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Understanding the 62% Violent Pac-Man:A Look at the Flawed Research Influencing the U.S. Senate: Editor's Note: This research was cited during a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection in June 2006. Originally, this article incorrectly stated that it was during a Senate hearing in July 2006. 2nd Editor's Note: Dr. Thompson has responded to this article on Joystiq.com. To read our response to her comments, and a more complete analysis of the study, see the second part of this article. The 62% Violent Pac-Man:In June of 2006, Dr. Kimberly Thompson testified before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection about the effectiveness of video game rating systems. In one of the chief studies she cited in her testimony, Thompson lists the classic arcade version of Pac-Man as being 62% violent. In the same study, Dig Dug is 67% violent, Ms. Pac-Man 54.3%, Q*bert 33.5%, and Centipede 92.6%.Of course, no one in the Subcommittee ever saw these numbers specifically, possibly because they lack even the appearance of real-life application. Yet the study was cited as evidence that the ESRB is not correctly labeling video games, that they're missing "violent" content that should be labeled in E-rated games. Anyone familiar with video games will tell you that there's something wrong with those numbers. But it gets more amazing. The numbers come from measuring the amount of time (measured in seconds) a player engages in violent behavior over a 90 minute period, not counting cut-scenes. So to say that Pac-Man is 62% violent literally means that the player spends 56 out of every 90 minutes being violent towards another character in the game. The process of measurement is simply flawed. In fact, when you apply the same measurement to 15 minutes of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, an M rated game, you find that it says Oblivion is only 5% violent, 18 times less violent than Pac-Man. All this time, parents that were more worried about letting their kids slash people to death with swords instead of eating the sheets off of little ghosts were way off-base, apparently. The results of the study deviate so much from what the average person would consider to be violence in a video game that the results are almost inconsequential. Still, this is the research that the U.S. Senate is listening to when deciding if the ESRB system should be revamped. But before we get to the reasons why this study is flawed, take a look at some of the other ratings that were assigned to games in the study, including games like Super Mario Brothers (41.3%) and Zelda (68.4%), and be amazed at how misleading research can be. Countinue: How Violent are Mario Brothers, Zelda, and Dig Dug --> |
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