Steal This Professor

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By INGRID NORTON

In her years of studying the effects of video games, Karen Dill, an associate professor of psychology at Lenoir-Rhyne College, has endured blog rants about her work and the glares of young men watching her presentations.

But until now she's never actually been cast in one of the games.

The "Karin Dilettante" is a sporty hybrid sedan that appears in Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest installment in the famously violent and sexualized series of video games. "Chicks love electronic gadgets" is the slogan in fake ads for the car.

Ms. Dill says she couldn't believe that Rockstar Games, the maker of Grand Theft Auto, had taken the trouble to name a car for her: "I was kind of like, whoa, they actually do care about video-game research."

She has studied the link between games and aggression since graduate school in the late '90s, when she was surprised to find that people actually came to her talks when the subject was video games. Her research on Grand Theft Auto has questioned the crass sex that characters have with strippers in the cars and looked at the effects of racial and gender stereotypes. Ms. Dill has described her work before Congressional committees and on morning talk shows.

Tim Smith, editorial director of spong.com, a video-game database, has criticized her on his company's site. He said via e-mail that most research on video-game violence "is laughable and at best debatable." Showing that video games produce aggression is easy enough, he said, but the same results could probably be found by monitoring people watching basketball games or reading some of Shakespeare's plays.

Still, while Rockstar Games hasn't commented on the car's naming, Mr. Smith called it "a cheap, teenage-like trick."

Ms. Dill took it more lightly. She was just relieved she wasn't a prostitute.

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