Understanding the 62% Violent Pac-Man:
Responding to Dr. Thompson
Responding to Dr. Thompson:
According to this method of coding violence, Namco Museum 64 is in the top 7 most violent games in the study, beating out many other titles, including an NHL hockey game. In which case, the ESRB failed to list "Violence" as a descriptor on the label of a game that involves the player being faced with violence 56 minutes out of every 90 played. The fact that Pac-Man's numbers were not included in the final data of the study suggests that even the researchers themselves know that the method from the study is not doing a good job of labeling Pac-Man. I also find it hard to imagine that anyone would argue that a 62% violence rating for Pac-Man is realistically representative of what is or is not violence. The researchers were hasty in choosing their definition of violence, and should have rethought their approach the instant they realized it could produce such bizarre results.
The study excluded Namco Museum 64 because the violence measurement was incapable of producing useful results across the full spectrum of different types of gameplay. You see this same problem again in the differences between 3D and 2D titles. You see a drop in the violence level of each franchise as it moves from 2D to exploring 3D worlds. Zelda: A Link to the Past is rated as 12 times more violent than Zelda: Majora's Mask (36.5% compared to 3.2%) even though Majora's Mask has more realistic violence. According to this method, games become less violent as they progress from 2D to 3D, which is blatantly misleading.
For a more dramatic example of this problem, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas would be considered far less violent than the top-down Grand Theft Auto 2, which included a much smaller environment to explore and far more pedestrians. The frequency of violence is much higher. Yet most people would rather their children play GTA 2 over San Andreas. The error does not come simply from the measure being too sensitive, which can be explained away by saying that E rated games are for children and require a more sensitive scale. The problem is that even within one rating category the measure is incapable of assigning a useful violence rating between games. In this respect, the percentage of violence fails to produce even a viable ranking of titles from most to least violent.
Pac-Man as Proof:
People are able to look at the 62% rating for Pac-Man and say to themselves, "I know Pac-Man, and I don't believe it is 62% violent." We can't necessarily do the same things with other games in the study, such as Rat Attack or The Smurfs. If we know that the system can't accurately measure the games we know, we can't rely on it to measure the games that we don't. If you don't agree that Pac-Man is 62% violent, then you disagree with the premise and methodology of this study, and it's not unreasonable to say so.This research should never have appeared before the U.S. Congress, because presenting its results without detailed explanation is extremely misleading.
Push it to the limit:
In her response on Joystiq.com, Dr. Thompson says that she's often amazed that people focus on the percentages when there are other elements in the study, like number of deaths per minute. However, these numbers suffer from similar problems, and don't seem to be capable of presenting a useful measure of violence. For example, Pokemon Stadium is recorded as being 74% violent, yet has 0 deaths and 0 deaths per minute. In comparison, Zelda: A Link to the Past is labeled as 36% violent, but 286 deaths and 9.5 deaths per minute, far more than Pokemon Stadium. Super Mario World killed off 177 characters, with a 40% violence rating. What is more, the games were played for varying amounts of time. Some games, like Mario 64, were played for the full 90 minutes. Other games, such as NFL Blitz 2000, were played for only 16 or 17 minutes, presumably one game of football. The arcade titles were only played for around 3 and a half minutes each, and Super Mario Brothers 1 was played for about 35 minutes, until completion. You can't directly compare the 177 characters killed in Super Mario World (played for 68 minutes) to the 171 killed in the original Super Mario Brothers, because Mario World was played for twice as long. To help address this, the researchers listed the deaths-per-minute, but again this suffers from being unable to tell the difference between different types of gameplay. Grand Theft Auto 3 has a lower deaths-per-minute rate than Grand Theft Auto 2, but it is not less violent. Obviously, having a high death rate does not mean you're more violent, and there's a lot of room for multiple interpretation within the numbers, depending on how you want to count.Finally, I don't trust many of the other measures. In counting rewards for violence, for example, Pac-Man would technically be rewarded for eating the ghosts, since he earns points, but I wouldn't consider this a reward for being violent. This again boils down to a matter of how you define violence, which I think is too sensitive in this study. In another example, the study says, "Although none of the games received a content descriptor for 'suggestive themes' we noted the provocative leather outfit worn by Ai Fukami in Ridge Racer V, the screen shot between her thighs, and the phrases 'control your desire' and 'push it to the limit' in the introduction." If this is an indication that the authors do consider the appearance of "push it to the limit" in Ridge Racer V as being a suggestive theme, I can't help but disagree with. The term does appear in the middle of a fairly suggestive montage, which involves a camera flying around a scantly clad girl on a race track, but I don't agree that it makes, "Push it to the limit," sexual. I've seen similar statements in many other sports titles, and think its presence in Ridge Racer V is more a result of expectations in sports games to push yourself to your physical extremes than it is sexual.