Social Impacts: How is multimedia changing us?
By Sonya Senkowsky
Peter Vorderer
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Prof. Peter Vorderer has been fascinated by hearing students who enjoy “first-person shooter” games. argue that their game-playing is not a violent activity.
“It’s not what you think it is; we just like to compete with each other,” they’d tell him, downplaying the effect of repeatedly pretending to kill one another, complete with gory and increasingly realistic graphics and effects, such as a vibrating control used to simulate the kickback of a machine gun.
Vorderer thought otherwise. He wondered whether being immersed in such explicitly violent worlds, supplemented by such effects as a vibrating game controller, might be having a different impact than the students thought. For example, once you’ve killed 5,000 people on-screen might you be less inhibited to do that in reality? Similar discussions have been prompted by school shootings like that at Columbine.
“The evidence that we have seen so far makes me more and more believe that … we are not always capable of understanding that this is only pretend.”
In one study, Vorderer had students wear head-mounted goggles and asked them to perform a task such as walking along a thin virtual line. Some were told they would fall if they failed; others were explicitly told about alligators or other hazards below. Many students responded as though the dangers were real.
“In one study there was no one who was willing to walk across; in another, only half was willing.” All students understood the images they were seeing were not real, but something in them apparently did not believe it.
Vorderer is also interested by the results of another study performed by colleagues overseas, one of very few that have looked at actual brain behavior during game play. In that study, subjects had their brains scanned while they played a violent video game such as the U.S. version of Tactical Operations.
One unusual result was that the subjects in the scanner didn’t demand to get out of the claustrophobic situation, as many study subjects do. Instead, they often didn’t want to leave, or asked when they could go back in. Another result was that the observed responses of the amygdala, a part of the brain that responds to aggressive behavior. This, said Vorderer, suggested that the “play” wasn’t being regarded as play at a deeper level. (However, results of this study are still very preliminary, he cautioned.)
Most people studying game-based entertainment today aren’t academics, but are focused on development, technology, story lines and other aspects of feeding a fast-growing industry. So, although there are still many questions about what impacts exactly that games and other forms of multimedia might be having on children, adults and society as a whole, the answers are still few.
Also, there is as clear a generation gap in the research as in the playing. “Most of my collaborators are my students,” said Vorderer.
University-industry collaborations could revolutionize the research of gaming and other multimedia impacts by giving academia unprecedented access to developing multimedia technologies. It will also help developers, who need all the help they can understanding the rapidly growing industry. ”Developers need universities and the universities need games,” said Vorderer.
(Along these lines, he hinted at one very big developer-university collaboration that could be coming from USC as early as July 2005; it is currently “top secret,” he said, but if it happens, expect it to be big news.)
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