Video Games, Once Demonized, More Regularly Utilized For Positive Health Benefits

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For decades now, video games have been largely demonized by a certain segment of the population that probably were annoyed when great evils like jazz music and chess were also demonized. Video games, say this group, make kids lazy and fat, degrade social skills, keep them from going outside and hitting each other with sticks or something, and also make them all violent school shooters. That many of these same charges were levied on such horrible activities as chess, Dungeons & Dragons, or any of the other moral panics we kicked off appears to be lost on most everyone. Video games are evil, full stop.Until they're not, of course. And, fortunately, the tide continues to turn as more and more people play video games more and more. Already we've seen studies suggesting that gaming can actually be a very healthy activity, even for children. But not just for children. Gaming can also, according to a new study, be beneficial for older folks when it comes to combatting depression.

Playing video games might look like a fun way to spend an afternoon. "They get addicting," said Laurie Featherstone, age 60, who lives in Millcreek. But it can also be so much more."When you go to someone like me and say, 'I'm depressed,' you expect me to say, 'Well, you should take some medicine or you should go to therapy.' So we're really proposing a third, very odd option to patients," said Shizuko Morimoto, a University of Utah population health sciences professor.Morimoto, a neuroscientist, treated Featherstone with video games designed to target the cognitive control center of the brain which malfunctions in depressed patients.

One is a word game; the other, a gardening game. "Flowers are growing and you're tapping on watering buckets and you're shooing away bugs and you're looking at the weather," he said.But there's much more going on behind the colorful flowers. The better you get at the game the harder it becomes. It also charts your progress, giving vital feedback and improving care.Featherstone said it's an intense workout. "It felt like I'd gone out and ran you know, a 5K race and but with my brain," she said.

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Content Moderation Case Study: BoingBoing Begins Disemvoweling The Trolls (2007)

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Summary: One of the challenges for any website that allows for user content — no matter the size of the website — is how to deal with trollish behavior. There are a variety of options available, including just deleting such comments, but one option that got attention in the mid-2000s was the idea of disemvoweling: literally removing the vowels from any comment deemed trollish. This was something of an update on concept of merely “splatting out” letters (i.e., replacing certain letters with ‘*’ to make them less searchable and to create some level of disassociation from the initial word).The history of disemvoweling is not entirely agreed upon, though it is clear that James Joyce used the word to describe writing without vowels in Finnegan’s Wake, published in 1939. Many people associate the modern use of it with Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who wrote in the comments on her own blog (Making Light) about how she had removed the vowels from someone who was trolling.

"Glad to see comments back. With TNH moderating should we expect frequent dis-envoweling?Only if it's warranted. I doubt I'll have frequent cause to use it.” --Teresa Nielsen Hayden

We hired a community manager, and equipped our comments system with a secret weapon: the "disemvoweller." If someone's misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click. The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.Now, once again, the balance mostly works. I still believe that there is no fully automated system capable of managing the complexities of online human interaction — no software fix I know of. But I'd underestimated the power of dedicated human attention.Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes everything. Small actions by focused participants change the tone of the whole. It is possible to maintain big healthy gardens online. The solution isn't cheap, or easy, or hands-free. Few things of value are. -- Xeni Jardin

For example, Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling -- removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly -- so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable. -- Cory Doctorow

When Teresa started out disemvowelling, she removed the vowels from the offending messages by hand, a tedious and slow process. But shortly thereafter, Bryant Darrell wrote a Movable Type plugin to automate the process. This is a perfect example of human-geek synergy: hacking tools for civilian use based on the civilian's observed needs.But there aren't enough Teresas to go around: how do we keep all the other message-boards troll-free? Again, the secret is in observing the troll whisperer in the field, looking for techniques that can be encapsulated in tutorials and code. There is a wealth of troll whisperer lore that isn't pure intuition and good sense, techniques that can be turned into tools for the rest of us to use. -- Cory Doctorow

• What are other techniques like disemvoweling that can be alternatives to simply deleting trollish comments?
• Is disemvoweling an effective strategy for dealing with trollish behavior in forums?
• For making use of disemvoweling, is it worth investing in building tools to make the process usable across multiple moderators? If so, what features would those tools need to have? How would those tools be rolled out?
• Should there be different types of moderation (deletion, disemvoweling, etc.) applied to different types of content? If so, what should those differences be?
• In this case study, the websites' traffic was fairly small and moderation was by a handful of moderators. What would a company need to consider, in terms of content policy and moderation tools, if they want to use disemvoweling on websites that have much much larger communities and hundreds of moderators reviewing content?

• Would removing vowels simply make trolls angrier and more determined to troll a website?
• Is disemvoweling more effective than simply deleting content since it also acts as a signal of what is not acceptable behavior on a particular site?
• Do trolls adapt to techniques like disemvoweling and find other ways to troll, making it only a short term solution?
• Does disemvoweling actually highlight the comments, making curious readers try to figure out what it’s saying?

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