Your body is a temple (of doom)

The media have been tossing around this story about a study that found a correlation between the idealized or hyperidealized bodies of videogame characters and body image in gamers. It’s one of those O RLY? conclusions that is the result of almost every social psychology experiment: Gamers who played games featuring hot-bodied characters of their own gender had poorer body self-esteem, even after a mere 15 minutes of gaming.

It’s not the conclusion, per se, I take issue with; like I said, the goal of social psych experiments is, in essence, to scientifically validate obviousness. What bothers me is the fact that this scientifically un-rigorous “study” was published in an actual journal (which has, if I may revert to 13 years old, the best name ever) and is getting press attention.

• For starters, the study sample was very small (51 men and 32 women) and the participants were all “college-aged … [and] from the Midwestern USA,” meaning they were most likely a bunch of homogeneous, whitebread, corn-fed boys and girls.
• Also, the abstract for the article doesn’t mention a control group, a study cohort that took the same body-image test as the other groups but then played a neutral game without anthropomorphic characters, like Tetris. It could just be that sitting on your butt and staring at a TV for 15 min+ does a little something to sap the soul.
• Additionally, the experimenters controlled for only one variable: body mass index. While I agree that’s an important one, I can think of a few other variables that might have been useful to account for: previous exposure to gaming, consumption of other media featuring idealized body images, and how the participants performed at the games, to name a few.
• I haven’t read the full (subscription-only) article, but from the basic description it sounds like the results might have been confounded by a participant bias in which the subjects already knew what the experiment was about, and as such they may have unconsciously influenced the results.
• The game used in the male cohort was WWF WrestleMania 2000 for the N64. Hmmm… those hardbodied professional wrestlers look pretty impressive in all their 64-bit glory. Ahem. (I haven’t been able to find a mention of what the ladies’ game was).

A lot of commenters in the blogosphere have made cracks about how the universities involved are frittering away grant money on frivolous research like this. I can tell you that this study cost next to nothing to conduct - I’m pretty sure they dug WWF WrestleMania 2000 out of one of the authors’ basements - and it sounds like it was the brainchild of some undergraduate psych major just trying to pass his required Experimental Psych class. (I was one of those kids once myself, and I conducted an equally un-rigorous body image experiment). Interestingly, though, the authors are a professor and a post-doc.

Last, an observation: this study was published in print October, and published online even earlier than that, in May. I wonder why the media latched onto this now, more than seven months after it was released to the public?