Off-Topic Opinion: Too Much Orchestral Game Music

Just a quick thought: I believe that too many games now have big-name orchestras playing their music. It seems like games with a large enough budget just decide "Why not?" and hire one. Don't get me wrong, several first-person shooters like Halo should just stick with the orchestras so they don't end up with Dynasty Warriors-esque lame rock. I actually think Half-Life handles their music pretty well, with none for the majority of the game with special (non-orchestral) music suddenly coming up at tense points in the game. However, Ratchet & Clank should not have orchestral music. It's soft, unobtrusive, and completely forgettable, and I don't like that. I actually liked the one-man-with-a-computer compositions featured in similar 3D platformers like Spyro the Dragon that were sort of cool and at least could be heard. I know somebody will disagree with me, so go ahead and tell me so.

Studying Studies: Gender Differences in Gamers

Originally via GamePolitics, I came upon the recent Stanford University study that said men are more likely to become addicted to video games than women. Quote from the press release:

"Allan Reiss, MD, and his colleagues have a pretty good idea why your husband or boyfriend can’t put down the Halo 3. In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, the Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play."

Format

I thought at least "the Halo 3" should amuse some of you. Anyway, twenty-two people, evenly divided in gender, were given a game to play involving balls and a line across the middle of the viewing ground (you may as well just look at it in the original Stanford link up at the top.) A constant stream of balls come towards the middle line, and the line will move left if hit by a ball and move right if the balls are far enough away from it. The participants were only told to click as many balls as they could, removing them from the screen, but everyone quickly found out that their "territory" to the left of the middle line had to be increased to "win".

Results

The results came in roughly equal for the genders in number of balls clicked, but the men came out with more territory than the women, by identifying the balls closest to the wall as needing to be clicked first. According to Alan Reiss, “The females ‘got’ the game, and they moved the wall in the direction you would expect. They appeared motivated to succeed at the game. The males were just a lot more motivated to succeed.” After looking at the visuals for brain activity from the fMRI the players were hooked to, the researchers noticed increased activity in the area of the brain representing both reward and addiction for whoever ended up with more territory, meaning, the males.

My Response

So the conclusion that made the headlines and became more general and underexplained with each repeated telling was "Men more addicted to video games". I have a couple of issues with the study, which I discussed here at VG Researcher alongside Wai Yen Tang's write-up about the study. My main issue was likely the fact that the researchers claimed this game was "a fairly representative, generic computer game." Boiling down video games into this one simplistic tech demo-level program seems unfair, though I understand it's necessary that the experiment eliminate as many variables as possible. The game, in the end, doesn't represent video games so much as goal-oriented activities due to its abstract nature. Therefore, I think that a better conclusion would likely be "men are more addicted to achieving abstract goals" instead of video games. It mostly makes me wonder if the same brain visual results would occur from, say, scoring in a sport or winning at roulette in a comparison between genders.

Another interesting point we happened upon in our discussion at VG Researcher was that games without specific goals tend to be the ones stereotypically associated with girl gamers. The Sims and the various match-three puzzle games are often associated with girl gamers, and at least The Sims doesn't have a specific goal the player must reach. The puzzle games don't especially either, with more of a vague infinite points system than levels or worlds to beat. One can never "beat" Tetris or Bejewled especially, and girls seem to have an easier time obsessing over it than Civilization IV.

The Stanford research team said they planned to do more research in the area, which is definitely what I'm looking for. It's an interesting topic, and it's not likely to lead to laws being passed against gaming, so I'm all for it. I still have some concerns about the findings that will need more study to resolve.

Off-Topic Tuesday: New Google Map

Tuesdays will, in the future, tend to be more off-topic than even this, but today I began making a Google Map for gaming controversies to complement my Gaming Around the World Monday feature. I haven't quite decided where I'll put it yet, but here it is, if everything's working correctly:



View Larger Map

The State of the Union: Gaming 'Round the World

America isn't everything, even though Super Tuesday is tomorrow, but other countries have gaming controversies as well. Some of them have it even worse off, despite the fact there's no Thompson, Clinton, Romney, or Lieberman in their country. I'll quickly summarize the state of gaming in several other countries recently.


China: As GamePolitics reported today on a very old blog post from Henry Jenkins of MIT, China doesn't care so much as the United States about violence in video games so much as "gaming addiction". The notion of gaming addiction is supposed to loosen traditional family and community bonds and decrease productivity, and Jenkins argues that it benefits China to build the concept of an addiction to gaming. This would provide justification for China's increasingly restrictive policies on the internet and video games. China has banned all sorts of things online and modified a few others: China has banned children from internet cafes, imposed time restrictions on visiting those cafes, banned certain games for showing China didn't always belong to the current regime, and forced Google to support the great firewall. As capitalist of a communist country China is, they're still really restrictive about the internet, putting them at about the worst civilized country to be in if you're a gamer.

Germany: Germany has a strange couple of rulings on games as well. First of all, they don't allow any swastikas in their games or anything that's "not art", which is way more trouble than it's worth, but not very important. In a very strange decision, Half-Life was forced to tone the entire game down by a lot, resulting in robots instead of marines, no blood, vanishing enemies, and other nonsense.

Greece: Alright, this is the worst country for a gamer in the world, assuming you're not in a third-world country. In 2002, Greece right-out outlawed gaming. Nothing from solitaire to Brain Age could be played in Greece, even by foreigners just arriving in the nation. There was obviously a tremendous outcry, and the ban was reduced to only apply to internet cafes in December 2003. That was a close one.

Finland: Another recent story from GamePolitics, the Finnish Christian Democrats are asking for an extra screening process on video games to be doubly sure they don't have any hidden bad things. The Finnish Games and Multimedia Association was quick to say that the process is really rather unnecessary and would simply hurt the industry by giving Finnish gamers a reason to buy their games from elsewhere while they face delays and possible censorship, sidestepping the extra process. I wouldn't expect this to go anywhere especially, it's just a party considering the motion, but I'm not exactly up on my Finnish politics, either.

South Korea: Take China's information, and tone it down a lot. South Korea has banned several of the usual violent video games like Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt, but also has a slight issue with games involving the two Koreas. Mercenaries, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell have all been banned due to either showing North and South Korea at war or destroying Korean land in the games.

Rockstar Braces for Impact Over GTA IV

Dan Houser, writer for GTA IV, stated in a Yahoo interview that he's, understandably, certain that this installment of the series will bring as much or more trouble than the last ones. He especially fears that the drunk driving and strip clubs are going to cause the most trouble, besides the whole batch of old features to the game. Houser said "I expect [controversy] because we've had so much of it in the past. I wish people would treat video games the same as other media. They seem to not want to do that for reasons that I don't understand. It's a convenient enemy for people." Grand Theft Auto really seems to me sort of mellow compared to some games out there now like Saint's Row, but GTA is cursed to receive the public outcry, as is anything put out by Rockstar until, I don't know, they release a Reading Rainbow game series.

All Together Now: 1/26/08 - 2/1/08

1/26/08 - Cooper Lawrence apologizes for her role in the FOX Mass Effect scandal.

1/27/08 - My most popular post by far, a list of the last year and a half's studies on gaming's effect on humans.

1/28/08 - Jack Thompson is revealed to think the Mass Effect scandal is silly and contrived.

1/30/08 - Grand Theft Auto is being blamed again for violence. Hardly news, is it?

1/31/08 - Cooper Lawrence sticks by the University of Maryland study she cited, which is a good idea for her because the study can't be read without paying for it.

The Never-Ending Story: Cooper Clarifies

Cooper Lawrence has talked to MTV, now, and she sort of backs down but is still really irritating ("Expert Backs Down..." shouldn't be the title of an article about the fact that she wasn't an expert, but anyway). She stands by the University of Maryland research she cited that no one had ever heard of. You can't actually read the research without being someone or paying, though, so I still can't ascertain whether she was fair about it or not. Gamepolitics.com now has a poll asking if gamers should forgive Cooper now, and I'm still torn in a way. There's not a whole lot of material given in the MTV News report, but it doesn't sound as apologetic as I'd like it to be. I wouldn't keep "reviewing" her books or anything, but I seriously doubt, if it were actually possible, that a gamer apology would be appropriate as of yet.