Pew releases "Teens, Video Games, and Civics" report
The long-awaited Pew report on teen gaming has just been released. Claiming to be the first national survey of its kind (in scope, depth and representative sampling), this MacArthur-funded report concludes that "teens’ gaming experiences are diverse and include significant social interaction and civic engagement." Running nearly fifty pages in length, the document defies easy summarization, and indeed members of this community should consider digesting it in its entirety rather than relying on synopses and decontextualized excerpts.
The report is easy to read, with useful sub-headings, tables and summaries of each section, offering authoritative interventions in numerous contemporary debates about teen gaming including gender, violence, race, learning, and social and political engagement. Many of the findings are not exactly surprising - both boys and girls play games, but boys play longer, etc. - but the report offers well-documented challenges to the most common focal points for moral panic around youth and games and a wealth of statistics about who is playing which games and why.
In addition to the report, with its careful accounting of research methodology (regression analysis anyone?), the Pew researchers released a white paper titled "The Civic Potential of Video Games" (which actually came out a week before the final report), advocating a progressive vision of gaming's potential to promote social and political engagement and addressing the specific kinds of gameplay that correlate with different kinds of actions in the social world.