| Videogame Violence: how young people articulate the pleasures of violent content |
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Location: LKL Small Seminar Room
Further Info: Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media - Lunchtime research seminar
Host/Speaker: Gareth Schott, University of Waikato, NZ
Date and Time:
Thursday, 17 September 2009, 12:30 - 13:30
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Young people’s voices are often considered irrelevant or unreliable when it comes to assessing the influence and impact of their engagement with screen-mediated depictions of violence. Research emanating from psychology has continued to propagate the ‘effects’ debate by seeking to substantiate the harmful impact of videogames on individuals that are considered to lack the knowledge and strategies to make sense of them. Moral panics surrounding the role of videogames as cultural pedagogy, for antisocial attitudes and behaviours, appear to have absolved the need to account for the complexity and diversity of interactive game-texts, the range of practices that constitute mediated violence, player experiences and social practices surrounding games.
This presentation presents findings taken from a two-year funded project that sought to apply the critical and analytical scrutiny of Game Studies to achieve a more balanced and contextual understanding of young people’s experiences with and around violent game content. Young people actively engaging with such texts often become stigmatized by the stereotypes implicit in ‘effects’ research and codified within protective legislation as anti-social, unintelligent and non-creative. Despite forming the readership of popular culture, young people are often denied a voice by authorities and opinion makers in this one-sided discussion. The primary aim of the project was to therefore prioritize the experiences and articulations of young people themselves concerning the nature of violent content within videogames. |
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