Interview: Susan Greenfield on gaming’s alleged dangers

Posted November 18, 2011 by Lewis Denby.

Baroness Susan Greenfield, a professor at Oxford University, recently made some rather alarming claims about videogames: that they can decrease empathy, increase aggression, and perhaps lead to serious mental health disorders. We approached Susan, asking her to expand upon these comments. Here’s the ensuing interview…

Baroness Susan Greenfield is no stranger to controversy when it comes to videogames and the internet, and the negative effects she alleges they may have on the brain. Recently she made some especially alarming comments in her book, an extract of which was lapped up and reprinted by the mainstream media. In this extract, Baroness Greenfield made some extremely serious accusations against gaming: that it has led to a ‘decrease in empathy’, that it can ‘increase aggression’, and that it may even be responsible for a rise in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

If this is all true, then it is a matter of enormous public health interest, as gaming continues to propagate into our everyday lives. No one here is trying to mindlessly defend the innocuous nature of videogames if there is evidence to the contrary. But, at least in the reprinted extracts, Greenfield pointed to no evidence to reinforce her claims. I approached Greenfield asking her to clarify her comments and, happily, she agreed.

Greenfield has said in the past that she has been misrepresented by the media. Today, she tells me that she was interviewed on the matter for the BBC’s ‘Panorama’ last year, but her section was cut from the final programme because her views were “too nuanced”. She also reveals that she is to meet with UKIE, Sony and Electronic Arts next week to discuss her concerns with gaming, and theirs with her comments. Below are her answers to our questions.

You seem to suggest that videogames and other ‘screen experiences’ lack the capacity to convey metaphor in the way that a play like Macbeth can. How are screen-based visual arts different from stage-based visual arts in this sense? Both have scripts, actors, scenery – and many videogames have explicitly attempted to communicate rich tapestries of metaphor, such as 2007 action game BioShock, as well as a large ‘art game’ movement. Are you aware of these?

Stage-based performances such as Macbeth place emphasis on thoughts and feelings rather than the simple actions that triggered them. Yes in both cases there’s a combination of narrative and speech: but having looked up BioShock, and discussed it with my more knowledgeable colleagues, it appears that such games do not use metaphor in the way I meant, i.e. expressing one thing in terms of another. For that, you need a conceptual framework that enables you to understand the parallels, such as the example I gave from Macbeth of the extinction of a candle as death. Books, i.e. words, can convey inner feelings: hence even with films, most people say that the book of the same story is usually better. What’s more, because the essence of a videogame is that there is ‘user input’, the user, through his actions alone, will change the outcome of a string of situations in the game in order to move the story forward: there is very little room for ‘storytelling’ in this context – only about enough to provide the setting. Can I also draw your attention to a quote from Eric Schmidt, ex CEO and now Chairman of Google:

“I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information…is in fact affecting cognition. It is affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we’re losing that…”

You state that in a videogame you play not because you care about the characters or storytelling, but because of the thrill of play. Do you feel that this is true of all games, or just some – like Mario, which you referenced? Because it strikes me that for every game that’s about pure gameplay, there’s another game that places its focus on storytelling.

We need to distinguish between storytelling per se and stories, such as in novels, which explore and express the diversity and complexity of the human condition. Whilst games may ‘focus’ on storytelling, as far as I can see, they are at the level of comic strips and fairy tales, i.e. exciting and action-packed stories but lacking any character development and more typically appropriate for young children.

You cite a study that says children spend ’900 hours in class, 1,277 hours with family and 1,934 hours in front of a screen’ between their 10th and 11th birthdays. These figures do not, however, account for the full amount of time that occurs between these two birthdays. What is this study, and how does the study account for the rest? And does the study mention a crossover between family time and time in front of a screen? It would seem likely that there would be quite a large crossover.

The study referring to hours in class, with family and in front of the screen between 10th and 11th birthday, comes from a report by ChildWise (ChildWise, The Monitor Report 2007-2008, SMRC ChildWise, Norwich). I would also like to draw your attention to the following statistics from a recent American study:

In any event surely the issue is the substantial amount of time spent in front of a screen, which will mean that much less time doing other things, which are admittedly not detailed in the study.

What evidence have you selected to demonstrate that empathy has ‘sharply’ decreased? Similarly, what evidence have you selected to suggest that videogames cause aggression? There have been several studies on this topic, and to my knowledge the majority of them have arrived at the opposite conclusion.

The evidence I have selected comes from the following study:

Sara H. Konrath, Edward H. O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing. Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis, Pers Soc Psychol Rev May 2011 15: 180-198, first published on August 5, 2010 doi:10.1177/1088868310377395.

This study examines changes over time in a commonly used measure of dispositional empathy. A cross-temporal meta-analysis was conducted on 72 samples of American college students who completed at least one of the four subscales (Empathic Concern, Perspective Taking, Fantasy, and Personal Distress) of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) between 1979 and 2009 (total N = 13,737). Overall, the authors found changes in the most prototypically empathic subscales of the IRI: Empathic Concern was most sharply dropping, followed by Perspective Taking. The IRI Fantasy and Personal Distress subscales exhibited no changes over time. Additional analyses found that the declines in Perspective Taking and Empathic Concern are relatively recent phenomena and are most pronounced in samples from after 2000.

By the same token perhaps you could let me have the references you mention that prove the opposite, i.e. an increase in empathy with screen culture. [EDITOR'S NOTE: I was actually referring here to the relationship between gaming and aggression, and will be responding to Baroness Greenfield in due course. However, my colleague Jamie Donnely links in the comments thread to a meta-analysis that appears to suggest the opposite of the studies I have read. Since meta-analyses provide the broadest findings into a given topic, I shall be reading it with interest - because, like I said above, if there is a significant risk factor associated with playing games, I believe we should know about it.]

You discuss the relationship between videogames and attention defecit hyperactivity disorder. Here you do not cite any evidence, but merely postulate that it is a “possibility” that videogames could be the cause, which suggests that it is your own theory. Is this based on any research, or merely an uncorroborated idea you have had? If the former, why have you not published this research in an academic journal?

I have only ever claimed that the irrefutable rise in methylphenidate prescriptions is closely correlated with the rise of the digital native. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Baroness Greenfield's actual quote is: "[A] third possibility could indeed be that if the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fact action-reaction [...] then such a rapid interchange might lead to a shorter attention span.”] Rather like with smoking and cancer some 50 years ago, seeing parallel trends is the first step: the next step is then to conduct detailed epidemiology exploring a potential causal link.