After school shootings or mass shooting, there is always one common scapegoat that comes up and its video games. For decades we have had to deal with people like Jack Thompson peddling the idea that video games cause people to become violent. I have talked about aggression in video games and have already cited many sources showing that games are not shown to have long-term behavioral impacts, even if short-term ones are seen. There is a new argument though that the more realistic a game is the more likely people will relate it to the real world. Once again the argument has been shown to be false along with the idea that games prime us to certain behaviors.
A new set of paper done at the University of York by Dr. David Zendle and his team explain how they ran experiments over 3000 players to see if they could find any behavioral changes caused by games. This was done over a couple of experiments, which I will try to break down real quick.
In the paper "No Priming in Video Games" they used an identical video game with a driving situation and one where a mouse was avoiding a cat. What they were looking for is the result of what is called the GLM or General Learning model. The concept is that if a player practices a particular behavior in a video game they will learn that particular behavior and after repetition will adopt that behavior long term. In this experiment, if the player played a cat game they were theoretically more likely to recognize a cat or some other animal faster because they would have been primed to do so. This was not the case. What they actually found is called the negative priming effect where it took longer for a player to recognize the items they were exposed to. For instance, they had slower reaction time identifying a cat if they had played the cat maze. Time of play did not matter either.
The paper "Behavioural realism and the activation of aggressive concepts in violent video games" checked against the hypothesis that more realistic models or behaviors would lead to greater acts of aggression. They did this by testing against ragdoll physic vs. a more nonrealistic animation. They also tested against realistic vs. nonrealistic behavior. Basically, whether the NPC would take cover or not. They found a low confidence that there was any correlation between realism and aggression. This indicates that even if an NPC acts or behaves more realistic there is not a significant increase in aggression in the players.
These studies have shown two more conditions where video games have shown no impact on aggression in the behavior of the person playing them. They have found no evidence showing that games prime you towards a certain mindset nor increase aggression based on realism. This is more evidence of the large amount of data that people are able to separate the fantasy world of video games from the world around them. If aggression is ever found in these studies it usually has a lot more to do with the difficulty of the game rather then the content they are playing. Playing GTA is, as most of us already know, not turning us into serial killers. Cuphead though...
A new set of paper done at the University of York by Dr. David Zendle and his team explain how they ran experiments over 3000 players to see if they could find any behavioral changes caused by games. This was done over a couple of experiments, which I will try to break down real quick.
In the paper "No Priming in Video Games" they used an identical video game with a driving situation and one where a mouse was avoiding a cat. What they were looking for is the result of what is called the GLM or General Learning model. The concept is that if a player practices a particular behavior in a video game they will learn that particular behavior and after repetition will adopt that behavior long term. In this experiment, if the player played a cat game they were theoretically more likely to recognize a cat or some other animal faster because they would have been primed to do so. This was not the case. What they actually found is called the negative priming effect where it took longer for a player to recognize the items they were exposed to. For instance, they had slower reaction time identifying a cat if they had played the cat maze. Time of play did not matter either.
The paper "Behavioural realism and the activation of aggressive concepts in violent video games" checked against the hypothesis that more realistic models or behaviors would lead to greater acts of aggression. They did this by testing against ragdoll physic vs. a more nonrealistic animation. They also tested against realistic vs. nonrealistic behavior. Basically, whether the NPC would take cover or not. They found a low confidence that there was any correlation between realism and aggression. This indicates that even if an NPC acts or behaves more realistic there is not a significant increase in aggression in the players.
These studies have shown two more conditions where video games have shown no impact on aggression in the behavior of the person playing them. They have found no evidence showing that games prime you towards a certain mindset nor increase aggression based on realism. This is more evidence of the large amount of data that people are able to separate the fantasy world of video games from the world around them. If aggression is ever found in these studies it usually has a lot more to do with the difficulty of the game rather then the content they are playing. Playing GTA is, as most of us already know, not turning us into serial killers. Cuphead though...
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