Cultivation theory has been around for about four decades now. What is it? The idea is that if you consume some kind of media consistently, you'll start thinking that the real world is more like the media one.
The classic case is television news. People who watch a lot of it were supposed to think that their neighborhoods were more dangerous. Only the studies were generally trashed in one of the better academic food fights that my field's ever had. One particularly devastating critique showed the the zodiac signs of the people in the studies were a better predictor than what they watched. So for years we've thought that the theory, while appealing, was probably a load of baloney.
The problem is, I found cultivation in an MMO.
Freshly published article here (5th item down, note publishing legalese below).
Readers of this space will likely know that I do, among other things, the dreaded "media effects" research. As in, I see if media affects people in both good and bad ways. This includes video games and MMOs. I'm on record as saying that games research has not shown aggression effects, but I've always been careful to not say that they don't do anything, or never will be shown to. Still, when my research showed a big cultivation finding, I was a bit surprised. Maybe I shouldn't have been.
The idea behind cultivation is that if you see a lot of something and it's fairly consistent, it's easy to remember. TV has always been awful for this research because it has a lot of variety. I think that in comparison, a gamer's MMO diet is probably a lot more consistent: one thing, played a lot, over a long time.
So what exactly did I find? I had people playing an MMO (Asheron's Call 2, we hardly knew ya) for one month. At the same time I had a group not playing an MMO. I asked both groups about the likelihood of violence in the real world along four dimensions: assault with a weapon, murder, rape, robbery. As it turns out, only one of those occurs in AC2, and that's assault with a weapon. I think it's no stretch to claim that weapons are a central focus in that and many MMOs. So what's wild is that after the study ended, the people who played AC2 thought that getting assaulted with a weapon in real life was much more likely than those who didn't play.
Think about that. Playing the MMO actually changed the players' perceptions of reality.
Now I know what your reaction is right now. It's Wait a minute, wait a minute, let's not have any more of this crazy effects nonsense and let's not hear about why games are bad anymore. Only I think that's wrong on both points. The study is pretty solid. Control group, strong statistics, the works. No other possible explanations for the findings.
Now as for the good vs. bad, here's where I think it gets interesting. Let's say you are with me and you buy the findings. I think they aren't necessarily good or bad. Consider the person who thinks that there is a lot of weapon-based assault going on--more in fact than actually exists. They play and their level of suspicion goes up. In a word, they get paranoid. Yet consider the person who didn't think that it was as likely as it really is. That person gets corrected upward to the right degree. In effect, they become appropriately cautious.
Now, if you're ready for the head-spinner, consider that the thing that generated cultivation could be good or bad. What if a game generated trust? Do we want people to become more trusting from playing MMOs? The answer depends on whether they were overly or under-trusting beforehand. I think. And of course the kinds of cultivation could vary quite a bit from title to title.
From the paper:
"Last, there is the important issue of the various types of cultivation that might
occur in video games. As cultivation researchers have found, all effects need not be
negative or solely concerned with violence and fear. When digital worlds can be
anything, the effects could be negative or positive. Shrum’s heuristic-recall model
suggests that the frequent occurrence of an action or pattern could inform the
player’s perceptions of offline life. For example, a virtual world in which players
continually see cheaters prosper might well cause a decrease in general trust
because the player could begin to suspect real-world people of cheating. In contrast,
one that stresses the importance of ethical behavior might well cause an
increase in the perception of others as ethical in the real world. Ultima Online,
for example, is well known in the gaming community as a title that preaches ethical
behavior.
Perhaps virtual cultivation could improve human relations. Lai (2003) has
shown how American MMRPGs stress racial diversity. Could spending time in
diverse worlds improve real-world perceptions of other racial groups or lead to
ethnic tolerance? Or could it foster stereotypes (Nakamura, 2001)? Can time spent
in a prosocial environment featuring sharing, altruism, and generosity improve our
perceptions of others offline? Many games make a point of rewarding virtuous
behavior, although a handful, like the Grand Theft Auto series, glorify antisocial
behavior."
I'm still wrapping my head around this finding, even though it's in print. Is this a good thing or bad? Should developers consider it? What games are causing what kinds of cultivation out there?
