Use the terms games and impact in one sentence and many people will associate this with the impact of violent entertainment games on behavior. Especially incidence of individual violence in public places such as shootings in schools, malls, or churches often stir the debate about the social and behavioral impact of entertainment games. In the news or in comments on social media, the link between playing shooters, an acting violently in real life is quick to be made. But just one leads to the other. To establish a causal relationship, we need thorough research. It is thus not surprising that the link between violence and entertainment games also became a hot topic in scientific debates. The potential relationship between the two has been addressed in many academic studies, leading to various sometimes contradicting theories on how playing games impact us. One group of researchers advocate the direct effects theory by arguing that playing violent games implies a risk for players, and particularly for the ones that are vulnerable, for example, because of their age. Other research has defend the position at the other extreme by arguing that violent games do not have any effect. Actually many researchers take the middle ground by stating that the evidence of the research that shows an impact is largely inconclusive. We don't know yet. They argued that research showing a causal relation is often flawed. For example, because other factors that play a part in getting the players aggressive are not taken into account. Let's not get too much into detail here. Violent entertainment games are clearly beyond the scope of this smoke. But series game developers also need an answer to the question whether a series game can contribute to learning something, or to understanding an issue. The big difference is that researchers in this domain are primarily concerned with researching the potential positive impact of serious games. As you may notice, that's a pretty different angle compared to researching the negative effects of violent entertainment games. Nonetheless, researchers face similar difficulties in measuring impact. It's a complicated matter. Let me sketch three basic difficulties here, and just to be clear, we prefer the term impact to effects, words matter. If were to use the term effects, we would imply a simple direct flex model, while in reality, a game can have a direct and indirect consequences. The term impact allows for both. All right, the first difficulty with addressing impact is that you need to determine what impact a serious game exerts? Change in behavior is the ambitious aim of some games. For example, the ones that persuade you to quit smoking. However, research has shown that change in behavior is difficult. As a result, most serious games aim at increasing awareness or changing an attitude. If you think back to the Uber game, we can imagine that the creators intended to increase the awareness among players of the downside of the sharing economy and services such as Uber. They will have added some persuasive properties to the game to make exactly that happen. Actually, measuring a change in attitude or behavior comes with various complex issues. For example, how do you know that the attitudes or behavior players is changed in the proper direction? Researchers also need to adapt their research designed to take into account the attitude or behavior of players before they actually play the game. When a nonsmoker plays a nonsmoking game, you can imagine that the game will not have such impact, even when the persuasive properties and the game mechanics are working. The next difficulty is the complexity of determining short term and long term impact. A persuasive game such as My Cotton Picking Life may very well change your attitude regarding child labor immediately after playing. But does it sustain when you are so eager to buy that very affordable and fancy pair of jeans a week later? When researchers find an impact among players right after playing a game, this might not mean a lot. This effect may have disappeared an hour after playing. A research design that incorporates the longer term impact of a serious game is called a longitudinal research design. Pay attention to that term when you read about the impact of games. The third and last difficulty that we discuss is the complexity of external factors. We might think that the game has a certain impact when we measure it, but is the game really causing it or something else? For example, a positive attitude change occurring after playing My Life As a Refugee could also be caused by current European politics regarding refugees or because of a documentary that somebody has watched around the same time. When research is trying to establish whether there is a causal relationship or not between game content and behavior attitudes, they will most likely conduct an experiment in a laboratory setting. This enables them to control the external factors. As long as you are in a controlled environment, you can't be home watching television or speaking to other people. Also, adding a control group to the experiment helps. One group plays the game, the other watches a movie or reads a magazine. If the game then turns out to have an effect in the experimental group, while no change occurs in the control group, we can be quite certain that the effect is the consequences of playing and not of an external factor. The downside of lab experiments is that playing a serious game in the laboratory is unnatural compared to playing on the couch at home. The possible artificiality of playing in the lab highlights an important overarching issue in game research, notably that there is no one best way of doing the job. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, and some methodological tools are better for answering specific impact questions than others. It's important to keep this in mind, it's what is being said on the impact of serious games. Try to be critical about the methods that are used. And if you want to have a short summary of the difficulties as discussed in this video, click to the next animation video. If you are more interested in what actual research tells us about impact, I invite you to start a roundtable interview.
