First, this article does not contain any humour and is in fact quite dry. Secondly, like it or not, nobody can accurately answer this question yet, but here I am going to present a scientific basis for getting closer to a definitive result.
My aim with this article is to point out the accuracies and flaws of current thinking and explain why these thoughts are accurate or flawed. To do this, one needs some qualification in the subject. I have experience with creating scientific tests and survey material, I am qualified in statistics and although I do not have a human sciences degree, I am somewhat self-taught in psychology including behavioral psychology – however I am in no sense an expert on that subject. I will try to keep this scientific and objective with personal opinion removed, and let you decide for yourselves.
Definition
In order to say whether video games corrupt children, we first have to define the meaning of corruption in terms that can be scientifically measured. You can produce no meaningful results without an accurate definition of what you are testing.
Is corruption the act of children becoming more violent and aggressive? If so, what defines aggression? How do you quantify aggression as a number that can be measured? How much change in aggression is needed for it to be deemed meaningful? Does short-term aggression count or does it have to be sustained over a period of time, months or years?
Psychologists have scales for this sort of thing such as the Caprara Irritability Scale and the Boss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire – specific behaviours map to specific numbers – but to the best of my knowledge at no time has the word corruption been narrowly defined in a video game test.
Sample selection
The sample is the group of all participants (children) in the test. The way the sample is selected is extremely important to ensure a fair and balanced result. There are two classic methods:
- Select people based on extremely narrow criteria to test a very specific group, minimising the number of factors involved that might blur the issue. For example: pick all 8-year old children, white males with middle class parents with a specific range of income, all living in the same district, two-parent families only, exclude children with pre-existing physical or mental conditions and so on. Keep each selection as close to identical as possible so that they are all pre-disposed in approximately the same way, to see if exposing them to violent or sexual video games affects the behaviour of individuals in this specific demographic group.
- Diversify as much as possible. Ignore all factors and take children from all different backgrounds and social groups, keeping only very basic factors such as age range similar. In this case, it is extremely important to try to keep the mix as even as possible. If 80% of the sample happens to belong to one-parent families and this happens to be a factor in altering their behaviour when exposed to video games, you are not going to get a balanced result, and you will have no way of knowing whether it was their background that made them aggressive or the games.
Some existing studies on video game corruption have managed to select samples properly, others haven’t.
Why does it matter? Well, when a scientific test is done, we run a statistical analysis on the results to see if there is any correlation between what the subjects were exposed to and their subsequent behaviour. Suppose in a very clear-cut example that 5 boys and 5 girls are selected. 4 of the girls had a history of depression and so did one of the boys. After being exposed to violent video games, all the girls went out and massacred people, but none of the boys did. Were the girls aggressive because they were girls? Or was it because they had a history of depression? Or was it because of some other factor we didn’t think of? There is no way to know; the best solution therefore is to minimise any differences in the sample group.