![]() ![]() Favaro would remain at Hofstra doing similar work until several years after completing his PhD. Favaro found that playing a videogame for a long period of time made children better at playing other videogames, but had little effect on their motor skills or reflexes in the real world. ![]() Also discredited was a favorite claim of the pro-videogame camp, that the games improved hand-eye coordination. ![]() With regard to the other popular anti-videogame argument, that they made children “aggressive,” Favaro found that, while violent videogames did slightly increase aggression immediately after being played, they actually did so less than violent television shows. While there were indeed a small number of “maladaptive” children who played videogames to the detriment of their scholastic, social, and familial lives, the same was true of many other childhood activities, from eating sweets and chips to playing basketball. One of the first studies of its kind, it found that there was nothing uniquely addictive about videogames. His PhD thesis, which he completed and successfully defended in late 1983, was entitled The Effects of Computer Video Game Play on Mood, Physiological Arousal, and Psychomotor Performance. Everett Koop, waded in soon after, saying videogames created “aberration in childhood behavior” and, toting one of the anti-videogame camp’s two favorite lines of argument, claiming again that they addicted children, “body and soul.” Others colorfully if senselessly described videogames as substitutes for “adolescent masturbatory activity,” without clarifying what that deliciously Freudian phrase was supposed to mean or why we should care if it was true.įavaro labored to replace such poetic language with actual data derived from actual research. Undaunted, Ronald Reagan’s unusually prominent new Surgeon General, C. The Philippines and Singapore banned arcades outright, claiming they “cause aggression, truancy, ‘psychological addictions’ akin to gambling, and encourage stealing money from parents and others to support children’s videogame habits.” Closer to home, the Dallas, Texas, suburb of Mesquite banned children from playing videogames in public without a parent or other adult guardian, prompting a rash of similar bans in small towns across the country that were finally struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1982. Games and the mostly young people who played them would come to dominate Favaro’s years at Hofstra.Īs arcades and the Atari VCS grew in popularity over the course of those years, an anti-videogame hysteria grew in response. One of the last things we said about video games that day was that they would be fun to study in some small research projects. I also wondered what kinds of motor and reflex skills the games were training in us. They took us away from the pressure of graduate school for a short time and gave us a chance to act out some of our competitive urges. In his first year as a graduate student of Clinical Psychology at Long Island’s Hofstra University, he and another student developed an obsession with the early standup arcade game Space Wars (a direct descendent of that granddaddy of all arcade games, MIT’s Space War).ĭuring one of the many psychological discussions which developed around those sessions, I wondered whether the games served some kind of therapeutic function for us. Favaro started blending computers with psychology some eight years before Activision published his groundbreaking “life simulator” Alter Ego. This edition includes an updated interface and fixes bugs in the original version of the game, but the content of the game hasn’t changed from the original 1986 version of the game.Peter J. The current edition of the Alter Ego game is a production of Choose Multiple LLC. Alter Ego starts at birth and ends at death, including two substantially different versions, depending on whether you choose to be male or female. It’s in the style of pick-a-path gamebooks, but with over a thousand multiple-choice questions, it’s much longer and deeper than traditional gamebooks. In this text-based interactive fiction, you choose what happens next. Favaro for the Commodore 64, DOS, Apple II, and the Apple Macintosh in 1986. Platform: DOS, Commodore 64, OS X, AndroidĪlter Ego – a RPG video game created by Peter J. Last Updated on: 12th January 2023, 11:41 am ![]()
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