Wii Research Takes Easy to Measure Approach
Spong.com publicized research this week from a British academic, Tim Cable at Liverpool John Moores University. The research findings (not published yet, apparently, but announced in a press release), indicated children burn more calories playing Nintendo Wii activity games than other more traditional console games which don’t require much body movement for participation.
To the average person, such findings seem like a “duh” statement. Of course children are going to burn more calories when moving around than when simply sitting down. The importance of the research, though, is to give a glossy sheen of university-backed findings that indicate some sort of benefit in playing games on a particular console. It is perhaps understandable that console makers would want this sort of research out there, to act as a counter balance to research showing negative effects of video games.
However, in this case it seems to have backfired somewhat because Spong.com discovered shortly after their initial report that the research was funded by Nintendo. That fact probably wouldn’t have bothered the folks at Spong, but it was left out of the press release. It points to one of the issues surrounding academic research, namely that research is more likely to occur if someone offers funding. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Academics are under-funded as it is.
My thoughts are that at a higher level, the study indicates one of the larger problems with video game research: what to measure and how to measure it. Studies like this one focus on something that is easily measured (how many calories burned during game play). What the students learned while playing, how well they retained the knowledge, and whether the game knowledge transferred to other areas in life such as a mandated test are things that are much more difficult to measure.
I suspect this is one of the reasons violence in video games continues to be studied. Researchers can fairly easily set up an experiment where children play a violent game, then expose them to stimuli and measure their responses. A control group can engage in other activities, be exposed to the same stimuli and possibly respond differently. If researchers are careful in their definitions, they can show increased “violent” responses to the stimuli after playing “violent” video games. Many studies have been conducted along this vein, and the easiest way to look at them is to examine a meta-analysis such as Anderson & Bushman’s (2001) that I’ve cited below.
Other researchers have examined other things that are easy to measure. One paper presented by Lee, Luchini, Michael, Norris, & Soloway (2004) measured the amount of math problems second graders completed while playing a math game versus the amount completed by a control group with traditional paper worksheets. Again, this is easy to measure.
Another concern voiced by Spong.com was that the research indicated only preliminary findings, and was not a full-blown experimental endeavor. Alas, concerns such as that will have to await another day, and another blog entry.
References
Anderson C.A., & Bushman, B.J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science 12(5). 353-359.
Lee J., Luchini, K., Michael, B., Norris, C., & Soloway, E. (2004). More than just fun and games: Assessing the value of educational video games in the classroom. In Proceedings from Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1375 – 1378). Retrieved from ACM Portal.
February 22, 2007 2:31 am No Comments
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