By Chua Hian Hou
Technology Correspondent
hianhou@sph.com.sg

 

I have a story out in today's The Straits Times (Jan 28), on the Entertainment Software Association's (ESA) reaction to the video game addiction study conducted here.

Unsurprisingly, it isn't happy.

But there are some technical nuances to the story that I thought I’d try to elaborate on here in my blog.

All the major studies so far on pathological gaming (read: addiction, to laymen), suggest that it is correlated to some negative effects.

Now, this does not mean it causes the "Bad Stuff To Happen" to you.

I’ll paraphrase this example I picked up from an excellent book, The Invisible Gorilla (available from our very awesome National Library).

Ice cream sales go up at the same time drownings do.

Does selling ice cream cause people to drown? Obviously, not (well, not unless you eat a dozen pints of 40% proof rum and raisin anyway…okay, I kid, I kid).

So, there is probably a third factor that causes both.

In this case, the cause is hot weather – which results in higher ice cream sales, as well as more people going swimming and thus drowning.

On ethical grounds, researchers can’t try to induce addiction (already bad) in hopes of seeing if anything worse comes about.

ADDICTED

So, there will be no way to actually say for sure, if being addicted to games will cause Bad Stuff To Happen.

Now however, because the Singapore study looks at addicts over a few years, it can track how their problems worsen, or improve.

The result: Being addicted to games worsens depression over time, and if they fix their addictions, the depression improves too.

Now, this is still not quite "game addiction causes Bad Stuff To Happen", but as Dr Douglas Gentile said, it does hint at a causal relationship.

This result is probably as good as it’s going to get.

And it also explains the game companies’ umbrage – it has just gotten harder to sit there and say, it’s the gamers. Games have zilch to do with the problem.

Nonetheless, note that the ESA is arguably correct in saying that: "There simply is no concrete evidence that computer and video games cause harm."

It should also be noted that games have a lot of positive points (it’s all right to do research to test for benefits, thus the plethora of such studies).

I’ve written a lot of articles on those benefits, and some basic Google-fu will yield results on those.

I will end with this point: If games are so powerful that they can yield benefits, it stands to reason that they are powerful enough to cause problems. You really cannot have it both ways. 

chuahh@sph.com.sg

www.facebook.com/hianhou