While he was conducting his research, Favaro, an ambitious, personable fellow who had become something of a hacker following his purchase of an Atari 800, fostered links with the computer-industry trade press. 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 successful 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.
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