Jones, 1984, Video Games as Psychological Tests

Jones, Marshall B. 1984. “Video Games as Psychological Tests”. Simulation and Games. 15 (2): 131-57.

The concern of this article, as the title suggests, is with the use of video games as psychological tests. First, the author suggests five features that distinguish commercial video games (which he means console games) from earlier “computer-based” games: 1. Video games are not educational (excepting a rare few); 2. The reinforcements for playing the games well and learning to play them better are internal, and these reinforcements are strong; 3. Games are fast, which accounts for some of their novelty; 4. The rules are not presented in the form of instructions, but written into the game program; 5. Most video games do not model familiar physical systems, instead they create their own world with its own laws of motion.

Video games, Jones writes, lend themselves well to psychological testing because they are robust, inexpensive, small, light, and portable. Scoring is objective, and the rules of the game are similar for every player (135). They are problematic because the programs are inaccessible, and it takes time for the tests to stabilize (stabilization here is taken to mean when the player no longer shows a tendency to improve with practice, 140). Even a good game “generally requires 20-30 minutes of playing time before individual differences in performance become acceptably reliable” (136). In any case, video game tests lend themselves to individualization.

Stabilization produces a learning curve, however it is only descriptive. Different individuals follow different courses (such as starting out with high or low performances), but Jones hypothesizes that the pace of improvement eventually becomes uniform with practice. The significance is that until stabilization occurs, individual performances on different trials do not represent the same test (139). The issue lies in when to determine when stabilization takes place (140).

Do video games have predictive power in determining performance? This evidence is “still skimpy” (142). The two research findings that showed encouraging findings were based on Air Combat Maneuvering (ACM) and job simulation. These were highly specific to the task, however. For example, ACM showed that video games may have predictive power in pilot performance.

In other ways, video games could be useful testing tools: assessing cognitive function at high altitudes (or other extreme conditions), differences between individual performances, or retention of hand-eye coordinated skills. In conclusion, Jones believes in a promising future of video game tests in applied psychology. They allow psychologists to pursue individual differences and experimental manipulations in a technical context, easily and objectively (155).

Thurstone, 1930, Influence of Motion Pictures on Children’s Attitudes

Thurstone, L. L. 1931. “Influence of Motion Pictures on Children’s Attitudes”. The Journal of Social Psychology. 2 (3): 291-305.

This was one of a series of studies aimed at determining whether the effect of motion pictures on school-aged children can be measured and whether effects could be predicted. The two films looked at for this study were Street of Chance (a film on the life of a gambler) and Hide Out (a bootlegging film), both shown to the experimental population in 1929. The subjects, school children between 9th and 12th grade, were given the same survey to fill out several days before viewing and the morning after viewing the movie to assess their attitudes toward crime. Surveys included 78 pairs of crimes, such as “gambler-bootlegger,” “drunkard-beggar,” “gangster-tramp.” They were to underline which crime was deserving of a more severe punishment (292). Those who watched Hide Out were given a second survey on Prohibition. They were to agree or disagree with 28 statements, such as “Prohibition should come as the result of education, not legislation” and “the present prohibition laws are necessary for the good of the United States” (300-301).

A lot of complicated statistical math followed.

The researchers found that the film Hide Out “did not have any measurable effect on the attitudes of children toward bootlegging or toward prohibition.” The film Street of Chance “made the children more severe in their judgment of gambling than they were before seeing the film.” They concluded: It seems to be evident from these experiments and from others of a similar type that motion pictures can be used to affect the social attitudes of school children and that these effects can be objectively measured” (304).

Cooper and Mackie, 1986, Video Games and Aggression in Children

Cooper, Joel, and Diane Mackie. 1986. “Video Games and Aggression in Children.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 16 (8): 726-744.

This study examined the effect of playing an aggressive or nonaggressive video game on fifth-graders’ free play. Twenty-two pairs of boys and 20 pairs of girls were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. One of the children in each pair played a video game rated by peers as aggressive, a video game with little aggression, or a non-video maze-solving game for 8 minutes. The other child watched. Each child was then left individually to engage in free play in a separate room for 8 minutes, and also given the opportunity to deliver rewards and punishments to another child. The results were similar for both players and observers. Girls shoed significantly more general activity and aggressive free play after playing the aggressive video game, but they perceived Missle Command as only slightly more violent than Pac-Man. Girls’activity decreased and their quiet play slightly increased after playing the low aggressive game compared to the control group. Differences in boy’s vs. girls’ activity may be a function of socialization in appropriate boy/girl behavior. Neither video game had any significant effect on boys’ free play. Video games did not affect boys’ or girls’ behavior on the intepersonal measure of aggression (ie. neither girls nor boys gave significantly more punishments or rewards after playing any of the games). According to the authors, these results suggest that video game effects are not parallel with violent television effects.