Don't criticise the effects of video games on kids, exploit them!

1. The shooting of eight students by 14-year-old Michael Carneal in 1997 at a school in Paducah, Kentucky, USA was a catalyst that served to identify video games as a problem (the perpetrator played video games that used a point-and-shoot interface).

2. The media monitored and covered stories related to the catalyst. The crisis of school shootings presumably activated by video games, extended to schools in Jonesboro, Arkansas (1998), Springfield, Oregon (1998), Littleton, Colorado (1999). An industry of experts formed around these events, each of which also featured prominently in the media. Lt. Col. David Grossman, a co-author of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, is a prominent example. The prevailing view was that these events are the tip of the iceberg.

3. Public outcry about the apparent threat of violent video games fueled political reaction. Legislation, legal proceedings, and interest organisations arose to establish social control over the source of deviance, and researchers were given agendas. In 2000 and again in 2002, the US congress considered legislation to limit violent content and more tightly regulate the video games industry in America. Watchdog groups like the National Institute on Media and the Family have campaigned against the industry generally. In Australia, vocal lobbies pressed the Office of Film and Literature Classification and opposed an adult 'R' classification of video games.

While moral panics refer to a real problem, confusion about the scope of the problem - and the moral context in which it is cast - blurs our vision about it. For example, the effect of violent media on aggressive behaviour is well studied but not convincingly argued, suggesting the problem is not as great as some would suggest.

Two credible studies demonstrate the point: one in the journal Human Communication Research by Purdue University's John Sherry and the other in the journal Psychological Science by Iowa State University's Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman. Both studies used meta-analysis (a technique of statistically summarising collections of empirical studies). Both included most of the same original studies in their analyses. However, the two meta-analyses made remarkably different conclusions. The Sherry study found a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression than has been found over the years as a result of violent television content and that more game-playing reduces overall tendencies toward aggressive behaviour but that the type of game violence (human and fantasy, but not sport) did predict aggressive behaviour. The Anderson and Bushman article concluded that violent video games increased aggressive behaviour in players, that it increases physiological arousal and feelings and thoughts related to aggression.

Other studies have looked for different outcomes like the effect of games on attention span or on academic performance. Again, the findings have been inconsistent. Indeed, evidence is mounting (for example from the Home Office in Great Britain) to the surprise of many that video game play is related to higher levels of intelligence, literacy, job success and sporting activity.

Inconsistencies in research findings may result from the different video game content used as stimuli in studies. Moreover, when we learn that video games can serve positive roles in education and socialisation our surprise may be a function not only of our moral panic about games but also a function of inadequate understanding about the complexity and diversity of video game worlds. According to market analysts Inform, more than 3000 video game titles were on sale in Australia in early 2002. As media economist Dmitri Williams claimed in the International Journal on Media Management last year, "With the exception of a growing body of social science research chronicling the effects of game violence, academia has largely ignored this booming and vital new mass medium. And yet even this [research] work is mostly uninformed with regards to content…without understanding of the different types of content or an agreed-upon typology for genre or playing style".

Until this year, only five empirical studies had explored the content and nature of video games. Each of these looked specifically for violent content, one also examined gender and race portrayals. The Diverse Worlds Project at Bond University's Centre for New Media Research and Education has just been completed by the author and his colleagues. The aim of the project was to document the range of objects, characters, stylistic features and narratives in four elements of video game products including the packaging, manual, opening cinematic and game-play. The sample was 130 of the most popular games in Australia determined by unit sales for the first half of 2002 across the five dominant platforms in the market then and now including the personal computer, Xbox, PlayStation2, Game Boy Advance, and GameCube.

The findings reveal that video games present diverse worlds of play, and the vast majority of these worlds contrast with the moral panic associated with video games. These game worlds are populated mostly by realistic human characters who do much more than shoot or attack others in settings modeled mostly after our world (trees, buildings and all) and which present artifacts and stories from our formal cultural traditions.

The lesson of the Diverse Worlds Project is simple: video games tap into our existing cultural base, video games can be a part of learning and contemporary socialisation and video games can be a tool to inspire interest in formal culture, as long as they are tapped accordingly. Marc Prensky is the author of a striking book entitled Digital Game-based Learning. He reminds us that few young learners today live in a home without a computer and none have known a world without television. He calls them the game generation, others use the terms "N-gen" or Nintendo generation.

Boys and young men are fast becoming a smaller segment of the video games market with girls and women entering the playground of games. Australian researchers Kevin Durkin and Kate Aisbett found a few years ago that nearly all children (girls and boys) had played at least one video game in the year preceding the study and that over half of all adults had done so. Among youth, 98 per cent of boys and 89 per cent of girls played video games. In Australia, the video games market grew by 14 per cent in volume and 28 per cent in value during 2002 according to Inform. Last November Inform reported, "This growth rate now means that the total interactive market, including console software, hardware and gaming peripherals, is worth in excess of $2 million a day in Australia."

For young learners today, video games are part the "cultural furniture" (this term used by UK author and journalist Steven Poole). The development of boys and girls, their socialisation, and their formal learning (including literacy) are at risk if they reject contemporary media. What humanises technology most completely is appropriation of it. As any parent or teacher who has tried it knows, using popular media in the service of formal learning most readily overcomes the risk attributed to them. It also eliminates the source of moral panics: ignorance about the learners' world.

(Detailed findings of the Diverse Worlds Project will be presented in part at the Office of Film and Literature's International Ratings Conference in Sydney in September 2003; others will find their way into peer-reviewed journals).