June 2010 Archives

A wiser man than myself once said that sometimes the best research just takes the time to prove that common sense actually makes sense.  Which is why I saw so thrilled to stumble across a bit of newly minted research dealing with video game violence.  Patrick and Charlotte Markey (professors at Villanova and Rutgers respectively) recently published an article that shows what the more open minded (ie horribly biased) of us have always believed.  In a woefully simplified
summary, video games are not the cause of violent behavior - personality problems are. 

I absolutely love the analogy the authors make between violent video games and peanuts -  potentially benign stimuli which can have very significant impacts on people because we process things differently. 


Check out the full article, "Vulnerability to Violent Video Games: A Review and Integration of Personality Research" which was published in the Review of General Psychology.




FlashBack

• If you have been a long time reader of the blog, you might remember Patrick Markey's name from a video I posted back in 2007 that dealt with similar research.  The recently published piece deals more with looking at specific personality factors that contribute to one's susceptibility to being affected by violent media. 
  

Video game themed rap music has almost always been a recipe for disaster - try not to act too stunned.  In fact, during my lifetime long love affair with rap music and video games, the ONLY decent game related rap song I can think of is Ice Cube's Street Fighter, but even that comes with a caveat that it was made for the painfully bad movie (which was based on the game) as opposed to the game itself. Professional rappers certainly play video games, but writing songs about them doesn't really earn you a whole lot of street cred.  And thus nearly all video game raps are from amateurs.  And wow has that led to a boat load of terrible.  Novel terrible, but terrible none the less.

So you can imagine my skepticism when my RSS reader laid upon my digital doorstep something called the "epic gaming history rap" from one Dan Bull.  I decided to give it a go, not because I had any belief that it would be good, but rather because laughing at things that are awful has become something of a hobby of mine. 

And was I ever pleasantly surprised. 

An original song, catchy song, with clever lyrics that actually does a nice job flowing through an individual's personally history of gaming?  Ladies and Gentlemen, I think we have a winner.  Though as a warning, it does have a bit of strong language for those of you who are sensitive to such things.