The ongoing battle over the psychological effects of violent games continues in a recent study published in the most recent edition of Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking. From the abstract:
Christian Happ and his colleagues recruited 60 students (20 men) with varied video gaming experience and had them spend 15 minutes playing the violent and bloody beat-em-up game Mortal Combat vs. DC Universe on the Playstation 3. Some of the participants played the morally good character Superman, while the others played the Joker, the baddie from Batman. Apart from that, the game experience was the same for all participants – their time was spent in hand-to-hand combat against a variety of other computer-controlled game characters.
Another twist to the experiment was that before the game began half the participants read a bogus Wikipedia article about their character, designed to encourage them to empathise with him. For those playing Superman, the article said how he’d come from a loving family. The Joker article described how he’d suffered abuse in his childhood.
After playing the video game, the participants looked at grids of faces on a computer screen and indicated how hostile they looked. Some of the grids contained angry faces, but the crucial test was how hostile the participants rated the grids that contained all neutral faces. The key finding here was that participants who’d played the Joker were more likely to perceive hostility in neutral faces (a marker of an aggressive mindset), as compared with the participants who played Superman.
Another test was an old favourite known as the “lost letter technique”. As the students left the lab, they saw a stamped and addressed envelope on the floor outside. Those who’d played Superman in the violent game were 6.2 times more likely to post the letter or hand it in to the researchers, as compared with those who played The Joker (the rates were 20.7 per cent vs. 3.3 per cent, respectively).
Beyond the typical question of whether on-screen violence leads to real life violence, this study adds the fascinating question of how games impact sociability generally. However, as always with media effects studies, there is lots of room to challenge the results. For example, did participants’ past knowledge of Superman and the Joker change how they related to the character? Did the violence matter, or would the effect have been the same if the participants had spent 15 minutes solving puzzles as Superman or the Joker?
Dr. Kimberly Voll joins us next week as we explore social issues, including violence and sexism in games. Kim holds a PhD in computer science, and an honours degree in cognitive science. She spent six years as faculty at the University of British Columbia, and has taught everything from software engineering to video-game development to health informatics. Her areas of specialization include artificial intelligence and language modelling, user experience, game design, software engineering, and innovative educational methods and curriculum design. Passionate about video games since the age of two, Kim runs the Vancouver chapter of the Global Game Jam (one of the largest chapters in the world), helps coordinate FullIndie (a meetup for Vancouver independent game developers), and is a huge supporter of the Vancouver video-game community and beyond. Whenever possible, Kim does volunteer consulting for new startups or small companies, including crowdsourced funding strategies and design/development strategies for games and apps. On the side, Kim is a 2D concept artist, occasional graphic designer, a writer, and is currently developing a game for iOS.
The mysterious “missing first 20 seconds of audio” bug has made an unscheduled reappearance right at the front end. Apologies to Jennifer for a slightly over aggressive edit at the end. Since Jennifer was remote and our system only picked up her slides in class, you will have to download her slides and advance them manually to re-create the compelling nature of the live experience. On the YouTube version, we only have Jennifer’s audio (clear as a bell) over the video of…me sitting at the instructors desk. At least on the Mediasite versions you can switch me off (insert clever comment).
The EULA (or End-User License Agreement) is that annoying pop-up we are all forced to agree to when we install new software. These contracts permeate and govern many relationships in our life, but who actually reads all of them. According to people who study this stuff, it would take between 200 and 250 hours a year to read all of the EULAs that we need to agree to in order to go on with our lives. My guess is not many people do. Other people who study these things found that the average EULA for a top 50 software product at download.com came in at 2,752 words. Adobe Reader came out on top at a whopping 9,313 words (or 41 double spaced pages). These “other people” also determined it would take 13 minutes to read the average EULA in download.com’s top 50 list. With all of this in view, it would appear that we agree to between 923 and 1,154 EULAs each year. Since we aren’t all agreeing to all of the same EULAs, use your imagination, and without too much of a stretch you can quickly realize that there are a lot of EULAs floating about.
Now, someone has to draft these EULAs. That could be big bucks for niche lawyers specializing in these documents. So why is it that game developers would only pay a lawyer $5 for a document that governs the entire relationships between the software developer and its users? If you don’t want to watch the hyperlinked video, these developers and industry experts say that Lawyers are abusing the copy and paste functions of their word processors.
I was skeptical of this claim and embarked on a journey into the land of quasi-science by taking a non-random sample of “user generated content” clauses from EULAs accompanying video-games that I was familiar with. In my Saturday afternoon study I found that Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive, and 2K Games all used the exact same clause.
So what does this mean?
Well, first it means that I need to brush up on my scientific methods.
More broadly, this suggests that the industry may be moving towards standardization of EULAs through the legal profession’s unwillingness to innovate. Of course, I may have merely stumbled upon three EULAs drafted by the same individual, in which case we would expect a certain level of copying (what lawyer doesn’t want to use a precedent?). If the former is true, this may be a good thing for consumers. Continual use of standardized or copied clauses would increase the probability of having a consumer knowing what he or she was agreeing to even if that particular EULA was not read. Wouldn’t it be great if we could read one EULA to rule them all?
Unfortunately, if this trend is true, my dream of building a niche market of drafting EULAs for video game developers may be going down the drain. At $5 a pop, my hard efforts of hitting copy and paste would barely recoup the printing costs for all those EULAs. Thank goodness for paperless offices.
Professor Ronald Deibert of U of T is one of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable academics in the world on the subjects of internet censorship,surveillance and information warfare. His latest book is “Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace” published in May 2013. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the ubiquity and relevance of those issues to all of digital media, even including networked gaming, is undeniable. Feel very privileged to be a discussant on his presentation. Poster with all the details below:
Andy Moore will be joining us as a Guest Commentator in class next week. Andy is a programmer by trade (but a teacher at heart), and has helped game studios and other digital-media companies as a consultant, contractor, and specialist; focusing in the fields of rapid development, prototyping, data collection & analysis, and the “lean startup” pivot-style project management. He developed productivity-applications for ten years before going all-in on independent video game creation in 2008, opening his studio Radial Games. Within a year he produced the SteamBirds franchise, an award-winning free-to-play turn-based strategy game; and subsequently launched the critically acclaimed title Monster Loves You! on Steam. Currently, Andy is working on future games for the Steam and mobile platforms.
Having done all of this, Andy is particularly well placed to provide context and commentary to next weeks subject of “Controlling Originality”. Andy will join us for the entire class and will be adding his views throughout, in addition to a presentation in which he will stake out his initial perspectives.
Last year as a bit of a lark wrote up an exam question (yes, in a non exam course). Though it looks like the tech involved is not being incorporated into the next generation of gaming hardware, the issues are still live ones. As they may inspire a paper (or two) am posting the faux “exam question” here:
“Both Sony & Microsoft have apparently developed used-game blocking mechanisms for their upcoming consoles. Please advise the on the legalities of their possible implementations, paying particular attention to Video Game Law cases involving interoperability as well as competition law/anti-trust questions. Consider also the law relating to hardware and software mods, as well as such freedom of expression/speech issues as you may be able to identify.”
Check out theVideos of Interest to Law 423 on YouTube 
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