Date posted: May 11, 2006
Updated: Oct 23, 2006
By Jonas Heide Smith and Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen (smith@game-research.com and egenfeldt@game-research.com)
Considering the hard science basis of the computer game business, one may well be surprised by the degree to which fuzzy logic and urban legends shape industry debate. This article is a modest attempt to dispel a few of the more dominant gaming myths.
An article in progress
This article will be continuously expanded. More myths may be identified, old ones may change their focus.
Game Research users are encouraged to suggest additions and changes.
If you feel something needs further discussion please use the forum.
1) Games are bigger than movies
The confusion as to the actual size of the gaming industry is widespread. Since the early eighties, claims has been made that games outsell movies. Nevertheless, it appears not to be so. Let´s look at the facts.
Titanic (Paramount, 1997)
Super Mario Bros. 3 (Nintendo)
Today, the European game market creates revenues of 5.7 billion dollars (source). The US market makes close to 6 billion dollars (source) and the world market has estimated revenues of about 17 billion dollars (source).
In the UK, games gross more than movies at the box office but in 2000 did not outgross video sales (source). Thus, in the UK at least, games are smaller than movies.
In the US, the total 2001 movie box office grosses of 8.41 billion dollars (source) also outclass game sales.
Turning to individual titles, the movie Titanic (1997) made 1835.4 million dollars (source) whereas Nintendo´s Super Mario Bros. 3 has made 500 million dollars worldwide (according to Nintendo of Denmark).
The game industry is certainly growing fast and may well manage to outshine other media types financially but it just is not the case today.
(- Jonas Heide Smith)
2) Girls are eager gamers
As commented upon here, the issue of gender and gaming is an explosive one obscured by severe ideological biases. Declaring the idea that girls/women play as much as boys/men a myth is not, however, justified by the evidence. But what is surely a myth is the idea that it has been proven that girls play as much as boys.
It is fairly certain (though not entirely well-documented) that there are gender differences as to gaming preferences. In a study by Yasmin Kafai (find) boys and girls displayed clear differences in approaches to game design.
In a survey at this site, online gamers were questioned about their habits and preferences. Interestingly, only five percent of the respondents (recruited broadly) were female.
It may be that many girls play some types of games. But claiming that gender differences are slight is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
To settle the issue of time spent on gaming we ´merely´ need reliable quantitative studies along the lines of standard television rating measurement. That is, we need a transparent/constant methodology, a representative sample, and a method of recruitment that satisfies standard requirements of the social sciences.
As regards young people in the late 1990s reliable numbers do exist. One ambitious research project on the media use of 6-19 year old Europeans (see selected results) revealed that 79% of boys and 48% of girls play computer games. Whereas the boys spend 57 minutes a day playing, the girls spend 24 minutes on games on average.
(- Jonas Heide Smith)
3) Games make you violent
The direct effect ´ or magic bullet ´ myth of media effects may be the single most powerful and persistent. In its basic form, it is the idea that your experiences affect you. Not at all unreasonable.
However, it raises two questions. First of all: What do gamers experience? Do they experience a massacre of outrageous brutality or do they experience a social event characterised by friendly competition along the lines of classical forms of play and sports? Neither answer is obviously wrong making the question impossible to answer as such (from an external point of view). Secondly, how does your experience affect you? Do avid soccer players walk around trying to kick away all their problems? If not, why should gamers be influenced to somehow repeat the violence experienced in some games? Furthermore, who is to say that the effect is not the opposite of the one often claimed? Who is to say that games do not function as an outlet for aggression?
These somewhat polemic questions are meant to show one thing: There is no obvious reason to believe that violent games should make you violent. There is no underlying theory. This is an important point since it is a weakness of any study claiming to document that gaming makes anyone either aggressive or the opposite.
The actual existing studies do not provide evidence for the direct (and causal) link between gaming and violence. A pragmatic thesis based on these studies may be that violent games may enforce aggressive action patterns, patterns that in themselves caused the desire to play ultraviolent games.
In the opinion of this author, further studies along the traditional lines are not called for. If one seeks to prove the direct link between violent games and violent behaviour one should focus on describing the nature of this link. Such a description needs to go beyond common sense and into the realm of psychology.
(- Jonas Heide Smith)
4) Gaming causes physical defects or changes
Obviously, exercising only one´s trigger finger is not a good way to stay in acceptable physical shape. But this indirect danger is not at the centre of this myth.
From time to time, a story pops up in the media on how gamers suffer from various physical problems. Time Magazine (January 18th, 1982) mentioned such maladies as the Pac Man elbow and the Space Invaders Wrist. The latter had also been mentioned in Newsweek (November 16th, 1981) with the apparent original source being The New England Journal of Medicine.
The danger must have receded, since the illness has rarely been mentioned since1982.
A similar, more recent, story focused on the development of strong thumbs among young people, particularly gamers.
On the 24th of March 2002 The Observer quoted researcher Sadie Plant:
´The fact that our thumbs operate differently from our fingers is one of the main things that defines us as humans. Discovering that the younger generation has taken to using thumbs in a completely different way and are instinctively using it where the rest of us use our index fingers is particularly interesting.´
The day after, the BBC ran the same story as did a broad range of news media. Apparently, none of these found it appropriate to link to the actual study, which did not itself warrant such revolutionary headlines. It seems the story was compatible with a persistent myth based on the idea that games are something ´different´, ´strange´ and potentially dangerous.
(- Jonas Heide Smith)
5) Games have yet to mature as a medium
It is not uncommon to hear claims about computer game design being in its infancy. The arguments are that computer games have not been around for long and that we cannot expect it to have matured into a form showing the same depth, artistic expression and varied nature as in for example books or television. After all, it took several generations of book after the invention of writing before space was made between books and indexes were included. Similarly, the television of today is much different from the form it had in the 1950s where radio was looked to for inspiration.
In games, the most persistent criterium for a mature product seem to be the level of story. If we could only make good stories then the games would be deeper, more intellectually challenging, and well´ more like books.
But to put it bluntly: Games are mature. It is odd to compare computer games with the development cycle of books. If you should compare with something, it should be other visual media in this century, where the technological evolution has speeded up considerably compared to earlier centuries. And neither the television nor the radio took centuries to mature ´ there seems to be a romantic vision of computer games becoming something more than the established genres of today.
In this equation people seem to be forgetting that games have taken giant leaps forward since William A. Higinbotham´s Tennis for Two (1959), Steve Russell´s Space War (1962), and Crowther and Woods´ Adventure (1976).
The computer game has passed its 40 years birthday and does not seem likely to reach some sudden new level of maturity. Although computer games will evolve like all media are evolving, there is no reason to believe that we have not found the form computer games will have in many years to come.
(- Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen)
6) Games are great educational tools
Not long after the birth of computer games the first hopes for the potential of learning through games were expressed. Wouldn´t it be great if the enthusiasm exhibited when playing games could be used for good, sound learning? Since then, several commercial games showing various degrees of success have been labelled ´edutainment´ ´ a combination of the two words education and entertainment.
However, neither the education nor the entertainment part has been very successful in these titles´ combining the two has turned out to be a tough job.
According to the proponents of learning through games the main potential lies in the ability of games to increase motivation through the interactive nature of games, putting the player in control of the learning and the game´s options for adjusting the level of difficulty. However, it seems that most edutainment games have problems living up to these reasons for using games in the first place.
In her book Dataspill ´ Innf´ring og analyse (translation: Computer games ´ introduction and analysis) about games Eva Liest´l analyses five different games. She finds that the one game that does not let the player choose his own path through the game world is the edutainment title. She doesn´t press the issue but if you look at other edutainment titles, you find the same pattern ´ educational titles seem to take over the control and narrow down the game universe to make it fit with the intentions of the producer. These intentions are often to convey some specific information about a topic. Closing the game universe and conveying specific information does not fit well with traditional game dynamics, where simple and general rules are the backbone. In stead, educators have to a larger extent turned to the adventure genre, where it is easier to focus on information, but they have found out that even here it is hard to convey the necessary depth of an educational topic.
Furthermore, very few studies have delivered hard evidence that games can be used for learning. Typically the research has been directed at putting learning into games and then assuming that this learning somehow came across to the player. But the ambition should be higher than this. It is not enough to have ´some kind of learning´ in games. To truly say that games are great learning tools we must prove - or at least make probable - that games are better than other learning alternatives. And here we are still a long way from the goal ´ so the dream of games as great educational tools, remains a dream.
(- Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen)
RSS feed for this page
since June 2007
No comments yet.