Conclusion
Psychological video game research covers a wide variety of areas. Unfortunately, there seems to be a common flaw in most of the research (particularly in the last decade) where the growth and variety of the video game industry - although documented in much of the literature - has not been matched with any serious attempt to classify and categorise the games in experimental methods or observations. Researchers may call for categorisations by genre, but there is also a strong argument for categorising games by their age. The difference between games released in the mid-1980’s and those currently on sale is staggering - not only in graphics and sound, but also in the diversity, depth and scale of the content. There has not been much investigation into the difference between ‘old’ games and modern games, although numerous researchers have voiced concern at the "compulsive element built into the current generation of video games" and feel modern games "with their increasingly realistic graphics and requirement for complex skills" may be more liable to lead to psychological dependence (Phillips et al, 1995). Addiction is not the only concern; if the effects of games really are magnified by technical improvements, then concerns voiced by those such as Provenzo about the "amplification" of undesirable attitudes and behaviour in developing children are more pressing. Indeed, concerns about video games should be raised even higher by the continued progression of the technology. The concept and consequences of "immersion" in the microworld of a given video game should be a key element when evaluating the psychological impact of that game on an individual.
The content of modern video games is not the only change over time. Over 2 million Sony Playstations (currently the world’s most popular video game console) have been sold in the UK alone (the estimated world wide figure is 40 million), and the average age of these owners is 21 (Brookes, 1998). This indicates something that games manufacturers have known for some time: the demographic of video games players is expanding. Most research has chosen to look at the effects on children and adolescents, which is understandable from a developmental perspective but ignores an increasing number of adult video games players. Questions remain over whether adults play for the same reasons as children, and how their preferences differ.
According to Chris Deering (cited in Brookes, 1998), president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Sony’s goal is to make the Playstation as common in homes as the VCR. As video games become a leisure activity to rival more traditional pastimes such as television-watching and cinema-going, its importance to researchers must increase. However, to cope with the pace of technological change psychologists must approach their research from a more similar angle to the video games players. Keepers’ (1990) case study of a young boy pathologically obsessed with video games was an ideal example of research which evaluated the social situation of the subject, but also related his predicament to the content of the game he seemed so obsessed by.
Casting a cursory glance over the newsagent’s magazine selection reveals a wide variety of video game-related publications, designed to appeal to a wide variety of consumers from 13 year-old schoolboys to 30-something PC owners. Game reviews treat software titles with a reverence previously restricted to film and book reviews. It has become apparent that for games players, video games are an ‘experience’, just like film or television. And like film, video games have become increasingly sophisticated and realistic as they have aged. The concept of "immersion" in video games - the sense of inhabiting a miniature world - is well documented, but the question of "emotion" (a phrase I use meaning the player’s mental and physiological response) is becoming increasingly important.
Indicators already exist of the potential for future games development - the British Film and Television Academy has recently created numerous ‘Interactive Entertainment’ categories for its prestigious BAFTA award, and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences in the US held its first annual awards ceremony this year. The US military has adopted a version of id Software’s popular action game Doom to train marines, and plans are afoot to extend the training program (Riddell, 1997). Video game characters such as Tomb Raider’s ‘Lara Croft’ are set to star in big-budget Hollywood movies - but only because it is still technically impossible to bring the same level of realism to an interactive level on home computers. An informal age classification system for video games has surfaced in America and the UK, and even the British Board of Film Classification categorises an increasing number of games as suitable only for ‘15’ or’18’-year olds every year.
In the face of this continued development, it is imperative that psychologists determine an experimental strategy that allows individual studies to be compared with each other. I propose that by utilising games publications as a reference for experimental design and adopting the general categories shared by the media, researchers will find they develop a more reliable taxonomy which, coupled with proper evaluation of game content, provides a more accurate categorisation with which to compare data between studies. For current research to be of much value in the years to come, psychologists must make a better effort to understand the many different types of video games available, and the different types of people who play them.