FAR LEFT Working
as a diverse
team to achieve
a singular goal
in Overwatch can
help you tackle
real-life
situations
requiring
teamwork.
LEFT Assassin’s
Creed games can
help educate you
in historic
locales and
events.BELOW The Xbox
Adaptive
Controller is a
highly
customisable and
versatile piece
of kit.While videogames bring an
overwhelming amount of goodwill, it
would be ridiculous to pretend that it’s
all sweetness and light. There are still
issues which the industry would do well
to address, rather than ignore.
The one which the tabloids and their
ilk always jump on is, of course,
violence. Over the years, some research
has periodically surfaced purporting to
show that violent games breed
aggressive behaviour, but on closer
scrutiny, much of that ‘information’
emerged from dubious educational
establishments situated in the US bible
belt, with a censorious agenda.
Professor Mark Griffiths points out the
problem with research into violent
games: “I don’t believe that
scientifically, empirically that it has been
absolutely shown that playing violent
videogames makes people more
aggressive,” he says. “We just can’t
ethically allow eight-year-olds to play
Grand Theft Auto, then study them in the
lab to see what happens. It’s not our
fault that we can’t do the experiments
we’d like to do, but I don’t think the
science is there to do it.”
Griffiths, as one of the world’s leading
experts on addiction, does have
misgivings about loot boxes, though: “I
personally think, at the very least, it’s
gambling-like. It’s still socially and
behaviourally conditioning your children
about the concepts of gambling, even if
they don’t realise it’s gambling that they
are doing. Personally, I think children
and adults should be told what the
probability of winning is. If
you want something in
terms of extending your
gameplay or
improving your
gameplay,
you should
know what the
odds are when
you open that
loot box.”VIDEOGAMES ISSUES THAT STILL
NEED ADDRESSINGTHERE’S
MORE WORK TO
BE DONE...after study showing that if you get kids to
play videogames when they’ve had things
like chemotherapy or whatever, they need
significantly less painkillers.”
The wider benefit of games doesn’t
stop there, however. “I remember ages ago
talking about schools that were using Sim
City as a way of teaching economics, for
instance,” Griffiths continues. “In ‘god games’,
when you do things, you realise they have
consequences. I always argue that even in
games that are particularly violent, there are
still strategies there that involve problem-
solving skills and cognitive skills; even games
that might have morally questionable content
can still have good effects.
“Every week I’ll get an email from a parent
saying their kid is addicted to social media
or videogames,” Griffiths admits. “I’ll ask why
they think that, and they’ll say: ‘Because they
spend three or four hours a day on it.’ And
I’ll write back saying we psychologists have
got a word for that: it’s called ‘normal’. What
parents don’t like is the idea of kids spending
four hours on social media or gaming because
it’s not something they do themselves. That’s
a technological generation gap.” For Griffiths,
and anyone else with a purely rational
perspective on videogames, it’s obvious that
they provide myriad benefits. Q
More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 057