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ESA goes on offense regarding 'flawed' video game study
The Entertainment Software Association recently issued a press release calling the credibility of an article which will be published in the February issue of Pediatrics (which we're sure you all subscribe to) into question. The article is penned by Iowa State professor Douglas Gentile, whose previous essays attempt to link gaming with addiction and alcoholism. The article in question is equally inflammatory: It attempts to draw a connection between video games and mental health problems in Singaporean children. The ESA claims that Gentile's "definition of 'pathological gaming' is neither scientifically nor medically accepted and the type of measure used has been criticized by other scholars." The group's senior vice president for communications and industry affairs Richard Taylor added "We commend credible, independent, and verifiable research about computer and video games. However, this research is just more of the same questionable findings by the same author in his campaign against video games." We'll have to wait until the February issue of Pediatrics arrives before passing our own judgment. We'll make sure to share our insight on the rest of the articles therein as well -- we've got a few choice words to share about a certain exposé on Spongebob Squarepants-themed tongue depressors.
ABC News polling guy rips apart game addiction figures
ABC News' Director of Polling, Gary Langer, has a little beef with a study we heard about a couple days ago, in which we learned that 8.5 percent of America's youth are addicted to video games. Langer has several problems with the study, one issue being that it was an opt-in online panel -- a "self-selected 'convenience sample'" -- rather than a probability sample (random sampling). It gets technical, but Langer's issue is that he's yet to hear a "reasonable theoretical justification for the calculation of sampling error with a convenience sample."In the end, the author of the addiction study, Prof. Douglas Gentile (who is also the director of research for the National Institute of Media and the Family), wrote to Langer saying that he was unaware the data came from a convenience sampling. So, good news, everyone: either 8.5 percent of youths are addicted to video games ... or they just think they are. Yay, statistics! [Image]
