Kids' Game Faces Caught on Film

Here's something you don't see every day - an intelligent approach to the issue of how violence in games affects kids. Rather than gathering reams of paper evidence about how games are destroying the kids, photojournalist Robbie Cooper has started filming the reactions of children as they play games. You can see some of the results, part of a project dubbed 'Immersion' below.

Cooper places a camera lens behind the screen children are using to play, then films their reactions. The result is an unusual (and slightly disturbing) look at the expressions that flit across kids' faces as they play.

Cooper has so far filmed children playing in the US, London and Grimsby. He hopes to settle on a group of 75 children representing a cross-section of British ethnic groups, income brackets and cultural backgrounds. He will then spend 18 months filming them as they digest games, news footage, web videos and feature films. Once all that's been done, their expressions will be logged and then studied with a psychologist and sociologist, taking into account the children's psychological profiles.

Cooper is, apparently, a gamer himself.

"It seems possible", he says, "that there's a link between violent games and social aggression, bullying or exclusion; but whether the violent game is the biggest factor in that, it's hard to say. I think a lot of what has been said so far about the effect of media violence on children doesn't take into consideration the psychological make-up of individual kids, and how big an impact the different types of media violence have on different children."

Cooper is treating the experiment as both science and art. He hopes to put on his first exhibition in mid-2009.

It should be noted, however, that the games used for the footage below were Halo 3, Call of Duty, GTA 4, Tekken and Star Wars Battlefront. The kids in the film are apparently aged 9-16. Last time SPOnG checked (2 minutes before going to web) that wasn't old enough to be playing the 18-rated GTA IV...

Anyway, take a look at the footage below and see what you think.



If you're interested in some of Cooper's earlier work, showing MMO players photographed alongside their avatars, click here.

^{Source: The Telegraph}