Supernanny’s Violent Video Game “Experiment”

Together with Dr Doug Gentile she orchestrated an experiment in which 40 boys were asked to play games for 20 minutes – half played a football sim, the other half “a first-person war game”. They then had to view some violent news footage. Throughout, each participant had their heart rate monitored. At the end, the figures showed that the boys who played the violent game retained slower heart rates during the news footage.

“Shockingly, just 20 minutes of violent gameplay was enough to densensitise the boys,” says the sonorous voice over.

But are we to draw from this that those boys may suffer long-term desensitisation? Frosts melodramatic reaction to the findings, and the lack of any sort of qualifying analysis, would seem to lead us in that direction. But that would of course represent a massive oversimplification, a confusion of short-term physiological and cognitive effects with long-term psychological impact. Im no neuroscientist, but with the biological stress response recently engaged, surely its no surprise that in the few minutes after violent gameplay, test subjects react differently to violent stimuli?

via Supernanny takes on violent video games | Technology | guardian.co.uk

The article takes a tongue-in-cheek view pointing out obvious flaws in the experiment put by Jo ‘Supernanny’ Frost. Not going into the debate here, but the Guardian does cover the same argument put across before by Penn & Teller in their ‘Bull Shit’ program on the same subject. The conclusion was that a lot of these studies are agenda driven to prove a point rather than find out what it does from a none-bias point of view.

My only concern from this is people who may watch the program and take it as honest fact where it’s not; it’s entertainment, not edutainment. I just hope people read this article by Keith Stuart and not take what they see on TV as fact…

Check out the program here (might be regionally restricted).

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