Video Games Don’t Make You Violent

Scott Broyles

BHS Journalism

For the longest time people have worried, stated and declared that violent video games make people more violent, and there have been many studies conducted supporting the claim, the most common theory is that games prime people the act a certain way by exposing and familiarizing information them to violence, priming them to act that way, the most often cited example is someone plays a shooting game and the shoots someone.

However more recent studies have shown there is no connection between violent and increased violent actions. One study conducted by researchers at the University of York concluded that games do not prime people to act or react a certain way, they did this by having around 3,000 people play two games, one about avoiding trucks as a car, and another where you evade a cat as a mouse, participants were then shown pictures of cats and trucks and had to categorize them, and their was no notable difference between the espouse time of those who played the truck game or the cat game, if they were primed by the games they should have reacted faster to whatever threatened them in their respective games, but their reaction times were unaffected by the game they played.

According to Dr David Zendle, from the University’s Department of Computer Science, “If players are ‘primed’ through immersing themselves in the concepts of the game, they should be able to categorise the objects associated with this game more quickly in the real world once the game had concluded. Across the two games we didn’t find this to be the case. Participants who played a car-themed game were no quicker at categorising vehicle images, and indeed in some cases their reaction time was significantly slower.”

Another test was conducted to see if the realism in video games increases violent tendencies, two groups where asked to play to violent games, one with physics very similar to reality, and another which is essentially the same game but with those realistic physics(sometimes called ragdoll physics.)removed.

Then participants were asked to complete word fragment completion tasks, a sort of word puzzle, researchers where expecting more violent word associations, instead according to Dr Zendle said: “We found that the priming of violent concepts, as measured by how many violent concepts appeared in the word fragment completion task, was not detectable. There was no difference in priming between the game that employed ‘ragdoll physics’ and the game that didn’t, instead according to Dr. Zendle “We found that the priming of violent concepts, as measured by how many violent concepts appeared in the word fragment completion task, was not detectable. There was no difference in priming between the game that employed ‘ragdoll physics’ and the game that didn’t.”

Not only do games not increase violent tendencies, they can significantly reduce stress, one study conducted by the Behavioral Science Institute in The Netherlands, studied regular players of Starcraft 2, to see how they respond and cope with stress caused by playing the game (for example losing a competitive match) they found that many of the gamers who became upset utilized some the most useful stress coping strategies, such as problem solving, or seeking support from other players.