Video games don’t create killers, new book says

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Playing video games does not turn children into deranged, blood-thirsty super-killers, according to a new book by a pair of Harvard researchers.

Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team at Harvard Medical School, detail their views in “Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do,” which came out last month and promises to reshape the debate on the effects of video games on kids.

“What I hope people realize is that there is no data to support the simple-minded concerns that video games cause violence,” Kutner told Reuters.

The pair reached that conclusion after conducting a two-year study of more than 1,200 middle-school children about their attitudes towards video games.

It was a different approach than most other studies, which have focused on laboratory experiments that attempt to use actions like ringing a loud buzzer as a measure of aggression.

“What we did that had rarely been done by other researchers was actually talk to the kids. It sounds bizarre but it hadn’t been done,” Kutner said.

They found that playing video games was a near-universal activity among children, and was often intensely social.

But the data did show a link between playing mature-rated games and aggressive behavior. The researchers found that 51 percent of boys who played M-rated games — the industry’s equivalent of an R-rated movie, meaning suitable for ages 17 and up — had been in a fight in the past year, compared to 28 percent of non-M-rated gamers.

The pattern was even stronger among girls, with 40 percent of those who played M-rated games having been in a fight in the past year, compared to just 14 percent for non-M players.

One of the most surprising things was how popular mature games were among girls. In fact, the “Grand Theft Auto” crime action series was the second-most played game behind “The Sims,” a sort of virtual dollhouse.

Kutner and Olson said further study is needed because the data shows only a correlation, not causation. It is unclear whether the games trigger aggression or if aggressive children are drawn to more violent games.

“It’s still a minority of kids who play violent video games a lot and get into fights. If you want a good description of 13-year-old kids who play violent video games, it’s your local soccer team,” Olson said.

The researchers also try to place video games in a larger context of popular culture. The anxiety many parents voice over video games largely mirrors the concerns raised when movies, comic books and television became popular.

“One thing I like about their approach is that they’ve tried to historicize the whole concept of a media controversy and that we’ve seen this before,” said Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech known for his studies on video games.

The book urges a common-sense approach that takes stock of the entire range of a child’s behavior. Frequent fighting, bad grades, and obsessive gaming can be signs for trouble.

“If you have, for example, a girl who plays 15 hours a week of exclusively violent video games, I’d be very concerned because it’s very unusual,” Kutner said.

“But for boys (the danger sign) is not playing video games at all, because it looks like for this generation, video games are a measure of social competence for boys.”

Many video game fans have embraced the pair as champions of the industry, a label that makes them uncomfortable.

“We’re not comfortable doing pro and con. We’ve been asked to do the pro-game side in debates, and I don’t consider myself a pro-game person. Video games are a medium,” Olson said.

GTA IV sells 6 million copies

After breaking records for first-day sales, GTA IV has continued that success, furthering it into this week. With less than 10 days behind the game going gold, GTA IV now has broken first-week sales records with an estimated 6 million copies sold worldwide. That represents half a billion in sales, and obviously is making both Take Two and Rockstar very happy.

The new game has sparked off a slew of controversies, from crazy lawyers to city officials and more. Despite that, people have swarmed to the game. Interestingly, a Take Two Chairman made the assertion that GTA IV, and perhaps other titles in the future, is surpassing movies and music for sales figures on a launch day. That’s quite a difference when we can all remember a time not too far back when video games were a drop in the bucket.

Gates: 140 Million copies of Vista sold

Despite Vista struggling with the public’s perception, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is touting the OS’ “rapid sales rate” saying 140 million copies have been sold thus far. Gates did not specify whether those were licenses, retail copies, or some combination of the two – but the latter is more likely.

The update is the first since the company crossed the 100 million mark at the end of last year, meaning Microsoft could be selling around 10 million copies of Vista per month – of course, a great portion of this stem from licenses for new computers as part of users’ regular upgrade cycles.

Things may not be as rosy on the Vista front as Microsoft would want us to believe, however, with around 160,000 people having signed an online petition asking the company to continue selling its predecessor until the next version of Windows is released. Not to mention Dell, HP and Lenovo are saying they will continue to sell XP past its June 30 sales cut-off date.