Instant Genius - Are video games good for us? - Pete Etchells

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

In this week's Science Focus Podcast, we dive into the world of video games. Over the past couple of decades, video games have often got a bad rap, blamed for everything from aggression and violence to addiction and mental health problems. But what does the research actually say? Dr Pete Etchells is a psychologist at Bath Spa University who researches the behavioural effects of video games. In his first book, Lost in a Good Game (£14.99, Icon Books), he gets to the bottom of our relationship with games, and reveals a more positive side to our game-playing habits. He speaks to BBC Science Focus staff writer James Lloyd. If you like what you hear, then please rate, review, and share with anybody you think might enjoy our podcast. You can also subscribe and leave us a review on your favourite podcast apps. Also, if there is anybody you’d like us to speak to, or a topic you want us to cover, then let us know on Twitter at @sciencefocus. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: What does it mean to be happy? – Helen Russell Why ASMR gives you tingles – Emma WhispersRed What we got wrong about pandas and teenagers What’s the deal with algorithms? – Hannah Fry Changing our behaviour with virtual reality – Jeremy Bailenson Project Discovery and its search for exoplanets Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. I very distinctly remember and a key point, like when I found out about his diagnosis and not long after he died, but I turned to video games as a sort of solace. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team

with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Sarah Rigby, the online assistant of BBC Science Focus magazine. This week, we dive into the world of video games. Over the past couple of decades, video games have often got a bad rap,

blamed for everything from aggression and violence to addiction and mental health problems. But what does the research actually say? Dr. Pete Etchells is a psychologist at Bath Spa University who researches the behavioural effects of video games. In his first book, Lost in a Good Game, he gets to the bottom of our relationship with games and reveals a more positive side to our game-playing habits. Here is our staff writer James Lloyd speaking to Pete.

So Pete, I was wondering, why did you decide to write a book about video games? What set you out on that journey? It's a really good question. So I didn't start off doing video game research back in the early days of the mid-200, 2008, 2008, 2010, I was doing work on vision research, vision psychology, so trying to understand how and why we make eye movements to things that are moving around us. I've been a gamer most of my life.

And the thing that kind of sparked my interest in doing research in this sort of area was just kind of really reading news stories around, quite worrying stories around how video games affect us. There's always one that really sticks in my mind. I think it's from around about 2011 where somebody was quoted in the news as saying that video games or computer games cause early onset dementia in kids. And it's not so much that I got annoyed

at those sorts of stories. It's just that I didn't quite understand why people were worrying about those aspects of games that there's no evidence for and there was no need to worry about really. It kind of came from a viewpoint that was really based in, somebody who'd not really approached video games

in their life before. And I think that's what piqued my interest really is that a lot of people who are scared about video games and the effects that they have probably don't have much experience of them. And that's understandable, really. If you've never played a video game before and you watch somebody playing a video game,

it looks like a really jarring experience, right? Somebody's staring at a screen. It looks quite solitary, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, it looks as though they're completely absorbed in it. it looks like they're doing it on their own, absolutely. And if you don't understand what's going on, it's no small wonder that people worry about that sort of experience. So it's kind of stories in the news like that that made me think,

well, you know, what do we know about how video games affect us? And that kind of spurred me into doing research that's primarily really stuck to the old question of whether playing violent video games causes aggression. But I do other work as well in terms of a little bit of work on addiction. and also work on screen time more generally. So the screens generally have any sort of positive or negative effect. Okay, so we'll come on to that in a minute.

I was going to ask, you said that you yourself are a gamer. When did your love for video games begin? I don't think I can pinpoint a specific time. I've always had video games around, really. I think the first, quote-un-unquote, gaming console, it wasn't really a console that I remember was I had an Atari ST, when I was really young, when it was about six or seven. It was more of a computer, obviously,

but I remember playing all sorts of games on that. I do remember having access to things like a Spectrum, ZX, when I was a little bit younger than that, and an Atari 520. But it's just something that I've always been around, really. So it's never felt as though there was a momentous moment where I wasn't playing video games before, and then I did start playing them.

It's just been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, really. So you mentioned there the link between video games and violence. That seems to be what causes the most controversy in the media. The games with a lot of graphic violence and gore. And there have been lots of headlines over the years linking video games to aggression and violence. What does the research actually say about this? Do you know what? It's a really hard question to answer from a scientific point of view.

I think one of the things that frustrates me the most about the perception around video games research is that, you know, I talk about what I do in the news quite a lot. you get quite sarcastic comments from people saying, you know, have you found a cure for cancer yet? And I get where they're coming from. It's the implication that, you know, games are sort of perceived to be a childish pastime and why would you as a scientist

waste your time on them? But two things to say about that. One is that actually I think it's really important to understand what the effects of games are because we are so worried about whether they're bad for us or good for us because so many people play them. The second thing is that actually is a science, it's really hard to do this sort of stuff, right?

So it's really hard to get somebody into a lab in a really controlled condition, set of conditions and give some people a violent game to play, say in other people a non-violent game. And for that to be really nicely controlled so that you can really just isolate the effects of violence and do that in such a way that you can be convinced that whatever effects on behaviour you do see

are, A, because of that violent content and B, long term. and it's very difficult to do that. So what kinds of studies are normally done then to test this link? There's generally sort of two types of studies. So there are experimental studies that try and test a causal link. So you selectively manipulate things like the violent content of games and see whether that has an effect on some sort of measure of aggression. And there are real problems with how we measure that.

Yeah, so I was going to ask, how do you actually go about measuring aggression in a lab? You know, obviously with someone in a lab, you're not going to get them to do aggressive acts or violent acts or talk. Yeah, well, that's the thing. When you read a lot of these papers, they often start by saying something along the lines of there was a, they might talk about a particular shooting in the US,

and there was a discussion and controversy around that shooting that suggested that the person who perpetrated that act of violence played a lot of violent video games. And therefore, it's an important societal question to answer because ideally we want to, if it's the case that playing a violent video games causes people to do that, then we want to be able to try and stop that from happening. That's the sort of aggression that a lot of people are talking about quite a lot,

but you can't measure that in a lab. You can't get people to beat each other up. It's just never going to get through ethical approval. So what we end up having to do is use what we call proxy measures of aggression. So things that look like aggressive behavior, but aren't people actually directly hurting each other. And that's where the problems start to come in. So one of the most common measures that people use in,

research is called the competitive reaction time task. So the basic setup here is that you get people to play a violent or a nonviolent game, whatever that means. And then you say afterwards, okay, we're going to do a different game now. We're going to take you into a room on your own and you're going to play a reaction time game. So basically something's going to pop up on the screen like a red blob or something. As soon as it does that, you've got to press the space bar as quickly as possible. You're going to be playing it against somebody else in a different room, somewhere else in the university.

that person actually in reality doesn't exist, it's all controlled by the computer. But there's a competitive element to it. So you're told that if you win, you get to punish your opponent by blasting them with a loud noise. If you lose, they get to punish you with the same thing. And you get to decide how loud the noise is and how long the blast lasts for. So that's the measure of aggression. So you're being more aggressive if you punish your opponent, as it were, with a louder noise for longer. The problem with that as a measure is that it is some form of aggression.

It's very different to beating people up or shooting people or being physically aggressive in the real world. But also there's a lot of flexibility in how we analyze and test that measure. So because you're testing two things, you're changing the loudness and the duration. What do you pick as your measure? Well, in some studies, they pick the average loudness across all of the trials of the experiment. some studies they take the average duration some studies they take the average loudness times the average duration in some studies you might just take the data from the very first trial in the experiment

because that's the only time where the participant will have won having never lost and you could argue that that's unprovoked aggression some studies take only the data from trials where the participant won but they lost the previous trial so you might call that retaliatory aggression Okay. Now the trouble with all of this is this is all well-engedged, but if you look at the data across all of the different ways in which you can analyze it,

a study that came out a few years ago did precisely this. They took a single data set, and they analyzed it in about 30 or 40 different ways that you find in the research literature. And the problem there that they found was that depending on the way that you analyze the same data, you can show anything from showing that violent video games really definitely do cause aggression

to that they definitely don't. and everything in between. So it's nothing to do with what's in the data itself. It's entirely down to the decisions that you make as a researcher about which analysis method to use. And then the follow-on problem with that, to get a little bit more nerdy, is that that, in theory, is fine, as long as there's a clear and logical, consistent rationale

for why you pick a certain analysis method. And that doesn't exist in the literature. So it's not clear why some researchers pick some methods and others pick other methods. So do we not really have any idea yet then on whether there is a link between aggression and video games? So the best research that we have, like with a lot of things in this sort of realm,

suggest that there are effects. So there are small effects of playing video games. I don't think anybody's suggesting that if you play a video game, it won't have any effect on you at all, because I think that would be unique. Literally everything that we do has an effect on us in some small way. The question is whether it's meaningful or not.

So the best research I think that we have so far, suggest that there are some small effects. There are some small correlations, but they're not things to worry about. So if you're worried about real-world physical aggression, if you're worried about mental health issues, like depression or anxiety, video games might play a very small factor in that,

but they're not something that you really want to concentrate on too much. There'll be other things that are much more important in terms of contributing factors. The other thing I was going to ask you about in relation to the possible downsides of video games is you mentioned something else which you look at in your research, which is the addictive side of them.

So last year, the World Health Organization classified gaming disorders as a mental health condition. But how addictive are video games really? I mean, as a game in myself, I get that urge, you know, you just want to complete the next level, you just want to spend a bit more time getting to the next bit of the game.

But obviously there's a difference between an urge and an actual proper addiction, I guess, isn't there? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot of complex issues going on here. And I think actually what you just said there is a really important one to tease apart that we worry about kind of compulsive behavior or that kind of urge to play the next level. But that's not addiction.

When we're talking about addiction in a clinical sense, it's a really serious, very debilitating disorder. When it comes to video games, the picture is not a clear one at all. Certainly in my mind, other scientists out there that would disagree with me. I think the problem is that if you talk about video games generally, that is such a broad church

that it sort of becomes a meaningless question to ask. Asking whether video games generally are addictive is probably not the right way to approach the subject because I think by and large the answer is no, generally. That's not to say that there aren't things to worry about about video games. So I think increasingly we are seeing

gambling-like mechanisms being introduced into games as a form of monetisation. So things like loot boxes, particularly in mobile games, in-app purchases and microtransactions. The way a lot of those work mimic the way

that things like fixed odds betting machines work. And I think that's a real worry. But then I think the argument is not so much that video games are addictive. It's these gambling mechanisms which we already know are addictive, which are being implemented in video games that's causing the problem.

So I think most scientists are in agreement that there is a small number of people of individuals out there for whom, if they play video games, it can become a problematic thing. It can become something that looks like an addiction and can cause harm in their lives. Where scientists disagree, I think,

is in what the prevalence of the prevalence, rates are, so what proportion of the gaming population might be susceptible to that, and actually even more fundamentally than that, what video game addiction looks like. So historically, if you look at how video game addiction research has played out over the past 30 years, it used things like gambling addiction questionnaires or substance use addiction questionnaires as a starting point. So basically what you do is take a questionnaire that says, you know, it has various sorts of questions about gambling. And you just replace the word gambling with gaming in there, right?

That's a really good starting point. It's completely reasonable to suggest that, you know, things, two kind of behavioral things might share similarities. But what sort of happened since then is rather than there be a real drive to understand what the unique aspects of video game addiction might look like, we've just kept reusing and reusing these questionnaires that are based on other sorts of disorders instead, without really thinking about what that might meet.

You know, if you have a scale, so really kind of facetious example, but if I have a one item questionnaire that says, do you think you're addicted to video games between zero and 10, people will put numbers on that, right? And then you can create an addiction scale, right,

and say, well, if you score more than six on this one item scale, you are addicted to video games. And then a certain portion of the population will show addiction to video games. But that's not actually measuring addiction to video games, right? And it's the same sort of issue

generally with literature. Like there are, there are criteria that the WHO uses, for instance, and the DSM, which is sort of the American version of the international classification of diseases that the WHO lists all of their disease criterion. So the American version came out a few years ago and listed internet gaming disorder as a potential disorder that warrants further research. And in both of those situations, one of the criteria was that you become preoccupied with video games. stop doing other hobbies instead. That kind of makes sense when you're talking about heroin, right? So if you start taking heroin, which has no negative effects, and you're doing that and you're not doing anything else that you used to do, you can see how that would be a bad thing.

But video games are a hobby, right? They're designed to be a hobby. They're designed to be immersive and interactive, and there's lots of different ways you can play them. So if somebody starts playing one thing and stops doing other things that are hobbies, is that a problem. If I started playing golf and I did that and stopped doing everything else, nobody would say I'd be addicted to golf. So we have this kind of fixation on video games being unique in that sense. So, you know, and obviously a lot of people will say that they play video games and they

don't really do anything else. So that sort of criterion has the potential to inflate the potential prevalence rate. And I think that's the problem that a lot of scientists have with how the WHO is proceeded with trying to include gaming disorders. I suppose video games can get to the extent, can't it, where it does have an impact on your relationship with people, an impact on your mental health, I suppose, if you do it too much? Absolutely. There is a potential for that. But the problem is that if you include these other criteria,

which then might capture a lot of people who don't have a problem with video games, but are suddenly classified as having a problem with video games. Two things happen. One is that you're over-diagnosing, so you're stigmatizing people because you're saying that they've got a disorder when they don't. That can cause all sorts of extra pressures on treatment services of which there are none that are evidence-based at the minute, really. But it also means that the people that do have an actual problem in video games

kind of get lost in the noise because you're not really specifically targeting those people. You're just targeting a much broader population. So we've talked quite a lot about the supposed downsides of video games. I was going to ask you, what are some of the ways in which video games can be benefit us. That's quite a big part of your book. You talk about some of the kind of psychological benefits that video games can have. So it's an interesting question.

And there's sort of two sides to this really. So one is, I think, there's such a backlash against video games. We see so much about the negative effects of them in the news that we end up sometimes seeing stuff that goes too far the other way. So we often see stories about, well, here are the unequivocal positive effects of benefits of video games. You know, they make, they improve our reaction times or they improve our hand-eye coordination or they improve our memory and things like that. There are studies out there that show that there are some benefits in terms of cognitive performance. But just in the way that I'm not convinced about the aggression effects, I'm not massively convinced about the positive effects literature as well. I think, again, because it's such a hard thing to study and to do properly, there's not that much in the way of good research.

So I think we're going to be really careful about cherry picking, right? So I think it's important not to say, look, all the bad, I'm going to be really critical about all the negative stuff and I'm going to be really uncritical about all the positive stuff. Because I don't think that that helps anyone really. I think in the book, the sorts of benefits that I talk about, a lot of them are kind of anecdotal in a way. And I think they're trying to push back against some of those misconceptions about what video games are. So for me, I always find it quite strange when people say that they think that playing video games is a really isolating experience. Because for me, video games have been one of the most connecting experiences that I can think of. You know, I play a lot of World of Warcraft.

I'm in a guild there, which is a group of players. I've known these people for seven or eight years now. And a lot of the time, I play the game. You know, sometimes I might not even play the game, right? I'm just sat there chatting to them. It's basically a glorified social network. and it's a way of keeping in touch and forming communities around people

that have similar interests to you and I think that's a really powerful and important thing. Finding ways to talk to people when actually you might otherwise be isolated is a really important thing that games can offer us. They increasingly, I think, are being used

in scientific research. So scientists are starting to realize that the immersive power that video games can have and they're leveraging that to answer some really important and complex questions around the human condition basically. So over the past few years, for example,

there's been a mobile game that's free to download, free to play called Sea Hero Quest, really nicely designed game where you navigate a little boat around a map. So the idea is you're kind of given a top-down view of the map to begin with, you've got to try and memorize that and then you've got to navigate to some waypoints afterwards. Actually, what's powering that,

is scientific research into trying to understand Alzheimer's disease in a way. So one of the things that goes wrong in Alzheimer's disease is spatial navigation, how you kind of figure out where to go in your environment. And annoyingly, we don't really have much information or much understanding of how that starts to go wrong. Because it's so difficult to diagnose Alzheimer's disease early on, you've got to kind of factor out other sorts of things that it might be. It also means that we don't have much of a handle on how that spatial navigation ability declines early on. We know what it's like in people who've got full-blown Alzheimer's disease.

We know what it's like in healthy populations. It's that transition that we don't know much about. So C-HeroQuest, the hope behind that was that we gather loads and loads of data from people right across the age demographic spectrum. And we can use that as a sort of database to try and understand what happens to spatial navigation abilities. over time. They've had millions and millions of players on this already. I think there were estimates of millions of years worth of data out there that they need to crunch. And we're starting to see some emerging results from it now, some really interesting stuff. So spatial navigation abilities seem to decline, start to decline much earlier in life than we initially thought.

There are interesting cultural differences. So they've done country by country analysis on this and found that depending on how oppressive certain cultures are towards women, you see stronger differences between men and women in terms of their spatial navigation abilities. So one thing that I always worry about with this is that this idea of gamification where basically scientists sometimes make a lab-based experiment and they make it kind of look like a game by adding a point-scoring element to something like that.

They tend to be really rubbish. Like, for people who play video games, you look at these things and they're really poor production values and they look really tacking. You think, well, it's not really a game. But we're starting to see a realisation that actually if you make really good games with high production values, you can communicate the science and do science in a really interesting and novel way. So you touched on it earlier, Pete, the ways in which video games had benefited you in your own life. I wanted if you could tell me a little bit more about the role that they played as you were. growing up, how they helped you with the things that you were going through at the time? Yeah, I think obviously it's going to be different for everybody who has their own kind of personal

experiences with games. I, for better or worse, I used games as a coping mechanism when I was younger. When I was 14, my dad died. He had motor neurone disease and I've been living with him and looking after him for about two years before that. And I very distilled. thinkly remember kind of key points, like when I found out about his diagnosis and not long after he died, that I turned to video games as a sort of solace. It's a very fine balance, I think, because I think there are some situations where some people have turned to video games and they've got completely lost in them and that's not necessarily a good thing.

For me, it's been a very positive thing. For me, it's been a way to allow my brain to sort of process something that kind of defies understanding really. So to just take a bit of a pause and say, look, I need to figure this out, but to try and do something in the background, as it were, to help with that at the time. So they've been immensely helpful for me in that sort of way.

I think we started to see more recently, more of an acknowledgement of the role, that sort of role that video games can play. And I think it's coupled with the fact that people are finding it easier to talk about mental health issues now. But we're starting to see games, that are built either based on the own

experiences of the developers themselves or to help them cope with either mental health issues or grief or loss. So I think, and we're starting to see big developers get involved in that as well. So I think EA have got a new game coming out seeing called Sea of Solitude

that tackles some of these ideas around loneliness and depression. So it'd be interesting to see how those sorts of things play out. So do you think it's the escape side of video games that give them these benefits then. I suppose movies, books, all these things we do in our leisure time. They're all a form of escapism really, aren't they?

Do you think video games offer more of an escape in a way? I think they can in the sense that you can get really involved in a movie and really empathise with the main characters, but you're still a sort of passive onlooker, whereas in video games you're actively, you are the main character. And that's quite an empowering thing. So, yeah, but I think people play games for different reasons. And I think even an individual person will play different games at different times for different reasons.

I got asked recently whether the social element of games is really important for me. And the answer to that is yes, because I play Warcraft. It's probably the game that I play the most. And there's a hugely social element to that. But, you know, there are also times where I just want to play a game on my own. and not really talk to anybody and just zone out for a bit. So I don't want all video games to have a social element because that would be horrible

because I'd never be able to get away from everybody. But sometimes I just like playing Zelda on my own and just experiencing that escape and going to another world. It's kind of like going on holiday for a little bit. So would you say that escapism is a positive thing generally? I think we've got to be careful about it because for me personally it's been a positive thing. I'm completely sympathetic to the viewpoint that for some people that can go quite wrong.

I think like anything in life, it's one of those situations where you've got to be moderate in the way that you do things. And I think you've got to be aware of what it is that you're doing. And with anything that we do, if you can kind of just have a little bit of a background commentary going on and just checking, you know, is this getting too much? It's good to be able to do that and to know when to stop. I don't think video games are unique in that sense but I don't think that we should be blasé about them either. So it seems like the world of science and psychology

is grappling still with quite a lot of issues around video games. We talked about the aggression, the violence issue, we talked about the addictive side. How do you think we can resolve these things and where would you like to see the conversation around video games go next? That's a really good question. I think one thing to begin with really is

that I would like to see video games researchers chill out with each other a little bit more. Certainly in the violent video game aggression research literature, there's quite a lot of viciousness. Ironically. Yeah, ironically. To the point that there was a paper that came out a few years ago

saying that had the title of something along lines of does doing violent media research make researchers violent somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But there's a lot of ad hom attack, I think, sometimes. And it's something that I talk about in the book and that there's been published commentaries where people say, you know, some people, some researchers believe that violent video games

don't cause aggression. Of course, also some people deny that the Holocaust happen. It's completely outrageous things to say that don't help the science as well. So I would like to see much more collaboration between scientists on different sites. I don't think it will happen. because I think we're too far beyond that.

But hopefully with the new generation researchers who are a little bit more open to that, we can move the conversation. I'd like to see scientists use more open research methods, so make their data and their materials and their analysis scripts available for other researchers to scrutinize because sometimes with the best intentions, we make mistakes.

Scientists are only human, right? We all make mistakes. I would also like to see more conversations between scientists and developers as well. So I think developers often hold quite a lot of data about how people, people are using their games. And I get that there are issues around industry confidentiality around that.

But I think opening the doors and being much more collaborative and collegiate about that will help everybody. I think it's unhelpful sometimes. And I know that there are people out there that would say, well, that's a risk because if you start doing research with games developers, there's going to be a massive conflict of interest there. There are ways in which you can mitigate the influence, the sort of either financial or business influence that might impact on your results.

There are ways in which we can get around that. And I think we should do that. Being open is one of them. So, yeah, there's lots of things that I'd like to see happen in those sorts of realms, really. I think I'd like to see more sensible conversations happen in the media as well. I think we are starting to see a shift in that happily. I think where, you know, five, six, seven years ago, it got a bit boring the fact that all of the conversations were playing college, causes Alzheimer's disease or causes people to become much more aggressive or, no, that's not true,

video games are great because they do this. They were very much all or nothing black or white conversations. We're starting to see more of a nuanced conversation happen now in a more mature conversation. I think that's great. That was Pete Etchols talking about video games. His book, Lost in a Good Game, is out now on ICON Books. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we ask,

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