After the recent publication of The Byron Review, which looked into the games industry and online access for children, Dr Tanya Byron has cautioned against laying blame on gaming.
She feels they are a far more positive influence than a negative one and that people should ”get a grip” on the real issues of debate and ”stop panicking”.
Dr Byron also feels strongly about violence tests of kids should never happen as they’re unreliable and unfair.
”The research is highly contested, incredibly polarised,” she said. ”You’ve got the researchers in the States saying, yes, we can prove from studies that short-term affects on aggressive behaviour follow from playing these games, and therefore we can conclude they cause problems.”
”Then, in the UK and Europe, they take an ethnographic approach, saying, hold on a second, lab studies aren’t the real world, and generalisations from short-terms effect to long-term effects are a pretty big stretch.”
Byron has worked closely with the games industry during her review and is quick to defend the industry about not being open enough. “The industry has worked really positively with me. I do believe this industry does not intend to corrupt young people,” she said.
”We can’t just isolate videogames as being responsible for the ills of society. I am really clear from the child development literature that there are some games that kids shouldn’t play and it could have a really, really negative impact on them if they do play them.”
”But my instinct is that the videogames industry is completely next to me on that one, because again, yes there are adult games and adult material that people can read and look at.”
Does the gaming industry finally have a friend in the scientific community that isn’t trying to jump the political band wagon? It would seem so and many publishing houses and development studios agree both with her approach and her report.
Click here for Part One of gamesindustry.biz’s interview with Dr Byron.
