Video games still inspiring junk-science articles

Indian students learn how to design video games. Photo courtesy Duke TIP.

It’s been a while since I saw so much junk science in a single article.

The Indian Express just published a piece arguing that video games make kids aggresive. The article quotes official-sounding people, such as Adarsh Kohli, professor of clinical psychology at Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education & Research, and child psychologists in India. These experts claim a number of video-game dangers, including:

* Gaming makes children forget to eat;
* Gaming makes children become irritated if they can’t play;
* Gaming causes social withdrawal, lack of participation in family activities, and disinterest in people;
* Gaming makes children immune to trauma;
* Gaming makes children rebellious;
* Gaming causes back problems, such as cervical spondylitis;
* Gaming causes photogenic seizures (the actual term is photosensitive epilepsy, and it’s very rare);
* Gaming causes weak eyesight (interesting, since the same newspaper reported that video games can heal lazy eye).

Meanwhile, another India news outlet, Deccan Chronicle, recently published an article showing that playing video games boosts kids’ exam results. Based on research at Yardleys School in Birmingham, England, the article explains that 70 percent of regular gamers exceeded targets on standardized tests, while only 40 percent of non-gamers did so.

Granted, this may be because students who excel academically may also be drawn to play video games regularly; let’s face it, smart kids/geeks and gaming often go hand in hand.

But someone at the White House thinks video games are such a positive influence, they’re exploring ways to use them in the classroom. Many schools already do this, but new research could turn it into more of a nationwide phenomenon:

As studies began to show that no such relationship exists, research turned toward how video games can be used to positively benefit society.

“It turns out that many of those relationships just haven’t borne out in the research, and new fields have emerged around looking at how games function as a means for turning screen time into activity time,” said [Constance] Steinkuehler, [a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy]. According to Steinkuehler, federal investments in games is not a new concept, and dates back well before the Obama administration.

As science moves ahead, will articles like the first one become a thing of the past? I hope so.

Blaming Grand Theft Auto insults rioters, ignores real reasons for youth rage

Here’s what we know so far:

* A London father named Mark Duggan was allegedly shot and killed by police last Thursday in the north London neighborhood of Tottenham.

* Rioting in working-class neighborhoods in London began on August 6, two days after Duggan’s death. Demonstrations, and then vandalism, violence, and looting, followed in Tottenham, Croydon, Wood Green, Enfield Town, Ponders End and Brixton.

* Violence spread to other cities in England, including Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Bristol, Kent, and Leeds.

* More than 500 Britons have been arrested, and more than 111 police officers have been hurt.

* Rioters are communicating partly by way of a BlackBerry service called BlackBerry Messenger, which allows for simultaneous communication similar to an online chat.

* Because the uprising is taking place predominantly in working-class communities, some say the violence has been percolating for years, just waiting for a spark:

It is demonstrative of how far Labour has sunk that it is barely considered a voice for those people on the streets, and it is of the utmost importance — if Labour is to against be simultaneously left-wing and electorally successful — that it once again gets in touch with those it has unfortunately abandoned.

Because, to be honest, that is what causes riots — disenfranchisement … Many of the rioters will have been unable to vote in the last election, and are now being hit hardest by the Coalition’s cuts. Cuts to EMA and youth services seem to be designed to specifically target the young and disadvantaged.

That only adds to a general environment which has been growing over the last decade (and perhaps longer) of anti-youth hysteria. In Maidstone and in towns and cities across the country, young people are treated like vermin to be kept away from shops and fast food outlets with a ‘mosquito’ device.

In the above video, journalist and political leader Darcus Howe says his own kids have lost count of the number of times his son has been searched by police. He also makes the case that it’s wrong to classify these actions as “riots”:

“I don’t call it rioting, I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it’s happening in Liverpool, it’s happening in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment.”

Meanwhile, the police — the very police whose actions against Duggan (justified or not) and whose actions against the young people of these poor communities may have sparked their anger — are blaming something else entirely.

Are you ready for it?

Grand Theft Auto.

In Tottenham, the scene of the first riots on Saturday night, a police officer said: ‘These are bad people who did this. Kids are out of control.

‘When I was young it was all Pacman and board games. Now they’re playing Grand Theft Auto and want to live it for themselves.’

When youth grow up facing attitudes like that, it’s no wonder they’re angry, bashing cars and torching shops.

It’s beyond insulting to the people of these communities to write off such deeply held rage as the product of playing a video game. Such statements lay bare the gulf of misunderstanding that lies between those in power and the powerless. The story of this violence is, in some ways, the story of every act of youth violence: in the effort to raise their voices, to be heard, to claim a moment of power, however senseless or misguided, their acts are once again misnamed, misinterpreted, misunderstood, and dismissed.

As long as this ignorance continues, so will the violence.