Studies that link aggression to video games fatally flawed

Another day, another study that purports to show a link between violent video games and aggressive behavior. But as Kotaku pointed out, there are three basic problems that all of these studies so far have shared:

1. How do you measure aggression? What even is "aggression"? It's not like taking someone's temperature. It's a fuzzy concept, and a difficult one to measure legitimately, even if you rule out researcher bias (which many of these studies do not).

2. Long-term versus short-term effects. All of these studies measure what happens immediately after the subjects stopped playing. But what about five minutes later? Five months? Five years? We have no idea if the effects of gaming wash out in the end. They may even make people less aggressive, because they provide an acceptable outlet for violent impulses.

3. The studies never take competition into account. These studies just consider whether a video game is violent or not - they jumble up single-player and multi-player games into the same "bucket," as it were. Competition is a well-known source of aggression, and it has been heavily studied elsewhere.

Many gaming experts think that any increase in aggression is due to the competitive factor - which is the same whether you're playing a video game, parking your car, or playing basketball. Since these studies never control for competitive versus non-competitive games, we can't say.

Image courtesy Flickr/Rob Boudon