http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20023458-71.html?tag=cnetRiver
Does gaming, some wonder, turn teens into psychopaths? Or are
all teens, perhaps, just a little bit, you know, someplace
else?
During my regular reading of the journal
Pediatrics, I happened to
come across a study that sought to begin to answer some of these
torrid questions.
Researchers at Yale decided that it was about time someone tried
to establish concrete data around the notion that gaming affects
(or doesn't) the growing mind in a stunting kind of way.
So they anonymously surveyed more than 4,000 teens and asked
them about their gaming habits and other aspects of their lives. Of
those surveyed, 51.2 percent reported gaming.
Their conclusions have a rather bracing quality. It seems that
in boys, gaming is "largely normative" and "not associated with
many health factors," according to the results. Indeed, boys who
game even appear to smoke less than those who eschew the Xbox in favor of, say, street corners
and obscure remixes of Bowie.
In girls, however, the researchers found some more disturbing
links.
It seems that gaming was linked not only to some level of
fisticuffs among some girls, but also to carrying a weapon to
school. I was not aware that girls needed to carry a weapon to
school.
But Rani Desai, associate professor of psychiatry and
epidemiology and public health at Yale, was
quoted on Futurity.org as
saying: "The gender differences observed between gamers and
non-gamers suggest that girls may be gaming for different reasons
than boys."
The suggestion is not (at least not yet) that gaming causes
girls to punch people and take up arms. But there seems to be
something in those girls who game (about 29 percent of girls
reported gaming) that may imply a slightly more aggressive--or,
indeed, perhaps, defensive--streak than in the general
population.
One wonders just how many girls who might be fans of Kobe Bryant
might find his new, gun-toting ad for "Call of
Duty: Black Ops" an uplifting experience.