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A new study by Christopher Ferguson at Texas A&M University once again showed no causal link between violent game play and actual overt violent or aggressive behavior. Ferguson is a name you should know, as he is one of a handful vocal academics who look beyond laboratory effects studies and who look towards social and personality factors as the main causal factors for aggressive behavior, instead of video games.

In this study, a final sample of 302 youths aged 10 to 14 were drawn from a representative sample in a city with a Hispanic majority (97% Hispanic). 75% of them played video games regularly, 40.4% of which were violent games and 20.9% were M-rated games on the ESRB scale. 7.3% reported to have engaged in at least one criminally violent game in the last 12 months.

Results showed that current depressive symptoms were the largest predictors of actual aggressive or violent behavior. Video game violence however, was not a predictor for this behavior. Read on if you want a more thorough breakdown of this study for more insight into how these kinds of studies are performed.

Study design

The games part

For this study, Ferguson used the ESRB ratings as a scoring mechanism to rate games (6 = Adults Only, 5 = Mature, etc.). He then let a couple of research assistants play a sample of 10 games for about 45 minutes each, and let them rate the violence level on a 5-point scale. These assistants were not heavy games and hadn’t played the games before.

The games in question were: Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, Call of Duty 4, F.E.A.R., Bioshock, Race Pro, Baja: Edge of Control, Sonic Unleashed, Spiderman 3, Silent Hill: Homecoming and Lego Indiana Jones. That’s a pretty well-rounded sample of games. Keep in mind that studies can sometimes take a year before they are published, so these games were not necessarily “old”.

The assistants rated these games independently, but scored them almost the same way. More interestingly, they showed a 98% correlation with the ESRB ratings, providing some support for the rating system in the process. A similar method was used for TV shows with the Parental Guidelines System, which provides ratings for TV shows, and similar results were found.

The children listed their 3 favorite TV shows and games and gave an estimate of how often they watch TV or play games. They were tested at two time periods to control for differences between periods.

Other measures

A number of scales measured factors like family environment, family conflict, negative life events and others. I won’t go into detail to what they contain exactly, but let’s run through them to give you a clearer picture of how such a study comes to its conclusions.

To measure the behavior of youths, the validated (that means it’s good) Negative Life Events instrument was used. It measures things like neighborhood problems, how much time kids spend with their family, and how many of their peers are delinquents.

The Family Environment Scale is another reliable scale that can distinguish between functional and dysfunctional families dealing with things like substance abuse problems, physical abuse and psychiatric problems within the family.

A standard self-report questionnaire was used to measure depressive symptoms among children. It’s your usual depression scale where people have to check statements like “I feel sad”.

The child’s primary guardian filled out the Conflict Tactics Scale, which measures how partners treat each other in a relationship (i.e.: using aggression during conflicts). This scale is used a lot in family violence studies. They also filled out the Child Behavior Checklist, which shows whether a child’s behavior may be psychopathic in nature.

Finally, a bullying scale with statements like “In the past month I have forced another kid to do something they didn’t want to do” was included.

That’s a lot of scales! But unfortunately, you are often tied to that problem when doing a study like this. You can’t just use three scales with one group and three scales with another, only to make some ridiculous claim afterwards. This range of used scales does show that violent game content is not at the center of the design. Ferguson’s previous studies already provided evidence that aggressive personality is a key predictor of aggressive behavior, with family violence as a predictor for that personality trait.

A small amount of people who may act out violent behavior tends to have a reason for that. Media just offer a stylistic way to act it out “at best”, it’s not a causal factor that turns normal people into psychopaths overnight or over the course of 10 years.

Results

Other than 75% playing games, 40.4% of games being violent and 20.9% being M-rated, boys were also more likely to play violent games than girls although it was not a huge difference. Neither the age nor the GPA of the child correlated with video game “exposure”. And neither did the amount of hours spent playing games predict their GPA. Too bad no child will have made it this far to read that, eh parents?

Crime and rule-breaking

Based on results from the Negative Life Events scale, only 22 kids (7.3%) reported they engaged in violent crimes, most commonly physical assaults or using force to steal objects or money (e.g., “That’s a nice lunchbox you have there, i.e.: it’s mine.”). 52 kids reported they engaged in at least one non-violent crime in the last 12 months, most commonly minor shoplifting and thefts on school property.

Parents and children reports for rule-breaking were proven to be consistent. Although children did report higher levels of rule-breaking than their parents did. Then again, we always did more stupid things when were kids than our parents caught us doing, right?

Video games

There was a correlation between violent game exposure between the two measurements at the two time periods. Ferguson does state that: “… however, the effect size was small, allowing a considerable amount of variance across time in video game violence exposure, probably as children put away older games and pick up new games that are different in genre and violence content.”

While correlation is never a predictor for actual behavior — just like driving a red car doesn’t predict you are a douchebag — exposure to video game violence proved to have no correlation with actual rule breaking, aggression or crimes. However, a small correlation was found with bullying (18%). Correlations don’t predict anything though.

Depression

Although video games showed another analysis found no predictive effect on any measured behavior, while some other factors did. Depressive symptoms were a strong predictor of aggression (beta = .66) and rule-breaking (beta = .62). Peer delinquency and interaction between depressive symptoms and antisocial personality traits both also had a predictive effect, although it was a smaller one (beta = .12 to .15 range). Just imagine this beta to be like a multiplier of sorts for your total score; a psychopath will hopefully have a bigger multiplier based on his psychopath scores than you will.

A strong attachment with family was actually a negative predictor for violent crime, meaning that having a close family helps a bit with your child not becoming a delinquent. And although bullying was significantly (as in: true for 95% of the cases) correlated with video game violence, this was not a predictor for bullying. Instead, depressive symptoms and antisocial personality were once again the main predictors for bullying.

Conclusions

All in all, no predictive effects were found for violent games. Instead it’s almost as if the people who act out violence are like actual human beings, instead of some passive sponge lifeform that just absorbs violent media and reacts like an automaton. Depression and personality, previous aggressive or violent behavior and a person’s upbringing tell a clearer story about what makes people act out violently.

Of course you can always choose to not measure those things, but instead only measure a person’s reaction time on pressing a button that you’re told will release a loud noise blast to another participant. And if they do it faster and longer after playing a violent game, then obviously violent games turn our children into serial killers. Which in a nutshell summarizes the “violent games = violent behavior” studies that made it as far as a Congressional hearing.

It’s exactly because some (methodologically unsound) experimental studies do find negative effects for violent video games, that we shouldn’t just go “duh” or “Captain Obvious” whenever a study shows that people instead act pretty normal; something we may think should be common sense. Unless you disprove it, it can slowly trickle into policy or bills. We’ve seen it happen with previous “violent game bills”.

Researchers like Ferguson and Cheryl K. Olson (author of Grand Theft Childhood) are among a small but growing group of researchers who do proper studies on video game effects. They are out there, but what major news channel wants to report on a not-scary story these days? Disproving a horror story about violent games is just not as exciting as telling parents that video games are addictive like crack, or that the Columbine shooter played the same games their kids played.

Good thing we have the Internet.

If you have access to scientific articles, this study can be found here or here. Another study by Ferguson, Olson, Kutner and Warner on violent games and bullying can be found here.

Ferguson, C. (2010). Video Games and Youth Violence: A Prospective Analysis in Adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 39

Justcause.com posted an interview with two of the movie’s producers: Adrian Askarieh and Eric Eisner. Askarieh produced the Hitman movie and his other new projects include SpyHunter, Hack/Slash, Hitman 2, Kane & Lynch and Jonny Quest. Eisner is best known for producing Hamlet 2.

The upcoming Just Cause movie will be an origin story centered around Rico and how he transforms into the Scorpion, making it “a great action/adventure with a strong central character; two MUST HAVE elements for a good action film.” Secondary characters like Sheldon will also be “used”.

Askarieh and Eisner also talk about how to deal with video game movies and say filmmakers should treat the source material as seriously as a novel, and how important a good script is. Like Hitman right? Michael Ross is writing the script, so let’s hope it’s not this one or that he was not responsible for the mess that was Turistas. A 3D treatment sounds likely and they are “shooting for a PG-13″.

Ehm, did anyone play Just Cause for the strong character and the story? And would you watch it if it starred Sean Connery and Laurence Fishburne again?

Exclusive interview with the creators [JustCause]

So, yesterday we talked about how Entertainment Weekly voted Kirby’s Epic Yarn the single worst game of 2010. While a bizarre choice in a year that saw games full of real technical, design and visual flaws, EW is entitled to its opinion.

It’s bizarre logic that the game was “too cute” was the really stupid thing, however, and it seems that things have gotten stupider. See, Entertainment Weekly actually reviewed Kirby’s Epic Yarn when it came out, and it seems that the “overwhelming” adorability wasn’t a problem back then. In fact, the game scored a B+. 

Here’s what the review says. Bear in mind this is the ENTIRE review, as well. They work hard at EW:

A pink globe gets plopped into a world constructed of colorful twine and craftsy cloth, and the result is likely the most adorable game ever. Yes, it’s kinda easy, but you’ll never stop smiling. B+

And that, friends, is grounds for being picked as the worst game of the year. Amazing, isn’t it? They say that “real game journalists” are the worst writers around, but so long as editorially inconsistent publications like EW are around, I think I’ll be sleeping easy at night. 

Does it really matter what EW thinks about games? I know some of you have asked that, and that answer is no. However, is it entertaining to laugh at what EW thinks about games? Absolutely! And I think that a publication called Entertainment Weekly could certainly appreciate that!

[Thanks to those that let me know about this]

Take Grand Theft Auto IV, create Mario-like characters and give it a gritty Mafia story and you have The Brothers Mario. An awesome mod that I want to actually play.

Weekend D has been sporadic at best as of late, but things will be stable once again. You don’t know what I’m talking about! After the break, it’s a nice historical song on videogames. Then it’s some funny fails from Halo: Reach. Next, it’s a World of Warcraft Cataclysm song. Next, check out the pretty rad Mario and Yoshi costume.

Then it’s LEGO Black Ops. Next up, Michelangelo is a douche. Followed by Brentalfloss with his Super Mario Bros musical. Then it’s a couple of live performances from the Spike Video Game Awards. The Destructainment ends with a very difficult game.

“The Wii Didn’t Start the Fire” a historical song on videogames. I love the intro. Thanks, Kaleb!

Some great fails in Halo: Reach.

World of Warcraft Cataclysm fan song.

Pretty awesome Mario and Yoshi costume from Wizard World 2010.

Lego Black Ops

Michaelangelo is a party douche.

Brentalfloss does Super Mario Bros: The Musical

The Halo: Reach segment from the VGAs without the audio issues.

Jose Gonzalez performs “Far Away” at the VGAs.

Commentary on the most difficult game ever. Thanks, AMV!

If you played Dragon Age: Origins on the PC, then chances are that you used the top-down camera and paused most of the combat encounters to plan and to micromanage your spells and healing. And perhaps you weren’t too happy with the news that the top-down camera would be absent in Dragon Age 2’s PC version. This latest trailer seems intent to put fears about the PC version at rest through some very dramatic lighting.

Two playthroughs of the same section — one in a hack & slash mode and one in a “thinking man” mode — show off the new combat system, running on the PC version. It still looks mostly like Origins, and the camera is pulled back far enough to still provide you with the oversight you need.

It seems to cater to different types of players while trying not to alienate part of the core fans of Origins. I always felt bad for whoever designed the unseen ceilings in Origins, and I think I can live with this kind of system. Can you?

Dragon Age 2 will hit Europe on March 11 2011.

BioWare: Dragon Age 2 is strategic [Eurogamer]

Update – Our unreleased SEGA Kitten game has been revealed!  If you missed it look at the archive around 2 o’clock PST.

Today we get together with SEGA to play SEGA games! Our good friend Fabian over at SEGA has joined us for a very special SEGA SATURDAY edition of the Dtoid Live Chill Bros Show on Justin.TV/DESTRUCTOID. We will be having quite a bit of fun today playing classic SEGA games, as well as doing many random forms of nonsense.

Watch all day because we have some amazing prizes to give away like signed copies of Vanquish, retro games, and limited edition out-of-print SEGA swag that’s been collecting mold in their secret warehouse! 

Watch live video from Destructoid on Justin.tv

I hadn’t heard about Jekklyn Heights until I saw this post on Rock, Paper, Shotgun this morning. We’ve never posted about this indie PC game on Destructoid, and I take that as a shameful failure, because it looks incredibly interesting. 

Jekklyn Heights is a “dark fairytale multiplayer game” that takes place in the eponymous town. It incorporates a wide variety of genres, including roleplaying, first-person and third-person combat. Two teams fight over the “Orb of Egression” which will allow them to escape the eponymous town. To help them, there are Ability Orbs that grant them new skills, and Sanity Posts that act as spawn points. 

The game is offering a free beta signup right now, so you may want to check it out. The visual style is fantastic, and it seems like developer Vex Studios is aiming for a really unique game. I want to find out more!

Also, who doesn’t love that name?

We talk about Conan for a while in this episode. Hope you’re cool with that.

We also talk about Tara’s preview time with Uncharted 3, the improvements made to Mass Effect 2 on the PS3, the new Fallout: New Vegas DLC, more classic games coming to the iPhone, the VGAs’ ratings, Dr Dre invading Facebook gaming, and a bunch of other stuff.

Also, a quick reminder, we’re shooting our awards show special next week, so get your votes in! If you’re super mad that Starcraft 2 or Heavy Rain or some other deserving game isn’t up for more awards, vote for it! Instructions for how to vote can be found in this episode if you’re not up for reading.

Oh, and we’re still giving away that transforming Xbox 360 controller to someone who has subscribed to us on YouTube or iTunes (in HD or large sizes). You only have until next week to enter, so you better get on that, ya dingus.

Look at that picture. Is it not glorious? There’s even a backstory, too!

Valve and Team Fortress 2 are celebrating the holidays by releasing a new Medieval mode. That … sounds about right, oddly enough. In it, players are restricted to melee weapons, but their outfits have miraculously remained untouched. I’d tell you more, but the dreaded download is conspiring against me.

New hats and weapons — plus the odd mechanic tweak — are also bundled into this free update. What’s more, there’s a sale happening at the Mann Co. item store this weekend. Here’s the picture to prove it.