"Dit barn bliver riktig dyktig til at slå ihjel"

This is my response to a blogpost by the Danish Ph D, medical doctor and author Vibeke Mannich. In her recent blogpost Dit barn bliver rigtig dygtig til at slå ihjel!  she attacks computer games violently, based on her reading of a list of articles by Craig Anderson et. al. If you have followed this blog for a while, you know that I have repeatedly cited other studies which question and disprove this research and meta-research, at most levels from methodology to knowledge about games in general to the funding.

Anyway: Vibeke Mannich was surprised at the vehement reactions to her blogpost, a post where she blamed World of Warcraft for the terror shooting at Utøya, and warned parents that their children will grow up to be just like the killer. Her blogpost was offensive to me as a Norwegian citizen who has been following the case against the Utøya-killer day to day, as a researcher who has spent the last 16 years studying games and gamers, as a gamer who has played that "horrible" game World of Wacraft for years, and as a mother of children (now adults) who have also played the game and not killed anybody yet. (Instead they are working to save the world from climate change, and care for children with social and physical problems.) She has also written another blogpost about how offensive the responses she received to the original gamer blogpost were, which is why I post my response here. She is moderating her comments heavily, and I am not convinced that my post will make the cut. So, here goes:

Update: Vibeke Mannich responded to my comments, particularly when I pointed out the criticism of Craig Anderson, and how the research and meta-research had been criticised and to a large degree disproved.  That's when I realised that I have been trolled. From her response:

Jeg må så sige, at det er tankevækkende som du beskriver Craig Anderson og hvordan han er blevet mistænkeliggjort og dæmoniseret. Jeg oplever jo i virkeligheden det samme – måske trods alt i mindre målstok. Men at jeg dæmoniseres i uhyggelig grad og udsættes for ja regelret chikane.

Translation: "I have to say, it's throught provoking how you describe Craig Anderson and how he has been drawn in doubt (made suspicious - direct translation) and demonified. I am experiencing the same - maybe to a lesser degree. But I am demonified in a terrifying degree, and am a victim of straight out harassment."

With a response like that to being made aware of criticism (he has published in peer-reviewed journals - well, who hasn't?) there's nothing more to be done. All I can do is tick her blog off on the list of online weirdos, which in itself is a learning experience. It's been a while since I was properly trolled.***

Kjære Vibeke

Jeg ser at den kjente og uhyre omstridte amerikanske forskeren Craig Anderson er en sentral kilde til din forståelse av computerspill. Da er det kanskje nyttig for deg å vite at hans forskning er sterkt kritisert både av psykologer, pedagoger og rene computerspillforskere. Hans forskning har vært forsøkt brukt som basis for å forby en rekke spill i USA, men det ble stoppet i høyesterett i California med begrunnelsen om at forskningen ikke er bred, grundig og uhildet (unbiased).
Se denne beskrivelsen av en artikkel fra 2009 av Christopher Ferguson, som kritiserer nettopp den type forskning på computerspill som du siterer over: http://www.gamepolitics.com/2009/01/21/researcher-no-link-between-violent-games-amp-school-shootings. Jeg kan også foreslå at du leser forskningen til denne svenske forskergruppen, som leverer en meget kunnskapsrik analyse om hvordan vold blir oppfattet og behandlet av spillere av spill som nettopp World of Warcraft.

Breivik-saken: Når du bruker Anders Behring Breivik som et eksempel på hvordan computerspill gjør en person farlig, så er jeg også nesten nødt til å spørre om du har fulgt med på rettsaken? De sakkyndige uttalelsene sendes direkte på norsk fjernsyn, og NRK er ofte en del av danske fjernsynspakker, så jeg går ut fra at du har hatt anledning til å studere dette? Dersom du har fått med deg hva debatten handler om, så er computerspill en forsvinnende liten del av det hele. Spillenes betydning for hans handlinger har blitt tonet kraftig ned. Tvert imot er det mye som tyder på at han har fått sine meninger og holdninger fra blogger på nettet, hvor mennesker som mener de er spesialister på et felt har uttalt seg skarpt, autoritært og ensidig uten å lese mer enn et par bøker som støtter deres egne meninger, samtidig som de stempler alle som er uenige med dem som hjernevaskede og kunnskapsløse. Noe som er litt ironisk i denne sammenhengen.
For å gå videre med forskningsartikler rundt massemordere og computerspill, så har det vært gjort forskning direkte på dette. En av de som har skrevet en rapport om skoleskyttere [og] risikofaktor er Mary Ellen O’Toole (pdf)

Det stedet hvor hun nevner computerspill er i denne passagen: “The student spends inordinate amounts of time playing video games with violent themes,and seems more interested in the violent images than in the game itself.”

Som du vil se når du leser rapporten er det ikke spillingen i seg selv som er problemet, det er interessen for vold. Forskning rundt vold viser at barn og unge som har lært fra sine omgivelser (venner og familie) at vold er en god løsning på deres problemer bruker alle ressurser de har på å bli dyktigere til denne form for problemløsning. Disse bruker blant annet bøker, filmer, musikk, kurs, skytterklubber, militæret, politi- eller vektertrening og ja, også computerspill, til å finne inspirasjon og idéer om hvordan de skal bli dyktigere til å bruke vold. De er imidlertid allerede voldelige, den ofte brede og varierte mediebruken er bare en måte å bli dyktigere til noe de har bestemt seg for å gjøre.

Så til et av dine egne utsagn fra debatten om dataspill: “Tak for jeres kommentarer – desværre må jeg jo sige, at en del af jeres ganske aggressive indlæg desværre bekræfter hvad jeg skriver i min tråd – nemlig at voldelige videospil gør (nogen af) jer voldelige/aggressive.”

Til dette vil jeg svare med en uhyre underholdende leder fra dn.se: Fiktivt våld gör forskare aggressiva. 

Når du publiserer et så skarpt utsagn som er så sårende og svakt begrunnet i erfaring og i forskning som “Dit barn bliver rigtig dygtig til at slå ihjel! ” og kobler tusener (millioner) av hyggelige, vennlige, kunnskapsrike unge mennesker til et så brutalt tilfelle som Anders Behring Breivik, da er det dessverre ikke helt uventet at du gjør mennesker opprørte. Kanskje ikke alle er så høflige som de burde være, men deres reaksjon er forståelig.

Med vennlig hilsen
Torill

Still Going Wrong

The main benefit of living in Copenhagen over Volda is the easy access to theatre, ballet, opera and whatnot. I know that sounds as if I am constantly off to some performance, while the truth is that most nights are spent falling asleep before I manage to finish the episode of CSI.

I do however get to see some of what is on, and last night I went with the husband, a sister and a friend of the family to a truly funny dance/performance/theatre "thing" which challenged the idea of "wrong". Still going wrong is performed by an ensemble of five dancing for just short of an hour in a very intimate stage. It explores "wrong" and turns odd, erroneous and ugly into a performance of surprising impact and humour. The dancers wear pink socks that lets them slide around the stage, they sweat through the casual wear they dance in, they bump into each other, look shy and akward, and run into the walls - just like your average distracted and introvert scholar.

I was unprepared for the experience, I just knew it would be pretty alternative compared to the classical ballet at the scene next door. Dansehallerne is  a center for dance built in the old soda factory of the brewing giant Carlsberg, and caters to a wide varity of dance styles with dancers and choreographers both Danish and international.

Unrepared was not a problem, though. Instead of coming out feeling elated after seeing a superb performance of exquisite style, Still going wrong had me coming out laughing and ready to explore the environment. After watching the dancers battle shyness, errors and akwardness, getting up on the playful installations waiting in the yard and jumping and moving in silly poses felt right and permitted. It was a performance more about the delight in flawed humanity than about the genius of perfection, and as such it spoke to us about what we could do ourselves.

Riding the bikes back home in a pack like serious bad-boy bikers (three women and one man, all between 50 and 64, crazy folks indeed) was the perfect way to end the evening, seeing Copenhagen in the sunset, soft warm light fading into fat drops of rain.

Summer!: Life in Copenhagen #9

(This was written 2nd of June and got stuck in the process.)

It's been almost two years. I have learned to ride my bike like a dane, which includes using the bell when the tourists wander into the bicycle lanes, to not worry if I haven't shopped for three days before a long week-end, and to call to talk to people in public offices, such as for instance the dreaded "skat", the tax department.

My language is changing, I am deliberately letting it slip into a more archaic form (to Norwegians archaic = Danish), and I am trying to decide which words may make it the easier for my students to understand me come fall. Some never will think I speak comprehensively, I know that, but I keep trying. I am practicing, in my head, to use "i" and "jer" rather than "dere" (which covers both in Norwegian), and "at" rather than "å". I have already given up words like "må" and "svært" due to its different emphasis in Norwegian and Danish, but I am keeping "enkelt". That one, my darling TAs assure me, is very easy to understand. It's "nemt", as they say. Hopefully, step by step, I will be able to lecture in a language a bit closer to Danish.

Until then, I take comfort in the fact that several of my students are willing to tell me, face to face, that they love the lectures. My Danish friends say Danes are introverts, reserved and uncomfortable with giving praise. I don't see that. My colleagues are warm, joyful, funny, and my students are interesting, challenging, polite, graceful and, surprisingly and extremely welcome, quite willing to thank me directly for the semester. I get that over and over again: "Thank you, for this term. It was a great class." Sometimes, even "it was the best class, the best class ever." I cherish that. It makes every exhausting lecture worth it, it even excuses what I do to my mother tongue.

But life is good outside of work too. The heat the last week has turned Copenhagen back to the city I fell in love with when I moved here. I wear sandals all the time, and have packed away most of the winter clothing. (OK, before I posted this, the weather turned COLD). I change into a T-shirt and work-out capris at home and just throw a thin top over for decency as I ride the bike to the Pilates work-outs. The ladies at Pilates cph deserve a mention. Perhaps even their own blogpost, soon. I started with Pilates years ago, but at home, from DVDs and books. It still helped, and as long as I managed to work out, my back gave me less problems. Then I found a teacher, for a day or two a week, in Ørsta. I loved it, but my schedule and hers made it less than efficient. Here, there are classes 6 days a week, all year, and I can schedule time online. This means, for instance, that even if I am travelling to Norway or Finland more than every second week since the beginning of April until the end of June, with a conference here in Denmark, I manage to get in two sometimes three work-outs a week. I have a long way to go to control a perfect "teaser", but I can get up into it, and hold it long enough to roll back down somewhat controlled, if I don't have to stay up there, showing off.

You might think I'd be more physically active in a place like Volda, where there isn't much else to do but hiking and living healthy. The truth is: I have had less pain since we moved to Copenhagen than I have had any other winter since 1985. And now it's warm, too, my muscles feel like butter, and I enjoy moving about, something I have rarely liked. Are there no problems? Oh yes, last week I was at a conference in Roskilde. Despite the effort, I never managed to get on the right train to get there on time. Partly it was me, not being sufficiently prepared - but how can I prepare for sudden 20-30 minute delays of the trains, and the chaos that is Nørreport station? The sudden heat caused the shoes that I had worn to work without incident just a week earlier to rub my feet raw, and the conference was on a topic I didn't know, leaving me to feel alienated and odd, like a giant dancing bear among all those tiny, serious women studying culture. After three days of heat, trains, Danish lunches and uncomfortable lecture-rooms I was physically wrecked.

Before that I had, for some reason, had 50 000,- dkk of "benefits" added to my income by the tax department. I was totally unable to track down where that had come in, as the electronic tax form didn't tell me. Hence, see the first paragraph. Mastering conversations on the phone with tax officials is vital. Also, the pollution worries me. I ride my bike to work and home through a cloud of exhaust, every day. I take some comfort in the fact that most of the time, I also ride up against a strong wind coming off the sea. I try not to think of what it carries with it from Germany, Poland and the other countries to the east and north.

And I miss the mountains. That plan I had: To sell Rotsethornet to Denmark, so we could have a bit more light? I still think it's a brilliant idea, but from the other side. Imagine how impressive it would have looked in Amager fælled? And imagine the opportunities it would have offered: just the resistance from the climb, the sensation of getting somewhere, getting up - yes, I miss it. But I'll go to the summer house this summer, live by the fjord, climb the mountains, curse the rain. I'll hurt, be cold and exhausted, and long for this little apartment right here, in the city.

Piracy and academic publishing

We all need to publish. It's part of the job description: The knowledge we, the scholars, are gathering, needs to be distributed. We do quite a bit of that through teaching, but it's not enough. Society not just expects us to publish, it demands it.

This demand is institutionalised through several different structures. The different roads to degrees, jobs, titles and opportunities are all paved with journal articles, the stepping stones are monographies and the embellishments all come in edited anthologies. The Universities are rewarded by the publishing of their scholars, and so they reward us, and the publications are used for public relations and for media attention, which again covers another part of our job: that responsibility to participate in the public debate. Research and learning is ok, but we have to demonstrate that we have done so.

There are of course rules to publishing. This blog doesn't give me any points. I have had (and still have) great pleasure from it. It has brought me in touch with some incredible people over the years, and in a few cases have been immediately useful. But it circumvents the structures that puts value to academic publishing. It's not peer-reviewed, it has no editor, no isbn-number and no rejection rate. It is, in short, not an academic journal. Academic journals is where it all happens, where publishing becomes elitist and important, and, for everybody but the scholars, where the money is. Some of them get paid both coming and going: Universities pay to have the articles of their scholars published, and then they pay to display the same journals (and articles) in the libraries, physical and digital. For a small university the price of journals is through the roof: there's no way we can afford it all.

And so we end up pirating.

When I am in a library with full access, I download like crazy. You can spot the experienced scholars in a big research library or inside a flush university network by the suddenly intense look of a treasure hunter about to download two or three or five years of journal volumes, and on the backchannel of conferences there will be a quiet whisper among friends about who grabs what, while we're still connected. Now, this is a pretty legitimate "piracy" - after all, we are supposed to exchange knowledge. The piracy university libraries targets is the stealing of journals by stealing student emails and passwords, and then grabbing volumes of journals for resale. Considering how extremely expensive it can be to buy one article - Jstore often asks for 25$ or more for 10-12 pages - this quickly becomes very profitable.

I am mostly a law-abiding person, and I couldn't hack Jstor even if I really tried, but I do get a little bit annoyed with the practice of making us pay both coming and going. As it is, scholars and their universities handle all the costs of the initial production. We are talking about years of work in many cases, and decades of education and study. The scholars write the material up, often presenting it at a few conferences on the way, to get feedback. This means it's already been through one or two peer-review processes before a version reaches a journal. This means at least 5 people have been directly involved in creating and editing the materials, before it's even sent to the journal.

Scholarly journal editors often work for free, and the peer-reviewers certainly do. We read and give feedback because we know we are in a loop of favours returned. I read for you, you read for me, and in the end we all get peer-reviewed. The double-blind process stops the most immediate exchange of favours, but there are still levels at which we are mutually dependent. Anyway, the journal itself does more or less decent copy-editing (often lacking, something that skews academic publishing heavily in favour of native English speakers), some design, some legal work as to registering the materials with the relevant libraries or central archives, printing and online publishing, and a minimal amount of advertising. And the sales, of course, where the largest revenues come from libraries, libraries at the universities where the same scholars who wrote the articles have to buy their own material back.

In other discussions about piracy, content producers point to the poor creative souls who try to make a living by writing their souls out, only to be ripped off by the pirates. In academia, pirates just can't steal anything more from us. We already pay, often twice, for content we have produced and the universities and research institutions have financed. And yes, we get something back, but not from the publishers. Hence, I don't hesitate to mail an article to a colleague or a student. I dip into the stored secrets of my hard-disk, and hand articles out, mine and others.

I do feel guilty though, in a looking-over-my-shoulder kind of way, but not because I think I am doing something bad. More in a slightly paranoid fashion, as if I expect Big Brother to look over my shoulder, not in the reality show version, but the Orwellian Science Fiction of 1984.

And now, back to downloading articles.