Laughing at this world of ours... | Funny Blog

Video games make you fat and depressed! Right? Wrong... Probably.

A previous anti-gaming poster campaign by the CDC - ''In the interests of a healthy America.''

A team from the United States' CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recently conducted a study - to be published in the October 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine - that reckons that those that play video games are fatter, more depressed and more reliant on the internet than those that don't.

Like its slothful depiction of video gamers, however, it was a half-arsed study with lazy conclusions that weren't put into any meaningful context. I can conduct a study right now that will prove that this CDC study is faulted and that the team in charge of it don't know how to conduct proper studies and/or conclude logical results from their studies.

Firstly, the research was conducted in the Seattle-Tacoma area "because its internet usage level is the highest within the US." Though the logic in this isn't expressly stated (either in the study or by the BBC's coverage), it is inferred that they see a correlation between internet usage (and subsequently media uptake) and video gaming. Given the close ties between the video games and the internet (the latter being the largest growing and soon potentially dominant platform for the former), this is an understandable link, but if you're trying to draw conclusions from a study that should be relevant to the nation as a whole, it's a pretty fundamental that you choose a sample of people that are representative of the nation as a whole. By choosing the area richest in internet users - and not an area with a more average internet usage level that is typical of the entire nation - you're immediately adding one big caveat to any of you're findings before you've begun. Not that the CDC would acknowledge this, mind.... - [read more]