Violent Video Games: More Playing Time Equals More Aggression | Hacker News Reader

Violent Video Games: More Playing Time Equals More Aggression

researchnews.osu.edu

30 pointsLibertatea44 comments

“Playing video games could be compared to smoking cigarettes. A single cigarette won’t cause lung cancer, but smoking over weeks or months or years greatly increases the risk. In the same way, repeated exposure to violent video games may have a cumulative effect on aggression.”

When are these bullshit sensationalist comparisons going to end?!

There's a theory that it actually is one cigarette that gives you cancer -- the tobacco in that one cig absorbed radioactive material and triggers the cancer. That theory supposedly explains why a great number of smokers don't get lung cancer. I'd find a link, but I'm at work.

A more apt comparison for the article might be cigarettes & emphysema/heart disease. Not saying I agree with it, but it'd be a better analogy.

“People who have a steady diet of playing these violent games may come to see the world as a hostile and violent place”

What type of fairyland is Bushman living in? The world IS in fact a violent and hostile place. Our origins are rooted in competition and blood.

Your username is not helping your case here.

I'm curious how much of these was simply being primed to be competitive. Were the test subjects competing against actual humans in the nonviolent video games? The violent video games add a form of personal feel to the game, regardless of whether you are playing against the computer or other people it certainly feels like you're fighting other beings. I wonder if that prompts a higher competitive drive.

This was my thought as well. Competitive video games cause aggressive behavior, not violent video games. It's the adrenaline. It's something you get from a high level competition, but something you don't get slaughtering thousands of zombies with a virtual chainsaw.

Following from that, it would be interesting to see if competitive contact sports (football, basketball, etc) would produce a similar effect of aggressive behavior.

The should have used Mario Kart as one of the non-violent games, that would have ruined their hypothesis.

Depends on what the criteria for violent is... Mario Kart is rather violent when you define it as injuring or impeding your opponent. Blood and guns don't make for a violent game although they are present as part of a violent game frequently.

I really hate studies like this. Their methodology was absolutely terrible, and absolutely does not support the conclusions they drew.

What they have shown is that exposure to violent fiction results in the production of more violent fiction, and nothing else. The researchers, like so many others, made the fundamental mistake of conflating fiction and reality. Fiction, however, is not reality. And naming violent acts to be incuded in a fictional story is not equivalent in any significant way with actual violence.

However, blasting unseen opponents' ears with louder and longer unpleasant noise is reality.

Since it's fiction, would it be ok if all villains were one specific ethnicity throughout all video games which had people in them?

Would it be ok if all the 'good people' were another entirely different ethnicity?

Could we project that to movies and TV shows as well? Would under-representing minorities in TV/movies be okay because it's fiction (barring reality shows, sports and news)?

I think the issue is more nuanced than "it's fiction, therefore it has no impact on real life". What the connection is and how much the influence is, I don't know. But I don't think one can say there is no bleeding through whatsoever.

It would not be 'ok'. But it also might not change behavior or attitudes, that's speculation.

> Students in the study then participated in a competitive reaction time task, which is used to measure aggression.

Ok, if you have fast reflexes you are a violent person now?

This is extremely misleading.

RTFA please. The reaction time task was phony, there was no competitor. What they actually measured was the punishment that the "winner" dished on the non-existent loser. The punishment was allegedly more severe for the aggressive game group.

My initial reaction was similar, but after the elaboration it's just poor writing.

The "competitive reaction time task" had them competing against no-one, and told they won about half the games. During play, they could decide how much to punish the opponent (through controlling the volume of some unpleasant noises) when the opponent lost.

So, they assume that choosing to inflict more unpleasantness on your opponent when it doesn't make a difference in game or out means you're a more violent person. That doesn't seem perfect, necessarily, but it's clearly a much better measurement than "if you have fast reflexes you are a violent person".

I have a bias here. I love video games and I've never truly believed they have serious detrimental effects on mental health. I'm also not an expert of psychology, but I know of at least two psychologists that are studying this and coming to the conclusion that video games have positive results.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_bavelier_your_brain_on_video...

http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/spence/Research_Games.html

Anyways, I tried to approach this study as objectively as I could. But I have some gripes with their methods and more importantly, their conclusions.

> Students in the study then participated in a competitive reaction time task, which is used to measure aggression. Each student was told that he or she would compete against an unseen opponent in a 25-trial computer game in which the object was to be the first to respond to a visual cue on the computer screen.

The loser of each trial would receive a blast of unpleasant noise through headphones, and the winner would decide how loud and long the blast would be. The noise blasts were a mixture of several sounds that most people find unpleasant (such as fingernails on a chalk board, dentist drills, and sirens). In actuality, there was no opponent and the participants were told they won about half the trials.)

So this study took people playing competitive, violent video games, and then measured their aggression by giving them another competitive, violent game? After three days, they say the students were choosing to deliver harsher and harsher sounds to their "opponents." But after three days, certainly these students had also been given their fair share of harsh sounds, and at that point it's not crazy to think that they were just "playing the game."

Another method they used to measure aggression:

> They were given the beginning of a story, and then asked to list 20 things that the main character will do or say as the story unfolds. For example, in one story another driver crashes into the back of the main character’s car, causing significant damage. The researchers counted how many times the participants listed violent or aggressive actions and words that might occur.

So after they played a violent yet fake video game that they likely found to be fun, you give them a fake story and they pick violent outcomes? They were likely still in the mindset of playing the game that they found fun.

None of this conclusively shows anything about their long term aggression in the real world. It seems to be using fake scenarios (with poor timing) to try and make real-world conclusions.

The tests to measure violence mean nothing by themselves. It is by comparing the results that you can draw conclusions. In this case, they compared people who played violent video games with people who played non-violent games.

The study shows a difference in both cases. However, if they didn't test with people who did not play either violent or non-violent games, they lack a control group and they cannot say if violent games make you more violent or if non-violent games make you less violent.

Since you've mentioned you're biased against the findings, what do you think it would take to convince you of their findings? What would they have to demonstrate for you that their conclusions were valid?

I would like to know what the lag time between end of play and test for aggression was, and how much of a factor it is.

Those details are probably in the paper. This seems to be it: http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-33947714.... It'd be nice to get access to it.

I went to download it (I work at a University so I have access) but it gave me this message:

"Java is required to run Document Download Manager and it is either not installed on your computer or out of date."

Java is installed and I'm not going to mess around trying to get their "Document Download Manager" working just to download a single PDF so screw them. Another reason to hate Elsevier.

As a similarly biased person, I'd also like to see a real control group instead of just "violent" vs. "non-violent" games. Also, 70 people doesn't seem like a very large sample size.

If anything, this study seems purposely built to gain headlines and media attention.

I don't disagree with you, but 70 is a pretty large study for something like this. Many drug studies use fewer people.

> So after they played a violent yet fake video game that they likely found to be fun, you give them a fake story and they pick violent outcomes? They were likely still in the mindset of playing the game that they found fun.

Yeah, that just sounded like basic priming; the act of participating in something causes it and related things to be at the forefront of your mind for a little while. I'm sure they could have been primed to favor cute kitty-related outcomes if desired. That didn't sound specific to violence.

> But after three days, certainly these students had also been given their fair share of harsh sounds, and at that point it's not crazy to think that they were just "playing the game."

"In actuality, there was no opponent and the participants were told they won about half the trials.)"

I.e. no one received harsh sounds.

They also said that the participant won half the trials. How could the experimenters fool the subjects about the game if they didn't get any harsh sounds back?

Read the study?

The actual study seems to be behind a paywall. The article claims that "participants were told they won about half the trials", which I assume would be by blasting them with noise ("fingernails on a chalk board, dentist drills, and sirens"). Why would they need to explain which noise was used if they never used it (the player had no opponent)?

Precisely. I'm not sure how you could design an experiment to do so but you'd need further proof that these tests do correlate with 'aggression' (however you choose to define THAT). It wouldn't be hard to come up with alternative explanations of what those tests measured.

So they've just proved a correlation between video games and two specific tests of... something...

It is really amazing how many psychology studies that try to address the effects of media end up making the mistake that they equate fiction and reality as the same thing. They show people violent videos, and immediately start talking about "witnessing violence" in order to convince people that the difference between real violence and violent imagery is irrelevant. In this study, they equate presenting violent concepts for inclusion in fiction as being indistinguishable from actual aggressive action.

A great deal of the social discussion surrounding violent media is poisoned by people who insist on denying that there is a difference between fiction and reality, or, more often, using words with two radically different meanings. They say something like "children have sex with hookers and then run over them, murdering them" in their description of a videogame. They are not claiming, of course, that the players physically did have sex or murder anyone, but they realy ENTIRELY upon you assigning the same negative connotations to the actions as you would to the real physical actions. If you stop and ask why murder is wrong when it involves two fictional characters, you either quickly find out that it simply isn't, or that the person speaking has no capacity to define WHY murder is wrong in the first place and so bases their entire worldview on seeing words like "murder" as a quasi-mystical totem portending danger.

What about the link between sports and aggression? I've seen more fights at sports games than I've seen at lan parties.

I wonder what the setup for CoD was. Were they playing against each other whether it was public games. I'd say most people would get violent tendencies after playing CoD on public servers.

Interesting way to study.

- As long as they don't use this to make decisions on what games people should be allowed to play that is. I personally think there is a subset of people who would be a lot more productive if they raised their base aggression level a little. Example: Keeping a punching bag might help some people get their aggression out and other people to build enough aggression to plough through boring work :-)

A few questions (which are potentially issues) for this study:

- Doesn't this essentially test short-term reaction to a stimulus? This study doesn't simulate effects after doing this behavior for months, but 3 days. There's always the chance of a dropoff in effect here

- Would one potential factor here be that the 'violent' games were very immediate twitch-based? And the non-violent games were all essentially racing? Racing games you're penalized frequently for harsh and sharp reactions, and rewarded for getting a smooth flow going and discipline (or at least this is how I play Gran Turismo). In FPS games, you're rewarded for a short, fast and harsh reaction to input stimulus.

- I would be interested to see the comparison of these games and violent/non-violent non-interactive things (movies).

- While it might have blown the 'cover' of the experiment, would it be possible to give the testers some other written test on moral-based decision making before/after?

If I'm driving and I get stuck in traffic, I'm going to be pissed during the duration of that encounter and if it somehow affects any plans I have. Similarly, if I am having a couple of bad rounds in a game (or even if I'm doing well but my team isn't), I'm going to be pissed during the duration of that game. I will probably still be bothered by it if it somehow manages to manifest itself into my overall self-worth, just as if traffic made me feel bad for being late for something.

If you are constantly beating yourself up over gameplay the same way you're beating yourself up over traffic (i.e. things you can only control so much), you're going to be more aggressive. But at that point, it is an entirely different issue.

I'm not sure why this is surprising to anyone - it fits together perfectly well with the general concept of priming. Experiencing a higher level of an emotion over a period of time from any source may very well lead to these same results.

I would expect these results for any consistent sustained exposure to any interactive activity, not just agression related.

The next experiment should substitute video gaming with say, sustained OKC or LinkedIn activity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

The question is whether or not the games were changing the participants' nature/personality (long-term). It seems self-obvious that playing violent games would inspire a short-term effect.

I work at Treyarch as software engineer. A lot of the QA people are located near to my office. I haven't seen even a bit of bad behavior from them, in fact they are one of the friendliest folk around. They have played, and still play (test) our game (Call of Duty: Black Ops 2) hours and hours, every day.

"The study involved 70 French university students"

A sample size that small won't tip the scales on the debate.

Equals is a word often used inappropriately by people who don't understand logic.

Let me guess: the control group was playing Scrabble, not Cowboys and Indians.

The games used in the study are listed in the press release.

Were they Playing Demon Souls? I get pretty violent playing that game. Granted, I can easily kill every person in a far more violent game and frolic down the street. So I think the quality of the game, the users experience with games, the users desire to die 800 time in 12 seconds, etc... may also have an impact.

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