I wonder if they'll cover the reeeaaalll issue of bloodshot eyes of workers staying up all night & morning with their latest addiction! :P

As anybody who has taken a highschool or college level science class should know, correlation does not mean causation.

If an alien fresh from Mars spent a day surfing internet forums and weblogs, they'd think the only statistical principle that exists is "correlation does not imply causation."

Has anyone done a study to see if violent people are just drawn more to violent media. This seems a lot more likely to me, that if you are a violent person, you choose to surround yourself with violent stuff. Kinda like a Star Trek nerd with a office decked out in Star Trek swag. I'd love to read a report that showed any further information about this.

This is SO unrealistic...a 9-year old in not a teen.

The studies I've seen on this subject contradict each other, so I don't know that there's been any conclusive findings. Hopefully, Penn and Teller will reference this fact instead of just grandstanding with automatic weapons and prepubescents.

It would also be nice if someone outside the enthusiast press noted for once that the violent games that get all of the attention are usually M-rated and not meant for anyone under 17. Whether 17-year olds should be playing them is a different question altogether.

Justin - I think the "internet consensus" is that the Grand Theft Childhood study is probably the most comprehensive released in the U.S.. There was a major British study that used a pretty large data pool as well, but I can't recall who wrote it, published it, or what it was titled off hand. Kotaku would probably have some links, though.

The vast majority of work on the subject, though, seems to be agit prop on one side of the discussion or the other with data carefully tailored and cropped to prove points. Granted, I don't conduct psych studies for a living, but when you actually settle down and read most of these things it seems like the testing criteria is constructed so that people can put whatever sort of spin on this they'd like.

I just want to see a study that links games to increased caffeine and Dorito consumption, though. That's the real issue at hand.

Seth: Correlation does not imply causation, but as anyone who's taken a high school or college science class should know, correlation is also found wherever causation is found.

The British study I was thinking of was the Byron Review, conducted by psychologist Tanya Byron and available here: http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/byronreview/pdfs/Final%20Report%20Bookmarked.pdf.

Grand Theft Childhood, unfortunately, is currently only available in print, so if you'd like to measure the veracity of their data you'll have to drop twenty bucks on a copy on Amazon.

And, Stephen, while Seth's argument isn't great, the fact that the correlation is, at best, questionable in this case is what really trashes the argument that a lot of these people set out to prove.

Omega, "agit prop" is exactly the sense I got from the studies I've looked at (which explains why they contradict each other). An agenda seemed so close to the surface that they appeared as scientific as opinion polls conducted by PACs.

One of them might have been Grand Theft Childhood, but I don't remember. Thanks for the link to the Byron Review. I'll be curious whether it's along the same lines.

I'm currently reading The Ten-Cent Plague, which details the near collapse of the comic book industry in the late 40s and early 50s due to the public perception that comics created juvenile delinquents. The parallels to the current situation with games are uncanny; the primary difference is that all of the comics of that period were unquestionably created for kids and teenagers (even if they were also secretly enjoyed by some adults).

See, I don't have any trouble believing that videogames, like anything else one does, have both positive and negative influences on one's life, skills, moods, etc etc. I could see violent games making for a certain extra aggressiveness or whatever. But there's a big difference between getting a little more aggressive and being primed to kill.

the only thing that videogames have shown any affect on is my waistline.

I recently saw a website that listed all the mass shooters since around ww1. The ones with the highest death tolls were prior to these violent games being released...

Damn... too bad I dropped showtime from my cable.

While I don't think the evidence towards a relation between violence and video games is convincing or significant enough at this point, I agree with Chick's view that if games want to be taken seriously as adult entertainment, then we have to allow it to be scrutinized as such, albeit in a far more rational manner then has been currently occuring.

However, I sincerely doubt Penn and Teller will present a balanced view at all. While they paint the show as straight-talking on what evidence tells us, especially against pseudoscientific beliefs, that traditionally is thrown out the window when the issue is social or political as they have a very vocal and hard right-leaning libertarian stance and therefore tend to aggressively oppose anything involving government regulation or corporate responsibility. I doubt they'll give the other side much attention, or if they do focus on the crazy ones with poor arguments that makes for an entertaining show as they can be easily mocked.