panel around discussing the New World Health Organization's classification of games addiction and this debate around games and violence and whether or not shooters are somehow inspired by by games so what I'm here to

do is to actually help you understand that we've actually been here before so the first place we'll start is comic books so in the last century comic books were considered the source of much debate my favorite quote of the era is from Frederic wertham who wrote the book seduction of the innocent and Frederic explicitly claimed to Senate that he thinks Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry and this is in the context of 1940s u.s. so basically it was widely debated as to whether or not comic books were the source of juvenile delinquency book burnings commenced and this is one of them and generally comic books were considered dangerous the same comic books that have inspired lots of contemporary media at some point what you'll see in the history is that all leisure seems subject to moral panic so we'll go back to the Puritans to start this is a great little article from Sports Illustrated

and Robert Doyle basically describes and highlights the Puritans supporting of the burning of the book of sports if you're unfamiliar the book of sports it was basically a 1600s era guide to Sunday sport and recreation for after church it was publicly burned in England in 1643 because it was dangerous and evil later if you go through the histories of the Industrial Revolution for example you could read Cunningham's leisure on in the industrial revolution you'll learn about the fact that class religion and ideology ideological tensions existed around things as trivial as tourism so for example there are discussions about how travel music and racing the new Leisure's available to a middle class were actually part of an anti-social culture and then there is Dungeons and Dragons so if you don't know about the Dungeons & Dragons story

I've got to tell you so the great I like the way they describe it there was the great 1980s Dungeons & Dragons panic so there's a great little BBC magazine article you can read about it and explicitly dddd Dungeons & Dragons was accused of inspiring suicides a cult activity being aligned with rape prostitution sadism sex perversion all kinds of things in fact it was actually linked to a murder by a man the man who committed the murder it was Darrin Molitor in 1985 and Darrin wrote a letter that helped feed this moral panic in the letter and I'm just highlighted a few things here he explicitly talks about how Dungeons & Dragons inspired him to be violent and he described it as possessive addictive and evil so D&D was once addictive and inspired violence you'll start to see a trend here so the founding of an organization called bothered about John James & Dragons

inspired by MADD Mothers Against Drunk Driving was founded by a woman named Pat poling and an 83 bad went out and set forth to help people get away from the addictive properties of D&D one of the things that this person did Pat poling actually created a book called the devil's web where she talks about the intersection of Satan and entertainment and she became the director of the National Coalition on TV violence the National Coalition on TV violence actually earned the support of the US Surgeon General the time it was C everett Koop who did believe that TV was part of the problem for violence which brings us to television so if you think about television in the history of analyzing TV and its effects on aggression we actually have more than 40 years of data and analysis one of the claims that was proven in a study like this study is actually that third graders become more violent from

watching TV even ten years later this is a public study published in 72 and we also that there is a poor a clear rather positive correlation between TV violence and aggressive behavior this is from another study published in 94 so of course you must be asking science proves that television fosters aggression except after 40 years some people are still saying no so in this example which is a study from 2008 it does not their understanding of the the relationship indicates that they do not correlate properly so there are lots of publications and lots of peer-reviewed high-quality research that actually says there's no link between violence and TV then there's the next one television addiction so one of the best quotes from this scientific in the the famous Mihai chicks in me hi and Kuby actually wrote together is that most of the criteria

for substance abuse our substance dependence can apply to people who watch a lot of TV what do you think about how pervasive television is in many modern cultures and actually did some quick research so the there's an OECD publication that talks about how people use their leisure time and at this point across the 19 countries that were surveyed it's about 39% of our leisure so when you're not working you're almost a 50% chance that you're watching TV and we have some results some research that claims that if you look at meta-analysis so you look at the different previous studies you'll find that there's actually a smaller effect of video violent video games than television violence which i think is an interesting observation given how much society is not worried about TV so that brings us to games if we talk about games I think one approach theme of the presentations that we're all giving one way to talk about games is actually to remind people

of our worldwide political past with leisure so I gave you these references right point them to the moral panics that have occurred before when people were worried that if we allowed people to go and be tourists they would lose their connection to religion or that we were burning books because we thought that they were dangerous or that we really did believe in Dungeons and Dragons being a very dangerous and addicting experience and then also point them to the people who misled us to the detriment of the people they were looking to help we wanted happy healthy children and some people had some approaches that seemed questionable so remind people and really highlight this idea that there is a dangerous game of pitting leasure against morality and that leisure itself is political attacking leisure is an opportunity to chip at culture and enforce your own culture it's a little bit of a cultural war so as scientists politicians and

journalists claim the detriments of comic books that they would drive innocent children into the clutches of juvenile delinquency others actually highlighted the fact that comic books attracted a high quotient of creative people who thought of basically got access to a more but a new publishing venue so it really offered them opportunities that other modes of publishing didn't so attacking games kind of mirrors the past attacks on leisure that we've seen historically and in an era of declining leisure where in the u.s. work ism is becoming the new religion and work may even be killing us maybe we should not attack leisure we should ask about the root of these dis courts of this discord so like TV no matter what it's going to be a long time if we can ever make these links it's gonna take us a long time to do it but I

remind you as people at GDC that games don't need to be burned to be erased erasing our cultural contribution is much easier and if you'd like we're gonna give you a bunch of links to some things that help you understand how all this works together Thanks that's all yeah there we go Thanks I drew the short straw and got to talk about games and violence I'm me I can solve oh I'm the Canada Research Chair in game studies and design and yeah there's so I'm just basically doing a deep dive into what woodlands I was alluding to in terms of the research mostly the social science research on games and their links to violence and aggression that kind of

thing and I would point out also that this is one of the most like heavily scrutinized areas of research that you will come across you know if if I did a study in this particular field I would be scared to death to publish it because you're just immediately jumped on and everything is just as you know as it should be it should be carefully reviewed but there is a ton a ton of people looking at this research and making you know saying if it is up to scratch it is not just research about games and violence though that's been problematic are called into account if you pay attention to the news you may notice social science research in general has been having a rough time you may hear the word replication crisis being used basically what happened is especially a lot of research in psychology you remember like at university and like those sophomores they get called to do you know for extra credit you do the research and some of those early studies that had like very influential findings people are finally getting around to replicating some of

them and some of them are not holding up to scrutiny one of the biggest examples is the marshmallow test so if you remember this is the one where you put a kid in a room with a plate of marshmallows and you're like I don't know like exactly how you do B see how long they can wait and you know if they can avoid eating the marshmallow and it's all about grip right and if you can avoid eating the marshmallow than ten years down the line you're gonna get into Stanford right and your life is gonna be taste and wonderful and what the replication found was that well knew actually it's more about your background in your socioeconomic class that leads you to be able to resist the marshmallow rather than some inner grit so yeah a lot of social science research you really just need to take with a grain of salt and see you know like is it standing up and also you know as Lindsay was saying this is culture you know people are changing and our culture is changing and so we can't just say if we found something once in the past it's necessarily going to hold up to games and violence however

if you are looking for an actual book to read on this topic and you're not allergic to academic prose I would highly recommend berry Gunter's 2016 does playing video games make players more violent I have the title in the handout you know on the website it's two hundred eighty pages I read all of them the panels know because I've told them this repeatedly I think this reading the book at times made me violence more than a video game has probably made anyone violent but it's a very thorough accounting of like hundreds of the studies over the past looking at games and violence so this is a big block of text but what he's basically saying here is just that video game playing doesn't occur in a social vacuum right like it's a part of our culture in our daily life we have you know socioeconomic background we live in certain places we have different

education we have different genders all of these things play a role and as he says going one step further to differentiate between the effects of violent video games as distinct from those of violent movies you know and watching a movie theater or program seen on TV is even more challenging it's so incredibly hard with people to like pull out one particular thread of what they do you know to say how does this you know affect the whole rest of their life how can we hold every other element of people's lives constant you know to see you know so that's like a really key thing to think about and again placing this in context Lindsay did this so I'll just go through it quickly but there have been studies you know and it does relate to moral panics but people worried about movies people worried about vision the cultivation model in the 80s basically said if you watch a lot of violent TV maybe you wouldn't become aggressive but you would think the world is a mean and scary place much more than it actually was and a lot of the early research even on violent games tended to link violent

media together in terms of when you studied populations and so you can't even pick out like how this you know did games do something because it was just this is like people who watch violent TV and movies and that kind of thing when you get to the research on games themselves there are three types of studies that you see so there are surveys where you're having you know children or adults fill out detailed questionnaires about their media use their backgrounds their personality type that kind of thing you have naturalistic observation where perhaps you go to playgrounds and watch people play and then try and infer that and maybe talk with them later about like their media diet to see if there are any correlations and then you have experiments where you know you set people up in a lab and you like have them play a game and then take a survey or you know interact in some way so there are problems associated with all of these types of of methods so for surveys you can't actually prove

causality right the most that you can do is actually find a correlation you know people who play a lot of you know Grand Theft Auto are also maybe arguing a lot with their teachers but you don't know maybe they argue a lot with their teachers and then they go play Grand Theft Auto right like there's no one way that you can see that the evidence is pointing that one necessarily leads to the other if you're uh if you're observing people in a setting you have little control over the actual setting it's not a population sample this is just a very convenient sample and you can't control the variables and with experiments it's an artificial setting you know so you're having people come into a lab and play a video game and I mean it's just completely unnatural but also in terms of effect time because you know maybe they're having them fill out a survey or react to something so you might be able to say like oh they got a little angry you know

15 minutes after my test but you don't know necessarily did that maybe then they got over it a day a week a month later right so it's really hard with experiments to show anything beyond immediate effect other critiques that people have made of some of the research on violence in games studies can examine these these seem kind of similar but they're actually very different things that people are looking at violent thoughts violent feelings and violent behaviors right they're not all the same thing if you have a thought about what you might do to somebody who cuts you off in traffic that doesn't mean that you necessarily go and do the thing right the thought and the behavior even though you'd really like to are not equivalent the feeling you may have rage directed you know at the person who cut you off in traffic that does not necessarily mean you're gonna do the thing so you have to look at what the studies are actually studying studies

use different measures and definitions of what aggression actually is some have tried to standardize over time and they have standardized like personality tests or definitions like they carry over from one study to another but especially a lot of the early research varied wildly in terms of what they said about them and there are ethical concerns about using and testing actual aggression right you can't just say I'm gonna have kids play this game and then I'm gonna have another kid go up and punch the kid to see if he punches them back right like ethics review boards really don't like you to do that kind of thing and so you have to develop substitutes for what an aggressive act might be so a really common one is the noise blast you're you know playing with somebody else and you know you want to punish them and it's like how loud a blast if noise do you give them and that's like a substitute is you know a loud noise blast really the same thing as punching someone another substitute is hot sauce you know

you want to punish somebody how much hot sauce are you putting on like food that they're being given culturally this is really weird to me you know I'd be like more hot sauce please like you don't like me you didn't put much on there if you go through again all of this literature there are two major theories or approaches in terms of trying to figure out like these links there's the general aggression model the GAM which Craig Anderson is one of the leading researchers on which is mostly focusing on thoughts as installing scripts for behavior that you play these games in your learning reactions like and that's gonna influence then what you actually do and then in counterpoint the catalyst model which is Chris Ferguson Chris Ferguson who's been like one of the most active opponents of the game and their research and calling out their methods and he says that you know their findings are just suspect and he looks at things like personality and environmental factors everyone does

agree it's not a simple issue gosh thanks it's complicated but they'll say things like you know it depends on a player's neighborhood their family history their school performance their friends personality social history media diet gender mental health and so on and so on and so on right and so what they all do at least agree on is like what you're looking for a risk factors associated but again figuring out and they argue about what those risk factors might be and the best ways to do them you'll also hear people talk about the meta analyses you know the big studies that take all the studies and say well maybe if we cram them all together we'll see like if we learn something as a result the problem here is that if you take crappy studies and put them together you just get a really big really crappy study you know this is my talk just killing me yeah another problem Thank You Roger another problem with these meta-analysis is a

lot of them focus on research that has been published there is a publication bias many times if you do a study and you find like no significant results a lot of journals don't want to publish it because it doesn't seem very exciting even though in violence research no significant results might be important and so you're leaving out those studies and their lack of results scientists have different ways of interpreting the results what one might consider a moderate effect one might consider you know a minor effect and so again there's just no clear-cut consensus some are very convinced of you know their truth but there is no complete consensus over all I'm kind of over time so just getting a really nitpicky not all games are violent you know people don't always play them just for the violent parts the research tends to conflate research on little kids young kids 17 year-olds and adults without separating them out and how they might be different some of the studies

don't really mention you know are women and girls involves a few do but not all of them so we don't really know conclusively about gender and just to close up you know another way to approach this is to ask what do people do with games right how are they using them in their lives what are they taking away from them what are they bringing to them rather than asking what two games do two people thanks [Music] [Applause] perfect Thank You doc appreciate it I'm

Roger it's nice to see everyone here I collect titles I work at Queensland University of Technology entertainment arts and engineering at Utah and all sorts of other fun things I like that workaholism I'm a lucky guy I get to work with talented people and talented students to make games sometimes there for entertainment and sometimes they are for health and so we have a lab that we work in and where we're making games in a hospital to sort of help people with all sorts of different things ranging from helping disabled people ski again and/or sail again to doing all sorts of things with medication compliance and things like that so I sort of have a vested interest in this notion just put all my biases out there about games as an industry and prepping people to work in a games industry and then also games as medicine and the games are good for you in fact I've done a lot of talks when I first started doing work in medicine on our games good for you and

how can games help people out people love talking about the negative aspects of games I think that came through in the previous talks there's been lots of it I think if you just google games are bad for you lots of fun stuff pops up right so there there's like no lack of it but oddly enough lots of good stuff pops up as well and I think this is one of the shifts that we're starting to see that that you would be surprised who is writing about the positive impacts of games right and the kinds of things that they're asking about so like for example on the vegan article they're talking about you know games are good for you the lots of reasons why games are good for you a call for Responsible play so this emphasis on personal responsibility that's an important shift and we're going to talk about that a little bit how we start we stop looking at the stimuli or the thing itself and we start looking at behavior and responsible behavior right I mean of course the same concerns that everyone always has but it's an interesting shift to see what it happens it's already been addressed that

there is negative there there is great academic work on games on sort of both sides of this debate if you believe there are two sides I'm really there's just a lot of thought on there it's kind of hard to boil it down into two camps and on addiction that we're seeing a shift in the way people talk about addiction so in the beginning people liked to talk about media in the same ways they would talk about addictive substances so you would talk about games the same way you might talk about a chemical substance or a drug right and certainly they could point to lots of negative things that happen around games and I think it's important for us when we talk about games especially we talk about games in the press not to sort of sweep these things under the rugs whether it's through academic study or anecdotes people have stories about negative things around gameplay right just like we laugh when we talked about negative things around driving we don't have to hide that we don't have to say driving is good all the time that every time you get behind the wheel of a car

it's a delightful experience right Mia wants to kill people apparently and she gets behind the wheel of a car so I'm gonna add that bullet point to this slide right and I think that when we talk about a negative aspects of leisure or negative aspects of games a particulars leisure we're not alone in this so one of the things that we don't hear much about is exercise addiction right an exercise addiction isn't a new thing this is something that's been studied since the 70s there are places where you can be treated for exercise addiction there are lots of great articles on exercise addiction being an exercise addict is a very serious condition it can affect your body in tremendous ways it reduces your longevity it can read complim eyes your immune system it there are all sorts of terrible things that happen but when we talk about exercise this isn't what comes up right we don't talk about exercise addiction when we have general conversations about exercise and the reason for that is because exercise is good for you this is known right even

though it is addictive even though people get hurt by it even though some of the cultures around where we do exercise are very complicated and under debate right now the idea and when we talk about exercise of her say hey let's talk about exercise never gonna say oh that's terrible sighs is the worst it's addictive and you might be exposed to toxic culture oh my god exercise don't get me started right no because you work with the assumption that exercise is good for you and so we can actually have conversations about those things and not worry that we're going to get rid of exercise and start having gym membership burning pardon I mean I don't even know what that would look like right so what if instead of always apologizing for games we started with something else what if we started with games are good for you right what if that was the assumption and so to get to this notion that games are good for you we might have to start talking about

the things about games that are good for you not just the right to be entertained that is a valuable thing or to engage and leave your time but are there things about games that are good for you there are lots of great individual studies on this kind of stuff both from social scientific and medical research this for example is a single study on the game bejeweled that shows that it has the effect that playing bejeweled for 30 minutes a day three times a week has the same impact on state and trait anxiety state anxiety is what we all experience when you get stressed out when something bad happens or trait anxiety you just deal with generalized anxiety it has the same impact as low dose benzos so low dose valium or low doses annex right and that it's it's a wonderful study because they do all this biometric stuff it's a good study and they sort of show that unlike a lot of things that are prescribed like people don't take their medications when they're prescribed to them when they were prescribed to video games they took them more than the

recommended dosage right and so they were prescribed a half hour of play average amount of play was just over 40 minutes right so get your Bejeweled on but rather than looking at a bunch of individual studies Mia already alluded to that meta studies and meta reviews are wonderful and extraordinarily useful and they're just never anything to critique about them we looked at each other's work I swear no but in reality though there are there this is actually a great place to start when you want to start looking for research or meta reviews so a good matter of view like this is a report that was sponsored by a Center in Australia and they looked at 200 different articles on well-being and children and games and sort of extract themes from it right and so it's it's a good place to sort of start the conversation clearly these things are never definitive right but they looked at a lot of research like we said over 200 peer-reviewed published articles again with caveats for all the things

that Mia mentioned and they sort of talked about positive emotional impacts of games the healthy relationships that come from games and social capital social capital is sort of the the things we use in life to exchange with one another that aren't monetary related but are like cool right so you could say hey look it I have a really cool amount or I'm a really high level of WoW and other people might say oh that's really great so that's social capital that you can exchange right and then the impact on self-esteem the positive impact on self-esteem um the citation for this will also be on the website that's on that handout if you need it but when we talked about the positive emotional impact or when that's article talks about it they sort of looked at mental well-being with video games and that it's a good way to relax it's a good way to not feel stressed out these are things that you might already believe but there's research that talks about this that people who play games tend not to have depressed mood as much that oddly enough that a lot of the research has a horseshoe-shaped pattern

meaning that those who don't play games and those who play excessive amounts of games have depressive mood problems but those that play moderate games have less of this than people who don't play games right and so and we actually see this with obesity as well that there's arguments about obesity in games in that those who don't play games and those who play excessive games are more likely to suffer from childhood obesity than those who play moderate amounts of games as well so that pattern seems to emerge a lot that in terms of healthy relationships that people who play games tend to have less risky friendship networks high levels of family closeness and that people in in games like wow are sometimes they find this a say space to discuss things that might be difficult for them to discuss interpersonally right and so the use of avatars the use of the game means that they can sort of talk about things in their life that they might be uncomfortable talking about IRL this is

actually true in other studies as well so with adults with adults who returned from war and are suffering from PTSD there's been great work that some people are more comfortable talking to a virtual counselor than a real counselor that they can be more honest and more forthcoming with an avatar than they can another person in the room in terms of self-esteem we sort of see that a lot of players feel they can express themselves more they feel empowered and confident to express their sexuality their appearance they're not afraid of these things and that virtual worlds can sort of give people a break from this stuff this is not the only matter of view on this there is lots of them this one is pretty interesting though because it was published by the American by the APA the American Psychological Association in their premier journal American psychologist the American Psychological Association has a complex relationship with games right they've come out on the other side of this game's addiction debate in the past right and so you

might have seen news articles that say things like American Psychological Association has concerns about games addiction but at the same time they are publishing work on the healthy benefits of playing games in their major journal right which is pretty interesting so this is another article that sort of analyzes dozens of other articles and instead of saying what are the social aspects of it it says that there are cognitive benefits to games that the types of things that we learn in fact they do a real interesting analysis of articles about first-person shooters that show that playing first-person shooters teaches you spatial reasoning and other skills at the same level as taking high-level college courses in them that they're good for motivation that they have for emotional health and that they're very social right so there's it's a great review of these kinds of things but the point of that isn't these articles that I'm talking about it's that we don't have to dismiss that maybe some people who play games have bad experiences or that bad things happen to them around

games we would be lying if that were the case right no one hates love but clearly people have been hurt in love right there wouldn't be a pop music industry if people didn't get hurt in love right but that talking about the positive aspects of games might get us to a place where we can say games are good for you and still have honest conversations about everything else right and that just because some people have a bad experience it doesn't mean that's a defining characteristic of the thing itself right that's all I have for you you feel free to an email me any questions you might have thank you yeah all right so now I got

suck this panel with the the joy of going right after Roger it's always interesting so my name's Andy I also collect titles I'm a professor of human interface technology at Canterbury which is a Christchurch I'm also a professor of art design at RIT I'm a game scholar in residence at American right now and probably most relevant to this particular talk I'm president of the higher education video game Alliance and I became president of the higher education video game Alliance about 20 mid-2017 around Thanksgiving time it was really nice my very good friend and colleague was was the prior president constant sine cooler and and we were kind of discussing as a board like who was gonna take it on next and you know she talked me into it as she has a way of doing and she said well you know I just I want to tell you right like like you know I think you're gonna have a pretty smooth sailing here with your tenure with have good like

it's not going to be that big of a deal because what I would she used to be assigned to the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House and she said when we were there right Sandy Hook happened and we got called meeting in Joe Biden's office to talk about video games so if that doesn't happen to you like you know like you're gonna have an easier time of it than I did right so it's gonna be okay and so that was fun and then I got to be about January and we had another school shooting and the President of the United States opened his mouth about how that was the fault of video games so it took three months great that was really super I particularly do enjoy the fact though that his tweet was actually from 2012 that everyone referenced in response to that debate it's pretty great so pretty much then right like

everything old is new new again again that's what what that's what happened in Washington in the wake of the shooting in Florida and so what was interesting and a little bit different though was I got a bunch of folks in the industry saying it'll blow over this always happens like we shouldn't worry about issuing statements and you know coming out on on these sides of these issues and and this that and the other and and then eventually right like Trump said no we're gonna have a meeting in the White House and we're gonna make the game executives show up an answer for this and that and then they had that meeting and basically everybody yelled at each other and nobody was you know it wasn't like I've I mean the optics of having a meeting at the White House sort of means you're gonna yell at each other because that makes for a better news story but that's you know kind of what happened right except that in the background of all of that there's some really interesting things that happened right so one was that issue got referred to

the Commission for school safety that had to issue a report back to the president over the course of the next year the school safety Commission report I'm willing to bet that most of you have not read it all right it's pretty dry gotta be at least one of the things that's interesting about that though is that it specifically calls out the Motion Picture Association of America and their rating systems as inadequate but it does not call out video games and one of the reasons for that is that there was a bunch of sustained advocacy behind the fact because organizations like mine like the ESA like the IG da we're making those articles that said the research is not conclusive right that violent video games caused the school shootings right and so that was a very necessary point of advocacy to continue to protect this medium that that we love and I just talked over my next slide so how does this affect you right it affects you because you know if they decided that it

did right we could all be legislated out of making certain kinds of content pretty darn quickly right we have a really great precedent with the with the supreme court case from a few years ago about you know games being you know first-person protected speech and and all of that right I don't know if you've noticed this but the balance of the court has shifted a little bit since that was tried I'm not willing to go down the road and say it'll always be upheld you never know all right so and then okay so that was like my first three months on the job and then we had this wedding so you know so then the World Health Organization comes out and says we're gonna have a classification around addiction and games right and I watched a bunch of my academic colleagues right who just did the very same thing that we we kind of did with

games and violence it said the research is not clear that the studies are this and this and we need you know it's going to take a long time to figure this stuff out and this kind of research is very difficult and it's not definitive and so on and so forth right and I was sitting here on mailing list watching colleagues that said that those very things about violence turn around and say yeah but man kids can't stop playing Fortnight like we got to do something about this like right now right and you're like put you know if you're really into that particular issue right there's a I would tell you there's a really great panel discussion at games for change in 2018 and the woman in that's very dark on there is Kelly thumb up and you should check her out because her work in the space is probably some of the the most down-to-earth and reasonable around what addiction act you know addiction is a really loaded word right there's a medical classification for it but the way we use it popularly has very little to do with

that and so that's an issue behind the scenes if you're if you're in and out of DC the way I am the way you have been one of the things you will notice is the standard age of the American lawmaker and there are some big generational divides regarding attitudes about games so we all love these little stats right that's like everybody plays games right there's you know like 97% of everyone ever plays games and we've been playing games since the dawn of time and all this kind of stuff but we play very different kinds of games based on our age a lot right we classify a lot of things in American politics is this left-right debate right but the real debate is old young right and so this was a really interesting article that just came out not too terribly long ago about the eligible voters and their age and what you see is that there are some really really big generations that are

you know in like early retirement age right now and that's not gonna phase out until like after 2045 all right so the way that we talk about media there's some issues there yep the other thing that I think is really interesting is that we're all at GDC and we're all developers and we make games and we know how games are made and we know some of the motivations behind them and what the industry kind of looks like a little bit and so on and so forth this is how most people think games get made all right so there's an idea person and then elves and then game right just talk to it like freshmen that come into games programs right they're like I want to be the idea guy so they're just there isn't this public narrative about how games get made and yet when you think about film right like a three-year-old knows that there's actors and a script and that gets turned into a thing right and

then you say well how does a game get made I don't really know write something with a computer I think right so it's no wonder that they're trying to threat that there's a lot of fear and moral panic around what these things do to us because they don't understand how they're made what they are and how they're being consumed and thus their effect all right we've talked a lot about some big national examples but the way this trickles down it can be state-by-state it can be local district it can be it can be how games are perceived by the librarian at your local library right it can be like Vermont just tried to ban the sale of violent video games independently just as as a state legislature action and that fortunately died on the governor's desk because there's really no way to enforce it presently but it was an interesting piece of legislation to see just kind of float right out there there's some efforts right now to legislate loot crate's in starting out of Hawaii so on

and so forth so Mike might what I would say to you is that if we profess to really care about this medium to aspire to games as art and to hold ourselves to the highest academic and professional standards then that also means using the knowledge that we have and the passion for this medium that we hold right to defend it right it means not being silent right and a lot of times we're silent because it's like well if we say the wrong thing like it's gonna go on Twitter and then bad things happen and so on right but if you don't say anything right you're you're seeding a void for other people to fill in that discussion I think Roger probably did it better than I did right but let's just remember that games have done some awesome things along the way for culture both in education and just it purely as a form of entertainment so in conclusion beware the media rumor please okay a lot of popular press articles will take some of the academic work that like Mia was citing or that

Rodger was citing and pick out what they think would be a really nice headline even if it doesn't exactly match what the study says right and then that gets condensed into a social media soundbite and so on and so forth right and so there's there's very little meat sometimes to what that looks like and so remember that we've been here before in our history of moral panics particularly in this country but also in others be aware of unpublished or preliminary research or research that had a particular sponsor with an agenda you see that sometimes in this space most importantly I think is to seek some empathy with the motivations of parents right cuz really I mean they just want their kids to be okay right that's the point right and so you know they're scared sometimes reading some of these articles or they're scared that schools are getting shot up and you know this kind of stuff and so they're looking there their knee jerking for answers that are easy that they think they have some control remember that you

are an expert on the creation of games right most people have no idea how they're made our relationship with games is complex a lot of times the research is less clear than any headline will ever allow the way we talk about games influences a lot of what is said about them and where the future research is targeted right so whatever we're set with a public debate around game shapes the kinds of research that's going to be funded the next time that money is allocated for research funding to look at this stuff so what we say actually matters because that influences the things that we're going to be able to go and explore and hopefully find out and you make a difference when you speak as a games creator as a researcher or as a professional and like I said a lot of the information that we packed into the panel is is on this little website that we made which is on the back of that card

also tweet the link after the talk and and stuff and with that we get to the good stuff so it's Q&A time all right so we have short Q&A time and so we would actually really appreciate yeah we have yeah if you would ask questions rather than giving comments or micro speeches right and so everyone will be so much happier if you do in fact the best question gets a bag of kangaroo meat right so you know so hop on up and ask a good question yes Julian it's it's 97 percent Australia 97 percent from Australia yeah what were the first question all right so one topic that wasn't breached here is VR on VR I think is fundamentally different because it strives to be ultimately indistinguishable from reality it strives to replace sensory input of

reality itself with something synthetic and in that case something violent is you carrying out a violent action it is not through a proxy or through make-believe there is no ultimately in its ideal form no awareness that it isn't real other than the memory of going into VR so the CNN editorial that I actually wrote addresses this succinctly because there was a Stanford faculty member researcher who had the same opinion and raised the fact he actually made design suggestions like if we curve the bullets then at least we're not training or it'll be good yeah so I have a full response to that and I don't think that increased realism drives us to be the kinds of people who would do heinous acts but the question wasn't increased realism necessarily but the the distinction all difference between something that happens in a rectangle and something that you have a first direct experience of with your senses the way reality interacts with your senses sure I guess I would I would

argue though that the right like it's not it's not just about senses right it's a human beings are more than just write a response to particular stimuli right there's a contextual awareness about what you're doing right so unless it's the matrix where you don't you're in the matrix and you're being powered by batteries in the background like you knew you put a VR headset on you knew that you're engaged with a fantasy environment right that is not in in present-day reality right so on and so forth so the contextual understanding right of what you're doing and why you're doing it and the motivation behind that right it's still wildly different right then the the physical act right of what would happen in in you know say like soldier training where you know that you know in fact you're training for a real-life scenario where you are going to be shot at or are going to be shooting so it's again right there's there's you know we can we can a lot of people will point to the graphics will point to the realism right but the behavior right is something that we we

don't really you know it's it's much stickier than that I sympathize with what you're saying because we freely speak out of both sides of our mouth on this kind of stuff where we say like for training for surgery it's just like being a surgeon right or for for what it is have the refugee experience it's just like it's the simulated empathy machine right I get it but at the same time I think that if you look at play and make-believe people have been role playing all sorts of experiences with various levels of realism with and without computer mediation there are live-action role-playing organizations that rent ships and all dress and authentic gear and and but they never stab each other right like when they're when they're doing their it'll like they feel like pirates or they look like spaceships are troopers or whatever the things they're doing is but you are you because you play that thing we're good

at differentiating that people are good at differentiating that and when people can't differentiate reality from fantasy there is there's actually a disease for that right and so I don't know that technology is the problem with this the separation between those two things will happily talk to you out in the hallway and we'll though more if you'd like alright that's cool thanks I'm I come from parallel industry I'm working for asthmatic corporation so we we are doing board games and have you have you ever like within your research where they were this topic of analog games were covered can I can I look for something interesting has there been any work on analog games and violence like D&D of course above them and something out there because we are funding this kind of research and if someone is interested I would like to challenge that also researchers face is you know

like I have colleagues who say you know like when you're getting grants like why don't you approach the game industry for funding and I'm like haha they're not gonna give me money but also the sense that I want to be independent because if I say this study was sponsored by EA how independent were you really there is there there are plans for conferences but and this stuff yeah for example we just launched a document for how games like manually are helping for our helping people with Alzheimer's disease so this kind of stuff we are looking for some I would love talk to you afterward there's a there's a whole world of health games researchers that I think would be super interested so I've actually had conversations in this vein before we're talking about publications

and kind of the biases that can go into them and the publication stuff and we are during the conversation the thing was brought up of these positives articles and somebody who was talking to the other side says why can't you say all those same things about those you know the bias the fact that it sensational to say these are good and we had an interesting conversation about there I'm curious what you would say would be a good response to saying like if you apply those arguments back towards the positive articles I need help with the question just a little bit more I'm sorry so basically for like a lot of the sensationalist ones like old books about the D&D and stuff like that there was a lot of kind of the moral panic there's some where it's like this is a very punchy headline that was condensed down God so when the same thing is said about like all these being positive like all the good things games do yeah okay I got it I got so cuz because to be perfectly honest there isn't like on the no one's really arguing against those things so

as Mia pointed out where there might be studies and we go back and forth over a period of time of our games addictive our games not addictive we're not seeing gain articles showing that games don't reduce anxiety we're not seeing articles that show games are not are not reducing self-esteem or increasing self-esteem right and so they're they're actually there aren't other articles to go back to that say these things aren't happening and so it's kind of like there are lots of debates were everyone wants to believe there's two sides to the debate but it's like exercise right it's like there there are no articles that say that cardiovascular activity and a regular healthy person can't be a wonderful part of their life right there's no anti cardio I mean there are some silly things on the internet right but they're there there's no anti cardiovascular activity study group at Stanford right and the same is true the pro-social aspects of games agree that I think that all the research should be strictly scrutinized yeah you know

because yeah it's like if if you're gonna critique one set of studies you should be critiquing it's just that honestly when you come up with you say a nice thing most people aren't ready to jump on you and be like prove it I don't think that's true what's your methodology is it a population sample so that's definitely true and I would argue in terms of the broader concerns I mean yes games do impact people they can impact us poorly they can impact us in positive ways it's just far more complicated in terms of how they do that right and I think that's true of the positive impacts as much as well yeah and I think I think too there's you know like to me in in in some of the work that I do in the way that that translates into things like policy proposal and and legislative action you know there's action or there's not right and so to err on the side of of not you know

increase of not creating more legislation of not creating new policy of you know letting sort of you know free market just you know kind of go and do it you know it's thing right I think there's the that you know so so it to me right like what's the what's the harm in having a good art you know a good think piece right you know that makes everybody feel good right but but you know like maybe it wasn't completely you know accurate yeah well yeah I mean we should strive for accuracy but who got hurt right there whereas on the other end right you do that and then you know that biases public opinion and that creates a you know a call to action and we start you know passing laws about you know what we're you know gonna allow to be seen and not seen right I think that that's a very slippery slope and so you know I I would hold a piece that's trying to skew public opinion in that way to a high standard I hope right so on that note I think we're going to conclude here we will answer questions

in the wrap-up room we strongly encourage you to give us your feedback via the forms that you now hey this hey guy with a good hat you can have it if you want it yeah you had a great question and that hat is just amazing right you seem like the person that deserves all right thank you [Applause]