July 19, 2006
Story by Jan Dehner
From the advent of Atari in the 1970s and Nintendo in the 1980s to the more recent wave of X-Box and PlayStation games, the proliferation of electronic video games is a testament to the industry’s popularity. In his May Term course “Issues in Electronic Gaming,” Dean Stevens, assistant professor of mathematical sciences, took a thought-provoking look at the myriad issues surrounding the genre, including violence, sexual imagery, and religion in video gaming, the pop culture of electronic games, video games as art, and recent court cases involving the issue of video game playing.
“It all started with an Interdepartmental Honors session I taught in which I presented the Devin Moore case,” Stevens explained. Moore was tried and convicted of the 2003 murders of three police officers. The 20-year-old’s attorney claimed Moore was a victim of childhood abuse and the influence of repetitive playing of a video game in which players shoot police officers and steal cars. During his arrest, Moore reportedly told the officers: "Life's like a video game. You've got to die sometime."
“Students were very engaged in that topic, and that told me that I was on to something that students cared about,” Stevens said.
The course was divided into two parts. The first part consisted of discussion of readings on such topics as the legal and ethical issues of electronic games, ratings policies, how electronic games are portrayed in the media, portrayal of women in video games, how gaming can be used for evangelism or as teaching tools, and the positive aspects of gaming, to name a few.
“A few of the positive aspects of gaming include teaching us how to focus on very specific tasks and improving cognitive skills, spatial reasoning, and hand-eye coordination,” said Stevens. He cited a 2004 study that showed that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games completed their tasks quicker and made fewer mistakes performing laparoscopic surgeries than surgeons who didn’t play video games.
The student received practical experience by participating in six different video game tournaments and were asked to complete a survey ranking the games’ degree of violence, among other things. The surveys will be used as data for a research project Stevens is conducting with Susan Burns, assistant professor of psychology at Morningside. The research project seeks to describe the psychological and physiological impact of playing violent versus non-violent electronic games. The two hope to present their research in the spring of 2007.
 Of the 23 students who took the electronic gaming course, more than 90 percent could be described as “high gamers,” or individuals who engaged in video gaming 5 to 10 hours a week or more, according to Stevens. Others, such as Joelle Stout, were less familiar with the genre.
“I’ve played video games before, but only for fun or to relax. This class really made me see that guys play games for different reasons. It’s very competitive for them,” said Stout, a senior from Sioux City who is majoring in psychology. “I was unaware of all of the controversies about video games. The class got me more interested in the video game culture and made me want to learn more about it.”
Stevens hopes that in the future, more “non-gamers” like Stout will take his class, giving him a better picture of popular culture and society in general.
“Video games are a useful lens for looking at the rest of the world,” he said.
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