August 24, 2009 | Mad Science, Rants

A new study from the Centers for Disease Control suggests that gamers are not mainly young kids learning life lessons about the joys of indiscriminate violence and destruction, or college kids looking for something to do while smoking pot that does not involve contact with a book. They are, in fact, old enough to have moved on to more productive pursuits like developing a disastrous gambling addiction and/or writing daily letters to the editor that will one day find their way into a police evidence file.

According to the study, the average gamer is 35, thus old enough to have fathered many of the people who comprise the target audience for many games (had they been out and shagging at an age when they were in all likelihood filling a room at their parents’ place with the smell of musty human). The study also says that most gamers are male, depressed, and obese – the latter two being boxes best left unchecked when signing up for an internet matchmaking service.

Before you get too excited about the prospect of the majority of gamers being guys with a couple of decades’ worth of Doritos lodged in the couch cushions, it should be noted that the study is – like one blaming drinking on television and another on how Facebook causes jealousy – dubious. It was based on an online survey of 552 people in Washington’s Seattle-Tacoma area from the ages of 19-99 (educated guess: the 99-year-old does not exist). So this tells us that people in Seattle who have the time and inclination to fill out online surveys about their lives are also likelier to spend hours developing thumb calluses rocking out to “Living on A Prayer” on Guitar Hero. Neither of us smacked our gobs in disbelief at learning that.

As the authors state in the study’s conclusion: “Because the study uses a cross-sectional design, conclusions about causality cannot be made.” And indeed you’d have a chicken and the egg scenario to figure out what came first: did the person come to the video game with a long face and a wide bottom, or did the realization that one’s best friend is someone who you chase around with an automatic weapon in a virtual post-apocalyptic world take the wind from beneath their wings.

Well, we are not psychologists — unless we’re drunk and in a bar then we’ll offer you everything from marriage tips to the card of a reputable roofer — and neither are the people who published this study, which tells us nothing more than newspapers have next to no filter when it comes to this kind of science and when in doubt blame a video game for absolutely everything.