The Academics Challenging Gaming’s Relationship with Suicide

Content warning: This article contains frequent references to suicide and later mentions murder. Please proceed with caution.

To say that the world of video game academia is interesting would be the understatement of the century. It is a world where research is retracted for “mathematically impossible” statistics, where distinguished professors send haughty, harassing emails to other professors, and where interviewees are obligated to have a pocket answer for the eventual question on video games and violence.

But underneath the drama and spectacle are people who truly care about the integrity of their field. This passion can lead to academics banding together for their cause and telling the world “Enough. This is a problem and we need to be better”.

This is exactly what has happened with the publication of ‘Researchers should avoid causally attributing suicide to video game play as a single factor’, a letter which challenges a research paper detailing suicides in Pakistan attributed to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG).

To give you the full story of what is happening and why this is important, I will be dividing this article into three sections: a summary of the paper on video games and suicide, a summary of the letter criticising this paper, and my own input on why relying on the data used in the original study is such a bad idea. Spoiler alert: it has historically led to one of the biggest and most frequently repeated lies in the history of psychology.

As usual, there will be a summary at the bottom if you do not wish to read everything. Now, let’s begin.

Contents

1. The Study
2. The Letter
3. Media Reports and Psychology: A Disheartening History
4. A Final Note
5. Summary
6. Credits
7. References

The Study

The paper being placed under scrutiny is ‘PUBG-related suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic: Three cases from Pakistan’ by Mamun et al. (2020). In this paper, three suicides are detailed that occurred in Lahore, Pakistan within the span of a few days. The main concern outlined in this paper is that free time during lockdown and isolation may be spent indulging in excessive gaming that can lead to negative consequences – the three cases provided acting as extreme examples.

Reading through the paper can be an exercise in whiplash at times. The summary of the paper tentatively says “It is likely that all three individuals experienced other predisposing factors related to psychological instability”, then the body of text makes bold statements such as “The present-report highlights what appears to be the first online gaming suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic globally…”. Perhaps this is just me, but the juxtaposition of those two terms makes me very uncomfortable.

Alongside the whiplash, the paper can generally be a frustrating read. I hinted at the beginning that the source of the data for this publication is a source of controversy, so allow me to elaborate. Rather than using data collected according to the scientific method, this paper relies on news and media reports. When doing this, just enough crumbs of information are left in the text to be suspicious of the circumstances. For example, one person had had a heated argument with their father prior to the tragic event, and another person had made a phone call to an unidentified person beforehand.

While it would be foolish of me to blame these things in isolation (more on this later), it is a good example of why relying on media reports is so frustrating – there simply isn’t enough room for elaboration or investigation. If you are setting out to write a report on video games and suicide, everything else gets sidelined and there isn’t enough time to accurately portray the lives these young people led.

There are many other problems with this paper, but they are much more eloquently explained in the letter – so let’s get to it.

The Letter

Four months after the above paper was published, a letter to the publisher was penned criticising it in three main ways.

Firstly, the authors are critical of the poor quality of the data used in the paper. Minimal effort was made to adapt media reports into an academic publication, simply changing or adding a few words which borders on plagiarism. When details were changed, it seemed to be done to add further sensationalism. For example, one of the teenagers was “said by those who knew him to be addicted to the game”. However, when you go back and check the media text, the statement about the teenager playing PUBG for many hours a day comes from a police superintendent, not someone ‘who knew him’.

You may have noticed that my description of the publication was suspiciously short. This was a deliberate choice due to the second critique – the original paper violates guidance from the World Health Organisation (2008) not to describe completed or attempted suicides in detail, nor to attribute suicide to one particular factor. The original paper is guilty of both of these factors, so I didn’t want to be guilty of the same ethical dilemmas being critiqued.

These ethical shortcomings are troublesome for two reasons. Many of us are familiar with the newly-recognised Gaming Disorder, and the authors are concerned that attributing the complex issue of suicide to video games will cause people to panic. I can’t help but agree as when news outlets reported that 20 hours of gaming per week equated to video game addiction, I saw concerned Facebook mothers tagging their friends to notify them. The second reason is due to something known as suicide contagion. The authors point to a body of evidence indicating that high-profile media reports on suicide can influence suicide rates, particularly in young people (Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2013; Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2020).

The final point made by the researchers is simply how unscientific the paper is. No attempts were made to source additional information outside of the media reports, and they comment that a lot of research referenced in the paper is self-citation. I took a look at the reference section to work out just how egregious the self-referencing was. 19 sources were cited in total, 15 of which were academic sources such as a peer-reviewed publication or textbook. Of these 15 academic sources, 13 (87%) contained an author of this paper.

When you combine citing yourself nearly every time you cite something, failure to engage with other research on the topic, failure to go any further than surface-level media reports, breaching moral and ethical guidelines set out by the World Health Organisation, and failure to try to collect or critique or analyse any information whatsoever, I cannot help but feel that this is academia at its most disappointing. The conclusion of the letter does an excellent job of summarising my feelings:

In repackaging news articles as formal case reports, Mamun et al. appear to have breached guidelines regarding the ethical reporting of suicide, and risk confusing the public debate around video game effects…More worryingly, given that there is a clear literature showing the effects of poor reporting on population suicide rates, we are concerned that the present paper has the potential to cause harm by effectively encouraging sensationalist news stories as worthy of academic attention.

I am incredibly mindful of the final sentence – ‘effectively encouraging sensationalist news stories as worthy of academic attention’. In my final section, I would like to provide an example of just how badly the world can be impacted when we rely on media reports for academic evidence. To be blunt, I sincerely feel it has made our world a more fearful place to live in.

Media Reports and Psychology: A Disheartening History

Before I proceed to the main story, I would like to remind readers that media reports on video games and suicide have historically contained errors. If you read video game news, you may be familiar with a suicide that was attributed to the visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club. In a now-deleted article, MSN describes a way in which the game may have interfered with the boy’s psyche:

He said Ben inputted his mobile phone into the game and would be contacted by text message during the day and at night, often waking him up.

As you might assume, there is no way to give Doki Doki Literature Club your cellphone number, and there is no way for the game to text you. This is an example of how information may be included in media reports which has not been verified or properly followed up on, yet is repeated uncritically.

If you have an interest in psychology, you may be familiar with something known as the Bystander Effect. The Bystander Effect argues that if something bad is happening and there are several people watching, we’re more likely to think ‘that’s not my problem’ and wait for someone else to help (Latane & Darley, 1968).

The catalyst for the Bystander Effect was the death of 28 year old Kitty Genovese. In 1964, the media reported that she died alone in an alleyway following multiple stabbings. Between these stabbings, 37 people saw her from their apartment and did not call anyone for help or attempt to go help her – they assumed someone else would (New York Times, 1964). Kitty’s story has been used in everything ranging from Soviet propaganda for how the western world is lazy and heartless (Baker, 2014), to a speech justifying the invasion of Iraq (Keller, 2002). Kitty’s story is used as evidence of how we turn our heads and our hearts off when we think someone else has the duty of care, until eventually no one cares.

Except that’s not what happened at all.

To start, the 37 people cited in the media is not the number of people who did nothing after witnessing the attack. This is the number of people interviewed by police, so this would have included people like Kitty’s friends helping to establish a potential suspect and motive. So how many people did see the attack?

This could technically be divided into two: who saw Kitty in the alleyway, and who realised she had been stabbed. This is an important distinction as the night was cold, windows were closed and the street was poorly lit, but some people did report seeing a woman hunched over. So what did they do?

While media reports say no one helped, multiple people actually called the police to report a woman slumped over. However, the police didn’t help. While no concrete reason was ever given, it’s speculated to be due to the crime scene being close to a bar and the police simply believing she was drunk (Solomon, 2015).

We then get to the second part – who had realised she was stabbed? Based on testimonials, this seems to be two people. The first was Joseph Fink, a cruel Neo-Nazi dubbed ‘Adolf’ by the local children (Bregman, 2020). The second person was Karl Ross. Ross didn’t immediately call the police, choosing instead to contact his neighbour Sophia Farrar.

Ross may have accidentally kickstarted speculation on the Bystander Effect by telling the New York Times that he ‘didn’t want to get involved’, appearing potentially cruel and disinterested in Kitty (New York Times, 1964). However, the truth is that Ross was afraid of the police as a gay man living in a world where his existence was criminalised. His fear of the police drove him to contact his neighbour rather than the police, meaning that he still set out to help Kitty while trying to protect himself from police persecution (Baker, 2014).

In a complete lack of regard for her own safety, Farrar ran to Kitty and held her in her final moments as her husband called the police – yet another person who called the police to help Kitty.

Because of sensationalised media reports on Kitty’s passing, the world believes that 37 people watched as she died alone and did not bother to do anything. The truth is that Kitty passed in the warm embrace of a neighbour after multiple people called the police to try to save her.

The Bystander Effect continues to be taught in psychology courses to this day, and people believe the world is a darker and colder place because of it. This is especially sad as the Bystander Effect doesn’t even hold up to academic scrutiny: data from several countries shows that 90% of public incidents involve bystanders coming to help, and people are actually more likely to help when an emergency is particularly dangerous (Fischer et al., 2011; Philpot et al., 2020).

I appreciate that this section is quite the segue from talking about video game research, but it is such a powerful example of why academics need to be rigorous with their research and not simply rely on media reports as evidence. News reports get details wrong, may sensationalise details for effect, and are in no way a good substitute for empirical evidence. We can not only see this within the world of video games with the reporting on Doki Doki Literature Club, but with the tragic legacy of Kitty Genovese and the Bystander Effect.

A Final Note

Sometimes I have the misfortune of reporting on research that isn’t quite up to statistical or ethical standards. Part of me gets stressed doing this as I’ve previously written about how working in academia comes with a degree of original sin: people just assume you have an agenda or tamper with statistics until you get what you want, and I’m sadly no stranger to these accusations. I would hate to think that shining a spotlight on disappointing work encourages the harassment or low opinion of my colleagues.

I would like to remind my kind readers that the lack of scientific rigour and ethical dilemmas in this paper were called out by academics. Please don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, people really do care and strive for academic, scientific, and ethical excellence wherever possible. Thank you for your kindness and for keeping an open heart and mind.

Summary

• An academic paper was published in 2020 which attributes three suicides in Lahore, Pakistan to excessive PUBG playing. Rather than using data collected using the scientific method or psychiatric case notes, the source of this information comes from news and media reports. Statements throughout the paper such as “the first online gaming suicides during the COVID-19 pandemic” are made which seem to emphasise video games as the catalyst for these tragic events.
• Four months later, a letter was published by a group of academics criticising this paper for three main reasons. Firstly, the paper borders on plagiarism due to the minimal effort in changing the original text; text that has been changed may lean further into sensationalism than the original media report. Secondly, the paper violates guidelines from the World Health Organisation not to describe suicides in detail or to attribute them to a lone reason. This is concerning due to pre-existing worries and confusion surrounding video game addiction, alongside the potential for high-profile suicide cases to have a contagious effect. Thirdly, the paper is criticised for its lack of scientific rigour due to gratuitous self-citation and lack of data collection or investigation.
• Relying solely on media reports as a source of evidence is very concerning. Media reports on video games and suicide have historically contained errors, such as erroneous reporting on Doki Doki Literature Club. An extreme example of why media reports should not be used to inform psychology comes from the Bystander Effect, arguing that people will be less likely to help you in a crisis if there are others around because it’s ‘not their problem’. The Bystander Effect was birthed from the murder of Kitty Genovese, a woman reported to have died alone in an alleyway after 37 witnesses did not help her. However, investigative journalism uncovered that this number of witnesses was completely false, several people called the police to help her, and that she passed in the loving arms of a neighbour rather than alone in the cold. The Bystander Effect also does not stand up to academic scrutiny as it is frequently contradicted in research.

Credits

A big thank you to DECosmic for designing my header image and to LoopyGc for drawing the header art.

This hard work would not be possible without the support of my wonderful Patrons. I would particularly like to thank my Platinum Patrons: Albert S Calderon, Kyle T, redKheld, Dimelo ‘Derp’ Waterson, Hagbard Celine, Aprou, Austin Enright, NotGac, Shaemus, Joey Rodriguez, Marcus Lo Re-Sant, DarrenIndeed, Thomas Meszaros, Dr. Jhin, Mulgar, Tobias Svensson, RK_Rammy, Arthos and John Bauman. Thank you!

 

References

Baker. P. C. (2014). Missing the Story. Retrieved May 9, 2021 from https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/missing-story/

Bregman, R. (2020). Humankind: A hopeful history. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Fischer, P., Krueger, J. I., Greitemeyer, T., Vogrincic, C., Kastenmüller, A., Frey, D., … & Kainbacher, M. (2011). The bystander-effect: a meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies. Psychological Bulletin, 137(4), 517-537.

Institute of Medicine and National Research Council. (2013). Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13489.

Keller, B. (2002). The sunshine warrior. Retrieved May 3, 2021 from https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/magazine/the-sunshine-warrior.html

Latane, B., & Darley, J. M. (1968). Group inhibition of bystander intervention in emergencies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 10(3), 215-221.

Mamun, M. A., Ullah, I., Usman, N., & Griffiths, M. D. (2020). PUBG‐related suicides during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Three cases from Pakistan. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 1-3.

New York Times. (1964). 37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police; Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector. Retrieved April 19, 2021 from https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/27/archives/37-who-saw-murder-didnt-call-the-police-apathy-at-stabbing-of.html

Philpot, R., Liebst, L. S., Levine, M., Bernasco, W., & Lindegaard, M. R. (2020). Would I be helped? Cross-national CCTV footage shows that intervention is the norm in public conflicts. American Psychologist, 75(1), 66–75. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000469

Soloman, J. D. (2015). The Witness. United States: FilmRise.

World Health Organization. (2017). Preventing suicide: A resource for media professionals (No. WHO/MSD/MER/17.5). World Health Organization.