Bash-ophilia

The problems caused by playing video games. Now a pair of researchers want to give it a name: “videophilia.” The two researchers, Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic, have been working on studies for the Nature Conservancy, that blame video games for the decline in attendance at the National Parks (originally available at: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/02/05/nature.interest.ap/index.html?eref=rss_tech):

By studying visits to national and state parks and the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses the researchers documented declines of between 18 percent and 25 percent in various types of outdoor recreation.

The decline, found in both the United States and Japan, appears to have begun in the 1980s and 1990s, the period of rapid growth of video games, they said.

Sounds ominous. Until you read the fine print:

There was a small growth in backpacking, but that may reflect day trips by some people who previously were campers, wrote Pergams and Zaradic.

While fishing declined, hunting held onto most of its market, they found.

“This may be related to various overfishing and pollution issues decreasing access to fish populations, contrasted with exploding deer populations,” they said.

So actually backpacking is up, and hunting is unchanged. And oh, by the way, fishing may be down because people would rather not fish in polluted streams.

And if you look at a previous study by the same researchers:

While more than two dozen variables were tested, Pergams said that video games, home movie rentals, going out to movies, Internet use, and rising fuel prices explained almost 98 percent of the decline in people visiting national parks.

Ah, so it isn’t just games, but a huge cultural shift, of which games are only a part. And the fact that people can’t afford to drive to National Parks because gas is so expensive.

There’s more:

‘It’s fairly stunning,’ Pergams said, but he cautioned that correlation is not the same as causation. ‘We’ve shown statistically that the rise in use of these various types of media, as well as oil prices, is so highly correlated with the decline in national park visits that there is likely to be some association.’

At least that is a repsonsible report of the limits of the study. The changes are correlated, but it isn’t clear whether playing video games (and renting movies, and using the internet, and going out to movies) causes people to stop going to National Parks, or the underfunding and declining condition of the parks makes staying home more appealing. Or (and this is the most likely possibility) the same cultural shifts that lead to more media use lead to less use of the parks.

It worries me if kids are spending less time in natural environments. But perhaps instead of videg/wp-content/uploadshilia we should be worrying about bash-ophilia and hype-ophilia. Or even better, we should be investing in our National Parks and other natural resources to make them less polluted and more accessible.

Update: More on these studies of the decline in attendance at National Parks, this time from Newsweek:

But is the problem really that too many people are staying home from the wilderness? Some, presumably including Thoreau, would say that the last thing nature needs is more people in it. “I have,” he wrote in “Walden,” “my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.” In 1850 he was able to find this a few miles outside Boston, but just let him try to duplicate it in Yellowstone park, say, on Memorial Day weekend. Or in Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina’s Patagonia region, to which Dominique Browning, a New York editor, made an arduous and expensive pilgrimage recently. In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, she described her trip as a disappointing vista of litter glimpsed between the heads of boorish tourists while the boat’s soundtrack echoed among the majestic glaciers. The experience left her, she says, with an appreciation of “the coffee-table book as a mode of travel.” The wilderness looks best through the lens of a professional photographer, who can crop the plastic bags out of the trees.

The study didn’t consider snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles or other motorized forms of “nature-based recreation,” but Zaradic thinks they deserve a place in the wilderness, too, as long as they get people to the out-of-doors. This is, of course, a fairly controversial position in the environmental movement. Her faith in the transformative power of nature is impressive. It would be nice to get kids into the woods once in a while so they can learn, at least, how to swat a mosquito. But maybe we’d all do better to give the World a break from us, so it can heal on its own.

Thanks to Elizabeth for finding the article….