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ESA Warns Of Flawed Video Game Study
The Entertainment Software Association is preemptively warning the public about what it considers is a flawed study regarding video game violence published in the February issue of Pediatrics magazine.
The study, by Douglas Gentile, attempts to link video games to mental health problems of children in Singapore. The ESA says it has found flaws in the study, including its definition of "pathological gaming" (which the ESA says is not medically accepted or used by other studies), the use of "dubious" tools to measure the study's outcomes, and overall "trivial" outcome effects.
Furthermore, the ESA is also going after author Gentile himself. "This research," said Richard Taylor, senior vice president for communications and industry affairs at the ESA, "is just more of the same questionable findings by the same author in his campaign against video games." Previously, Gentile admitted he made a mistake in methodology in a similar study published last year in Psychological Science.
Unfortunately, we haven't seen the new study yet (coming next week) to draw any of our own conclusions on the matter.
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