3 Year Olds Can Separate Fiction
This is interesting and somewhat relevant to videogames: At least two studies of very young children have found they can easily separate fictional worlds from each other.
While this isn’t an argument against there being any link between violent behaviour and violent games, it does shoot down one of the more inflammatory and patently idiotic aspects of some anti-games arguments: That people can’t tell the difference between reality and a video game.
There may be exceptions to this, for instance realistic depictions of violence+young children being one example that’s practically impossible to research ethically, but every time I’ve seen the reality/fiction argument wheeled out it’s been used badly. Perhaps the people using it could get some lessons in fiction from a 3 year old?
(CC image by severinelaville)
October 16th, 2009 at 3:27 am
I wish I could remember where it was published, but there was an interesting study a few years ago that found that children were far more scared of implied violence or ‘bad’ behaviour between ‘real’ people on screen, particularly if they were in positions of authority, than they were by graphic violence or horror in situations and formats that they could easily identify as unrealistic.