Semantics, and Back-of-an-Envelope Experiments

September 2023

As I'm just starting out, I want to 'ease myself' into my studies by starting to read the literature around what I'm doing. I thought good place to start would be to see what research is already out there around the unintended consequences of playing video games. To prepare, I went to Google and typed in 'unintended consequences of playing video games'.

Now, before going any further, my understanding is that an unintended consequence can be deemed 'good', 'bad', or 'neutral'. Wikipedia says that "in the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences, more colloquially called knock-on effects) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen."

It goes on to say that "unintended consequences can be grouped into three types:

Unexpected benefit: A positive unexpected benefit (also referred to as luck, serendipity or a windfall).
Unexpected drawback: An unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy (e.g., while irrigation schemes provide people with water for agriculture, they can increase waterborne diseases that have devastating health effects, such as schistosomiasis).
Perverse result: A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended." (Wikipedia, 2023)

Returning to the Google search, and I was somewhat surprised that the first page of search results was overwhelmingly negative.

I'm old enough to remember the satanic panic of the '90s, and how the media liked to blame video games, Harry Potter, and Marilyn Manson for any incident of teen violence. I had hoped - and maybe even assumed - that by 2023, attitudes had changed. Apparently not.

The first image you can see is a screenshot of the Google search, and while the results weren't entirely surprising, I had hoped that, by now, society had progressed enough to realise that we can no longer blame Gary Gygax and 'Grand Theft Auto' for all of the world's ills.

Despite my disappointment at this lack of progress, one thought did start to tickle at my brain: the conflation of the phrases unintended consequences and negative effects.

I guessed that the right thing to do would be to run the same search term through a second search engine, so I went into Bing and tried again, using the same search term as before. You can see the results of that search in the second image. Bing's results, though not identical, still trawled an internet that appears to see unintended consequences as being negative. Oh, and you need to up your game Bing - you only found 12,500,000 hits and Google found 316,000,000.

At this point, my long-dormant research senses were starting to tingle, and while my 'doing proper research' skills are pretty rusty, I thought it may be a good idea to stick to this informal line of enquiry for no reason other than curiosity. So I decided to go down the Artificial Intelligence route, and asked ChatGPT the same question three times: What are the unintended consequences of playing video games?

I pasted each response into a document, then highlight all text that could be interpreted as having positive meaning in green, and all that could be interpreted as being negative in yellow. Neutral, unbiased language would not be highlighted, and hopefully this would give me a quick, visual guide to see how comments were weighted. You can see this document on the right.

Now, this is only a 'back of an envelope experiment, but intriguing nonetheless. At a glance, all three of the responses I received from ChatGPT did exactly the same thing as Google and Bing: it trawled the internet and reported unintended consequences and negative effects as the same thing. Look at all of that yellow!

CHAT GPT What are the Unintended Consequences of Playing Video Games.pdf

Click to enlarge

Aware of the rabbit hole I may be in danger of falling down, I carried on regardless and collated the subheadings each ChatGPT response had provided, colour coded them to (loosely) represent categories such as mental health, physical health, and academic effects, then ran the yellow and green highlighting activity again. Of the 21 subheadings ChatGPT had suggested across all three searches, 13 were worded negatively, 8 were neutral, and 0 were positive.

I think I want to change the thinking here. While my research will not be wholly about happy accidents (though that is exactly what prompted me to enrol on a PhD in the first place), and I know that some of the unintended consequences my research participants experience WILL be negative, I'd like to try and balance the debate a little and help people to see that an unintended consequence can be a fine thing indeed.

So I think I can start planning my literature review. And my first stop will be examining the current research around unintended consequences of playing video games. I have a feeling it's not going to be a particularly positive topic...

References

Wikipedia, (2003), Unintended consequences, located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences, date accessed, 11/9/23

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