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Education Medicine Games

New Study Links Video Games and Mental Problems 306

Posted by CmdrTaco from the think-of-the-children dept.
eldavojohn writes "A new study published today in Pediatrics Journal conducted in Singapore on three thousand children in grades third, fourth, seventh and eighth claims that one in ten are video game addicts and almost all of those suffer mental health problems. This comes conveniently after the suspect in the Tucson shooting has widely been reported as an online gamer. Among the accusations from the study are that playing video games leads to lower school performance and fewer social skills while exacerbating existing depression, anxiety and social phobias. Gamasutra reports that the Entertainment Software Alliance is already criticizing this study, saying, 'Its definition of "pathological gaming" is neither scientifically nor medically accepted and the type of measure used has been criticized by other scholars. Other outcomes are also measured using dubious instruments when well-validated tools are readily available. In addition, because the effect sizes of the outcomes are mainly trivial, it leaves open the possibility the author is simply interpreting things as negatively as possible.' It seems that the doctors are still disagreeing on whether or not gaming causes problems."
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New Study Links Video Games and Mental Problems More

New Study Links Video Games and Mental Problems

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  • The Tucson Shooter... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17, 2011 @08:59AM (#34903714)

    ..Was reportedly walking. Now we need a study that links walking with mental problems!

    • Re:The Tucson Shooter... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SerpentMage ( 13390 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:09AM (#34903790)

      This is the kind of crap that keeps people from thinking straight. Video games do affect people. If you play them every now and then its normal. BUT if you play them to the point where you can't pry yourself away from them, then you have problems. For example if I eat like a pig and can't stop eating nobody would ever say, "oh no problem there." Or if you read, read, and read, and read to the point where you drone out reality everybody would say, "oh there is a problem." So why on this green earth can't people in slashdot admit that if you overdose on gaming then you have a problem!!!! Addiction, is an addiction and gaming is a vent for that addiction.

      • Re:The Tucson Shooter... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Cwix ( 1671282 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:15AM (#34903830)

        Hell, this study was nothing more then a survey anyways.. from the Reuters article...

        In the study, teachers handed out questionnaires to students in the third, fourth, seventh and eighth grades, including questions about their gaming habits, social skills, school performance and depression.
        The kids also answered ten questions to find out if they were addicted to gaming — so-called "pathological" gamers. If they answered half in the positive, they got the label.
        The questions included things like having neglected household chores to spend more time on video games, doing poorly on a school assignment or test as a result, or playing video games to escape from problems or bad feelings.

        • Same as the study that "Finds Video Games Are Not Bad for Kids."

          You are just cherry picking the studies you want to believe are true.

          • Re:The Tucson Shooter... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Cwix ( 1671282 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:45AM (#34904046)

            Which study would that be?

            I will gladly mock it also if it does the same or similar things.

            Giving children a questionnaire, to see if they are "pathological gamers" where they only have to answer yes to 5 questions, is NOT a scientific study.

            It does NOT fit the description of a "study". A study would monitor the children over a period of time, and use a guideline for what makes an answer yes or no.

            This "study" is bullshit.

            • I don't believe there is any generally agreed-upon definition of what actually constitutes a "study", so: caveat lector. (Of course the media just want your attention, so they'll usually publish this kind of crap without scrutiny, but I digress...)

        • Re:The Tucson Shooter... (Score:5, Funny)

          by Kelbear ( 870538 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:40AM (#34904004)

          Sheesh, they might as well have asked:

          "Have you ever put off doing something that sucks in favor of doing something you like?"

          A) Yes
          B) I'm an addict
          C) I have a problem
          D) I have mental health issues.
          E) All of the above

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by xaxa ( 988988 )

            There's a difference between avoiding stacking the dishwasher because you'd rather watch your favourite TV show, and never doing any washing because there's always another TV show to watch.

            Or not going out to see your "real life" friends once because there's a big WoW game planned, and not leaving the house for three months because you're playing it every night.

            A better question is "do you find yourself regularly putting off important activities because you want to do something else", followed by "does this

            • Maybe, but I don't get the impression that the survey actually delved into that kind of details.

              The question wasn't if you've played games to the point that you have to be dragged kicking and screamin to do homework or any chores, but rather whether you've done it at all. Which, yes, glosses over that important difference.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by maxwell demon ( 590494 )

              There's a difference between avoiding stacking the dishwasher because you'd rather watch your favourite TV show, and never doing any washing because there's always another TV show to watch.

              But if he doesn't stack the dishwasher because of the TV show, then doesn't stack the dishwasher because he wants to play that video game, then he doesn't stack the dishwasher because he reads Slashdot, and then he doesn't stack the dishwasher because he just found this comic book, ... is he then addicted to TV, to the in

          • Actually, you illustrate an even bigger problem (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @10:36AM (#34904586) Journal

            Actually, it seems to me you illustrate an even bigger problem.

            The way I remember it, a correlation in statistics (as opposed to the usual "I have a couple of anecdotes and watch me leap to a conclusion") involve looking at the covariance of two variables vs their normal distribution for _both_ variables. Even in binary terms, you'd have to look at the set of people who, say, do bad in school, people who play games, and the intersection. Though a more useful correlation would look at something like SAT grades vs hours played, or some such.

            And even then, you know, actual measured variables than someone's self-assessment. See for example Dunning Krueger for one problem with self-assessments.

            Basically you don't have to look at just how many people skipped school for gaming, but basically at whether you're seeing more than the product of two unrelated probabilities. The relevant question is, basically, are people who play video games more likely to skip school than those who don't?

            What I'm getting at is that asking "have you ever skipped school to play a game?" without also asking "have you ever skipped school?" is pretty worthless. A questionnaire like yours which asks, or _also_ asks, about the distribution of that variable without the conditional, would actually be a better exercise.

            IOW, asking just "have you ever skipped school to play a game?" will produce a semblance of a correlation just because there is no way to say, "does it count if I skipped school to smoke behind the school instead?" It's like asking "have you ever masturbated in the bathroom?" and concluding that bathrooms cause masturbation. It's not a real covariance if they're together simply because the question is phrased to only allow a "yes" if they appear together.

            • people who, say, do bad in school, people who play games, and the intersection. Though a more useful correlation would look at something like SAT grades vs hours played, or some such.

              Bingo! Doing well in school is an indicator of one's social prowess, not necessarily one's intellect. Therefore, an awkward intelligent kid can do poorly in school but feel cast out socially. So he plays WoW and D&D and Magic and other things that people like him like. Then when he gets a C in class (because school, many times, is about social conformity and not actual intelligence), people blame his weird hobbies.

        • Re:The Tucson Shooter... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Creepy ( 93888 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @10:08AM (#34904270) Journal

          Yep, and also what isn't mentioned is that Douglas Gentile, the lead publisher of the paper, is the former director of research for the National Institute for Media and the Family [wikipedia.org] an anti-video game group that has since dissolved. That group was given an "F" by the ESRB for "inaccuracies, incomplete and misleading statements, omission of material facts, and flawed research."

          I've called out this guy's "research" as flawed multiple times - how does this prove that video games cause depression? It doesn't - you can't tell whether the depression is caused by excessive video games or if depressed people tend to play more video games. This guy's a quack and nothing is proven here.

        • It's even more perverse than that, even if you assume that all kids answered 100% truthfully and objectively. (Yeah, right.)

          Let's say you ask a few thousands people how many miles they drove in the last year. Then you ask something like "did a bird ever crap on your windshield while driving?" That conditional right there is what you can do a pseudo-correlation for morons with. Of course the guys who drove only 1000 miles will be a lot less likely to say "yes" than the ones who drove 100,000 miles. So, there

      • Re:The Tucson Shooter... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by biryokumaru ( 822262 ) <biryokumaru@gmail.com> on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:16AM (#34903840)
        And if you walk, walk, walk to the point where that's all you do and drone out all reality, maybe that's a problem too, as the AC suggested. We might even find that gaming itself isn't even a statistically significant factor, and that the addiction component will take affect regardless of what the subject becomes addicted to. That might actually show that, as many here would suggest, gaming itself is not a problem at all.
        • Right because everyone on slashdot is a mental health expert.

          You believe what you want to believe.
        • Unfortunately, the media outlets can't wrap that up with a bow and sell it. "Video Games are teh Ev1l" might sell additional copies. Pointing out that "Jane is a bookworm, and reads to escape society," or "Bobby is addicted to model railroading" just makes people shrug and look at you funny. In high school, eons ago, before fire had been invented, I had a friend on the track team. He was effectively addicted to running. Eat, sleep, run ... that pretty much described his life. Note that there wasn't a

        • Or maybe doing something that is really fun for long periods of time might look like an addiction to people who like to go to lots of meetings and feel really important about themselves.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:17AM (#34903844)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by xaxa ( 988988 )

          Possibly we could find that different addictions have different effects in the real world. For instance, eating might just make you fat, but gaming or reading violent stories might make you more violent, whereas posting all day to a forum or reading some other kind of books might make you suicidal.

          (I'm not suggesting this is true, just suggesting that gaming could cause more problems than some other addictions. The man might have got violent because he became absorbed in violent media.)

          • That's exactly CRCulver's point though, is that there is no correlation like that defined yet, and that making these speculations are completely useless because we won't know until we gather all the evidence. Addictive eating is often deeply rooted in forms of depression, and then it ends up being worse because they'll be even more depressed that they are gaining weight, and this feedback cycle seems far more prone to lead to suicide than simply someone reading a book. See how easy it is to turn any addicti

      • Re:The Tucson Shooter... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:23AM (#34903890) Journal
        It seems that the claim is a tautology anyway. If you're addicted to anything, then you have a mental problem. People who have a specific mental problem have are a subset of people who have mental problems! Shock and amazement!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tixxit ( 1107127 )
        It is a chicken and egg problem. I think the main question is if gaming is the cause or a symptom of the issue. The "think of the children" crowd seem to believe the former, that video games make people go nuts. Others think it is the latter, that video gaming is merely one manifestation of a kid's depression or mental problems. It is probably a bit of both, w/ video games letting one feed the other.

        • Give it another 20 of 30 years till the current old folk die off.
          Then we'll be the old folk and it will be obvious to us that gaming is perfectly fine just like classical music,books,radio,silent movies,talkies, colour movies, black and white television and colour television.

          but those new fangled brain implant vivispecs are certainly going to destroy the next generations morals!

      • Video games do affect people.

        Unfortunately, that's not true in the least. Both games and TV absolutely can negatively and positively affect people. As can music. The problem is, it doesn't affect ALL people nor does it affect them the same way. And that seems to be what confuses so many people. When you have people who already suffer from some type of social or mental issue, they are far more likely to find escapes and rationalizations within their escapes. Furthermore, in the pursuit of their escape, as mentioned, they tend to disenga

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        Perhaps you should read what you've just written...

        Nobody here doubts that _excessive_ gaming is harmful, just like any other action that is done _excessively_ is harmful. See the connection? It's the action being done EXCESSIVELY that is the problem.

        What we don't like is it being stated in a way that makes people think ANY kind of gaming would be harmful.

      • So in other words they haven't found a direct link between video games and mental health problems, they've found a link between addiction and mental health problems. Considering that addiction is a mental health problem, I'm not entirely surprised by this.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jandersen ( 462034 )

      ..Was reportedly walking. Now we need a study that links walking with mental problems!

      Oh dear, yet another of the "because I can dream up a silly example I have now disproved ..." sort comments.

      Or the slightly more informed comment: "Correlation is not causation". Friends, I think we are beginning to approach the point where can't honestly reject that there is some sort of causation going on; if there were just 1 - 10 studies showing a correlation, yes, but we are talking an ever increasing number of studies, and not only that, but there are other studies that supplement the suspicion, that

      • Sure, violent media will make an already violent person worse, but it tends not to do anything to someone who can understand why what they do in the game is wrong in society.

        I might bring up a point raised in bowling for columbine (not saying Michael Moore is good, just that he has a point in saying..) that the kids went bowling shortly before the attack. Nobody's going after bowling.

        Attacks on gaming and say, rock music tend to be attacks of desperation, looking for someone else to blame. Video games have

    • 1/10th of ppl are subject to mental deficiencies of some sort
      Because of that 1/10th, we cannot drink in the street, smoke cannabis, drive fast, etc...mostly because that small fringe of the population cannot cope with it.

      So I propose we start discriminating on those 1/10th of the population and stop making the live of the 9/10th miserable. Wanna smoke dope ? have a psy check. Wanna drive fast ? have a "left lane permit". Wanna drink in the street ? "pass a binge check and prove you are not agressive when yo

  • Video games are still the lesser evil (Score:5, Insightful)

    by whiteboy86 ( 1930018 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:00AM (#34903718)
    Video games are way better then let your siblings lurk in the hood, take drugs, smoke or drink alcohol.

  • If somebody did a study that discovered that video games are harmless fun, do you think it would get published? Do you think those who authored the study would get future funding, or tenure?

  • The other way around? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pentadecagon ( 1926186 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:03AM (#34903742)
    Could it be the other way around? Maybe people with this kind of mental health problems are likely to become addicted to video games.

    • Re:The other way around? (Score:4, Informative)

      by tronbradia ( 961235 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:31AM (#34903962)
      The study was longitudinal, meaning that they could follow the kids around and look at the order in which things happen. This means that they were able to show that lower social competence and greater impulsivity were predictors (ahead of the fact) of 'pathological' gaming, and that depression, anxiety, social phobias, and lower school performance were seen to increase within subjects who developed pathological gaming, after they developed pathological gaming. Since causation probably doesn't run backwards in time, this actually is evidence that pathological gaming caused the problems, rather than being caused by them or being comorbid with them.

      • Re:The other way around? (Score:5, Informative)

        by coldsalmon ( 946941 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:40AM (#34903998)

        Yes, the study does actually have a reasonable basis to claim causality. It also does say that people with this kind of mental health problems are likely to become addicted to video games. It only claims exacerbation of existing mental health problems, not creation of the problems.

    • It might even be a positive thing - we don't have the figures to show how those people fit into society previously. I find it difficult to believe that, before the advent of games, such people set aside their mental issues and slotted into society without a hitch. More likely they found worse ways to sate their addictive behaviours - drugs, drink, cigarettes, self harm. Without knowing all the facts, who is to say that it's not a good thing that games are helping to identify people who can benefit from supp

  • Correlation =/= causation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by harperska ( 1376103 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:03AM (#34903746)
    Or, you know, it could be that people with mental problems also have a predisposition to become video game addicts.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cacba ( 1831766 )
      It seems they have defined a video game addict in such a way that it implies you are mentally ill. The real question is how many mentally ill arent video game addicts. Which makes this a study on how prevalent video games are amongst the mentally ill.

    • Re:Correlation =/= causation (Score:4, Funny)

      by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) * on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:25AM (#34903916) Journal

      it could be that people with mental problems also have a predisposition to become video game addicts.

      My wife said this very thing when she took away my Xbox just because I hadn't bathed or eaten anything but protein bars and diet coke for 2 weeks.

      I think it was when I ordered a catheter online that she finally put her foot down.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Maria D ( 264552 )

      There are studies confirming that people with emotional problems are more predisposed to play some types of games. Moreover, video games can be therapeutic, helping players cope with their problems, especially where other support isn't available.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by arivanov ( 12034 )

      Or, you know, it could be that people with mental problems also have a predisposition to become addicts.

      Fixed that for ya.

      It can be gambling, it can be alcohol, it can be drugs and it can be MMO or first person shooters.

  • Considering that Singapore is a country that will cane you for the most minor littering, spitting, or other innocuous offenses, I wonder how much higher the incidence of mental illness would be in that 10% if they didn't have an avenue to blow off steam.

  • I'm getting sick of these "studies" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ewhenn ( 647989 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:04AM (#34903754)
    I bet 8 in 10 of these school shooters have bicycles too. Why aren't they focused on the obvious bicycle problem?

    Correlation is not causation. When will they figure this out?
    • "8 in 10 school shooters known to be bicycle owners" sounds like a great Onion article.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )
      And correlation does not, as most slashdotters seem to think, disprove causation. As a lifelong gamer I think it's ridiculous to think that in some cases video games can't exacerbate mental issues.

      • Re:I'm getting sick of these "studies" (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:28AM (#34903940) Journal

        I don't think anyone is claiming that it disproves causation. The classic example is a study that surveyed young children showed a correlation between reading age and shoe size. It was a very accurate correlation - there were very few outliers who didn't have a reading age that you could predict from their shoe size with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

        Of course, children in the age group surveyed were all still growing, so both reading age and shoe size were correlated with age. Older children had been growing for longer (so had larger feet) and had been reading for longer (so had a higher reading age).

        Any half-competent statistician would obviously spot this, but many of these 'x is correlated with y' stories have a correlation no more valid than this, but are presented as 'x causes y'.

    • Forget bicycles - a lot of the school shooters in the United States enjoyed bowling. We clearly need to ban bowling immediate!

    • I bet 8 in 10 of these school shooters have bicycles too. Why aren't they focused on the obvious bicycle problem?

      Who will win? I will pay top dollar to watch that match . . .

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      Yes and not everyone that smokes gets cancer and some people get lung cancer without smoking but they all drink water I bet they all drink water. So smoking isn't the problem water is.
      So any study that shows that video gaming may contribute to people having problems must be false because you do not like it? Sorry but I do not buy it. As games get more and more realistic they will tend to effect people more and more like real situations. I am not a big gamer but I can tell you that when I am shooti

  • An Escape (Score:4, Insightful)

    by crow_t_robot ( 528562 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:06AM (#34903764)
    Gaming, like alcohol and drugs is an escape. It's an escape from reality that is regularly used by people with mental problems. I don't have any evidence but I am hard-pressed to believe that games cause this condition.

    • Re:An Escape (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ewhenn ( 647989 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:14AM (#34903822)
      Not only that, it's a popular thing to do. *Lots* of people play video games. It's as ubiquitous as watching a movie or talking on the telephone. Just by raw numbers alone, some of the people that play them might have a mental condition, it doesn't mean it's the games fault. All it means is popular activities are popular.

  • Fast-food eaters and fast-food chains are protesting against "eating too much shitty food can make you morbidly obese" study.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      And right they are. That statement is so broad, a blind man without limbs couldn't miss it with a baseball even if he were looking the other way.

      Yes, eating too much food of low quality, a lot of people can and probably will become obese.

      Doesn't mean everyone will. Doesn't mean everybody who's obese ate too much food of low quality.

      To differentiate and being objective are priceless skills... as in: They could be free. Still, it's a commodity more rare than an intelligent mob. Hmm... maybe there's a correlat

  • As in cell-phone cancer, bad fat and bad guns, you can't prove a negative. This makes the topic a research grant magnet, so we'll be seeing this kind of garbage forever.
  • A new study published today on Slashdot conducted in my mind on hypothetical children in grades third, fourth, seventh and eighth claims that almost all of those suffer mental health problems.

    The video game part is irrelevant. Not as confident about the 3rd/4th graders but I don't know many middle school kids who aren't at least moderately depressed. They are in middle school, for christ's sake.

  • Sports (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RafaelAngel ( 249818 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:18AM (#34903856)

    I hear sports cause bodily harm. They also cause aggression. Being in sports competitively can also lead to steroid use. Playing a game leads to mental exercise. Sure, you're not moving much(unless it's Wii, Move, or Kinect), but I'd rather play make-believe games then come home with something broken. There should be a study on how sports affect teen aggression and how the competitiveness of sports lead to athletes doing things to their bodies that isn't healthy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by symes ( 835608 )
      There are studies linking cometitive sports with poor health. But what has that got to do with the paper? Unless you are trying to say other stuff harms kids so therefore gaming is ok. Which doesn't really help much.

      I do not thik the gaming community should be scared by this research and should welcome it. The reason is simple. It might be the case that some types of gaming, in terms of quantity or content, could have deleterious effects. And if we are able to work out exactly who is predisposed and what t

      • Than you are missing the point. If there were some kind of trigger in a video game, you'd see a lot more shootings happening, like one at every school across the country. The fact that ONE person had this problem and that video games might have put him in the state of violent rage, you really should be studying what causes that initial problem where a game can set off a trigger, as opposed to the trigger itself. I propose that had he enjoyed enough violent movies or books he might have also been pushed towa

    • There are a lot of articles that show that. Here's one, for example: Chow et al. (2009). Individual, team, and coach predictors of players' likelihood to aggress in youth soccer. Journal of sport & exercise psychology, 31, 425-443. The authors found that, "Using multilevel modeling, results demonstrated that the team norm for aggression at the athlete and team level were significant predictors of athletes' self likelihood to aggress scores. Further, coaches' game strategy efficacy emerged as a positive

  • Once again, a misleading Slashdot headline. The study does not claim that gaming causes mental problems. It claims that it can exacerbate existing depression, anxiety, and social phobia.

  • And he drank milk (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Goboxer ( 1821502 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:23AM (#34903896)
    Seriously though, I bet if you did a study on the number of men under 25 you would find that 90% play video games or have played video games (aka, what they call a gamer). It would be like saying that the gunman didn't like doing chores or had at some point attended a concert.

  • Obvious? (Score:3)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 ) <max@romantschuk.fi> on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:25AM (#34903912) Homepage

    People who feel bad inside want to escape reality. Some turn to games. Is this surprising?

    I'm betting the gaming is a symptom, not a cause. Not that I'd say it's harmless to escape into a game when you really need therapy.

  • Every time a shooting happens, it seems like video games are brought into the mix somehow. The news is reporting that this guy is "crazy", but what they aren't reporting is that there were TONS of people who KNEW is was totally nuts, and didn't report it. Then he was able to go to a Walmart to buy ammo (he actually got denied by 1 walmart and had to go to the next because the first realized something was "off" about him).

    Perhaps what we need is a National "You're Freakin' Nuts" Database, which will have to

  • Maybe it is because normal people do not play video games... (ducks!)
  • Any activity that displaces the individual's perception from reality has the potential to contribute to mental illness. Whether it is drugs, TV, online games or romance novels, susceptible people risk becoming wrapped up in a fantasy world. Most often the results are benign to the outside world, so the pathology goes unnoticed. It doesn't mean the problem doesn't affect and detract from the lives of many.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by vlm ( 69642 )

      Any activity that displaces the individual's perception from reality has the potential to contribute to mental illness. Whether it is drugs, TV, online games or romance novels, susceptible people risk becoming wrapped up in a fantasy world. Most often the results are benign to the outside world, so the pathology goes unnoticed. It doesn't mean the problem doesn't affect and detract from the lives of many.

      Don't forget that the "American Dream in Suburbia" is, itself, an equally profound displacement from reality. And comic books / rock music / DnD (old school with books and dice not online) / Rap music / Video Games are another displacement. Watching delusional believers on both sides fight each other about "truth" is about as insightful as listening to theological debates.

  • misreporting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Charliemopps ( 1157495 ) on Monday January 17, 2011 @09:54AM (#34904122)
    Lets get it strait... the Tuscan shooter played ONE online game called "earth empires" which was about as sophisticated as mafia wars. The only interesting part of this were the posts he made in that games forums. He was clearly mentally unhinged and as you read them you can see the community is totally confused about what he's posting. They aren't sure if he's a Troll, just stupid or bat shit crazy. Unfortunately it ended up being the latter.

    http://www.earthempires.com/jared-loughner-arizona-shooter-posts

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Speare ( 84249 )
      The shooter wasn't Tuscan ([tuss-can] from Tuscany, Italy). The shooter was from Tucson ([too-sahn] the second largest city in Arizona, USA). C before S. He is a Tucsonan (some people guess Tucsonian).
  • These kind of studies are fine, showing that there is a link between video games and mental problems, but careless interpretration and reporting of the data screws it all up. Surely it's obvious that people with mental problems, especially the people they studied, which have "depression, anxiety and social phobia", will withdraw from society and play video games OR some other solitary pastime. But that makes for a boring headline. So, it becomes, video gaming may cause mental problems, your child may be
  • As an avid gamer since the days of the Atari 2600, up through PC gaming, a good 30 years. I can honestly say that no amount of gaming has made me want to randomly shoot people. What medical or scientific research do I need to link those two, exactly none.
    According to wikipedia, yeah I know, take it with a grain of salt, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Singaporean [wikipedia.org] "74% of the population is Chinese" and that's as of 2009. Since we also know that Chinese are pretty much leading the way with computer ad

    • I have smelled a lot of smoke, but I never had the graving to smoke. I have drunk booze but never became an alcoholic. I have fallen hard to the ground but never broke a bone.

      Ergo, there are no smoking addicts, no alcoholics and no broken bones in the world since they never happpened to me, they can't happen to anyone.

      Anecdotes are NOT evidence.

      What seems odd to me is that most gamers will readily admit mood music exists, certain music can put you into a certain mood. But a game with mood music playing on f

  • This comes conveniently after the suspect in the Tucson shooting has widely been reported as an online gamer.

    Widely reported? This is the first time I've even heard this in relation to the Tucson shooter. Second, convenient timing? Maybe the submitter doesn't understand how scientific publishing works, but there is no way to time the release of your paper. You submit it months before it actually gets published, it gets sent out for peer-review, rejected, revised, resubmitted, ad nauseum.

  • The billing bible DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) they use is populated by popular vote. Not by any scientific conclusions. No blood work, etc.

    If you read the items in it you quickly get the idea they are simply trying to cover everything we do, which then makes it a cinch to say you need our services, which always means drugs. Which for them means a lot more money.

    According to the DSM jet lag is a disorder. So is it to be anxious, even bitter over loosing your job.

    How about o

  • The dude was caught in the act. I think "suspect" is more of the same newspeak we hear more and more. V.annoying.

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