For my final blog post, I interviewed Rutgers University’s own Julio Angel Ortiz about his research involving video games. Ortiz, 32, lives in Ridgefield, N.J., and graduated from Penn State with a major in information sciences and technology. Now, as a postdoc at Rutgers, Ortiz is interested in studying how video games impact society, and which communities have access to them.
Video games are increasingly influencing us as a new form of media. “Profits of the video game industry rival Hollywood,” Ortiz said. But despite its increasing popularity, video game research doesn’t seem to get a lot of respect. “As a researcher, I noticed that most of the research that’s been written about video games was all negative. Most of it talked about how video games lead to aggression, violence, etc.,” Ortiz said. He feels that some researchers focused too heavily on the violent games which tend to get a lot of media attention. Other researchers would blame video games as a possible cause of childhood obesity.
Even if research studied the positive effects of video games, it always seemed to focus on medical effects like improved eye-hand coordination. “But there was no research about, ‘what are the policy aspects of games?’ What laws need to be created to ensure this industry is successful? How do different cultures use videogames?” These are the kinds of questions that interest Ortiz and inspire his research.
“I want to know the impact [of video games], whether it’s positive or negative,” Ortiz said. “From a societal standpoint, how do different communities use video games?”
“All media, like the telegraph, the telephone, the television, the radio…all these media impacted society in some form. So if you look at the video game as another medium, then we know that there will definitely be an impact.” Ortiz works to fill in the gaps other studies passed over, trying to balance the seemingly-biased views of past research. “Anytime a new technology is introduced, [the reaction] always starts out negative. Now it’s time to move past that and try to see what we can learn from [video games],” Ortiz said.
Ortiz feels that video game research from the 1990s was all very negative. But within the last decade, there was a paradigm shift, where people began to regard the study of video games as a “reputable field.” “Like any other media, we need to take a hard look at [the video game industry] and see what it means to have it in our society. Can people learn from it? Can it change people?” Ortiz asked.
During Ortiz’s studies at Penn State, he was most interested in the dynamics of broadband networks that are implemented into small cities by the government. Specifically, he wanted to look at how cities were working to “bridge the digital divide.” Ortiz found that income was central to participation in broadband networks, and low-income people usually did not have access. Ortiz took interest in three low-income communities in particular: African-Americans, Latinos, and the elderly.
Ortiz, being a Latino himself, wanted to study how the Latino community viewed video games and saw the long-term benefits of this area of research. “By the year 2050, the Latino community will be the largest community in the U.S., so it’s a growing community… [and it shows] that the face of America is changing,” Ortiz said. Looking at how the Latino community views video games will be telling of how our nation as a whole views them.
“One of the things that I noticed when I was doing my research was that in countries like Taiwan and Japan and South Korea, what really drove people to [adopt] broadband was videogames,” Ortiz said. The families that had access to the broadband network in their city were the same families that played computer games demanding a good Internet connection, such as the MMO World of Warcraft.
Ortiz contends that certain games can teach the player valuable social skills in very subtle ways. “People that play [MMOs] are learning leadership skills…they’re leaning how to build teams, how to collaborate, how to solve problems,” Ortiz said. In this way, video games can be educational in a social context even as they provide entertainment for the player.
“Gaming is so diverse…there are so many different kinds of games. [Researchers] are focusing on gory, violent kinds of games – I bet if they do a study on these other educational, non-violent kinds of games, the results would be completely different,” Ortiz mused. Ortiz is determined to use his research to elucidate how video games play a part in modern society, without the narrow views that hindered previous studies.
To find out more about Ortiz’s previous work and his current goals, check out his website:
http://www.julioangel.com/
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