Video games containing violent content have been blamed continuously for violent behavior seen in many people. The problem with these accusations is that a video game is much more than the amount of blood coming out of digital characters and the amount of killing you have to do to complete an objective. Nowadays, the majority of a video game contains content that is commonly experienced while interacting with another anonymous real-life personality. Aspects like competitive multi-player, cooperative game-play, and the overall game difficulty have been known to cause a change in social behavior even in games that do not contain violent content which is partly due to the anonymity given to players. The amount of violence in a video game does not contribute to violent behavior. The aspects of video games that require and promote interaction between different types of people are the cause of violent behavior changes.
There have been many studies regarding the relationship between violent content in video games and violent behavior changes. However, there have also been many kinds of conclusions that contradict each other. The reason for this is because there are many aspects of a video game that can lead to a behavioral change. For this reason, some recent studies have concentrated on key components of the gaming experience like difficulty, competitive multi-player, and cooperative game-play. There will be many times where a study will not even be necessary. There are enough videos of people getting extremely frustrated with video games that will have you question whether or not it is actually violent content that is changing their behavior.
Since most video games are commonly played with strangers through matchmaking, it would be a good start to see how the status of anonymity affects behavior. According to studies, anonymity does not drive people to behave negatively, but removes the consequences of behaving poorly. This is due to the lack of a personal image, which means that players would not have to worry about their reputation because no one knows who they actually are. This becomes an even bigger issue when playing alongside other like-minded players. According to Vivian Hsueh Hua Chen, "The effect of anonymity on game cheating, however, was found to be mediated by group identification within gaming communities". (Chen) People that are part of a large group tend to act differently because they lose a sense of self-awareness and the need to evaluate what they are doing as individuals. (Chang) Since players do not have to worry about facing any real-life consequences from their online behavior, especially if they are mixed in a group of people that behave poorly as well, they tend to behave in a manner that would not be exhibited in real-life because of the consequences. Even though video games come with ratings, the reason that developers insert "Game experience may change during online play" is because it is impossible to know the kind of personalities playing and the behavior exhibited by them. It is important to keep anonymity in mind when observing behavior changes in video games that require or promote matchmaking.
One of the largest and most popular aspects of video games, which is filled with unknown and anonymous players, is competitive multi-player. By nature, a competition implies that there is a winner declared. Some competitors may be there for personal improvement, but most are there for the sake of winning. It is common for negative feelings to develop the more a competitor loses, which could come in the form of verbal abuse, fights, and lack of self-esteem. There have been many occasions where crowds start rioting at sport events because of a loss, which is pretty violent behavior considering how insignificant of an effect it has on daily life.
Paul Adachi, a PhD candidate at Brock University, decided to study the competitive side of video games and their impact on aggressive behavior by carrying out two experiments. The first experiment involved having college students play "Conan" and "Fuel" for 12 minutes with "Conan" being a violent game and "Fuel" being a non-violent game. The second experiment had college students play "Mortal Kombat versus DC Universe", "Left 4 Dead 2", "Marble Blast Ultra", and "Fuel", which all had different combinations of violent content and competitiveness. Following the gaming sessions, the hot sauce paradigm was used to observe behavior changes. The first experiment found that violent content was not enough to cause a shift in behavior. However, the second experiment found that players that played "Fuel" and "Mortal Kombat Versus DC Universe" prepared hotter sauces than others, which shows a shift toward aggressive behavior. "Fuel" is considered a highly competitive and non-violent racing game while "Mortal Kombat Versus DC Universe" was considered a highly competitive and violent game. As the first experiment concluded, the second experiment suggests that the level of competitiveness in a video game is a factor in behavior change that should be observed more often. (Adachi) Most of the games used in this study only rely on personal performance, but what happens when you have to count on others to accomplish your goals?
Many studies have been made to connect violent behavior to violence in video games. For that reason, many people ignore the different modes of gameplay that exist in video games like competitive multi-player and cooperative modes. However, the cooperative portion of a video game has shown to have a negative effect on behavior. There have not been many studies that observe cooperative modes and behaviors, which indicates a new direction for researchers to focus on for video games and violent behavior, but there are many opportunities to observe those from a different form of media.
There are a countless amount of YouTube videos that show the frustrations of having to depend on another person. As you browse through a selection of game related videos, you may run into some "Top 10" videos. While spending the time looking through interesting videos on YouTube, I came across a video called "6 Co-op Games That Will Tear Your Friendship Apart". This video shows how having to rely on the performance of others could be frustrating. The following is quoted from the video:
"Less about thinking and more about shooting is FarCry 4, which finally listened and let us do co-op in the same open world as the single player campaign. 'Yes!' We all thought quickly followed by 'What the hell are you doing?' Crashing into each other because we can't decide who gets to drive, getting shot because we're not listening to each other, trying to storm a fortress with no preparation because Nathan" (Pearson)
This portion of the video was followed by an argument between both players after failing to take over a settlement in FarCry 4. Performance in another player is more than being able to shoot accurately or not dying. Being able to communicate effectively, strategize carefully, and execute plans successfully are essential to cooperative game play. This video shows two people playing that already know each other. Something that was mentioned in the video was related to the inability to communicate effectively in some cooperative moments. From personal experience, most of the players that take part in cooperative gaming have no means of communication, making it difficult to accomplish a goal. Imagine what it would be like to be grouped with people whose playstyle you know nothing about and without a way to communicate. This commonly leads to frustrated players that turn to aggressive behavior to communicate that frustration in the form of verbal abuse over the microphone, sending abusive text messages, and sometimes purposely ruining the gaming experience for the other person by killing them or prohibiting them from being able to progress any further. Most cooperative gaming is not too difficult assuming that you are playing with people that are familiar with the game. However, how does the difficulty of a game affect behavior? If less difficult games are already frustrating, imagine the reactions from more difficult games.
Throughout daily life, many people get frustrated over not being able to accomplish something. Those same emotions exist in the gaming world. The difficulty of a game is comparable to competition in any area. Normally, the goal of the player is to win. Understandably, constantly losing starts to build up frustration in many people. The harder a video game is, the more likely it is going to frustrate the player, which often leads to aggressive behavior.
A study conducted by Andrew Przybylski, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and Richard Ryan, a motivational psychologist at the University of Rochester observed the connection between the difficulty of a game and the psychological effects of failure on players. The study had university-aged students play games that were modified to have easy and difficult versions. One of the experiments had the subjects dip their hand in cold water for 25 seconds, while being told that the previous subject had determined the amount of time they have to leave their hand there. The experiment found that players that played a difficult version of Tetris assigned an average of 10 seconds more than players that played the easy version of Tetris, which shows the shift to negative behavior. Rachel quoted the following from Richard Ryan:
"When people feel they have no control over the outcome of a game that leads to aggression" he said. "We saw that in our experiments. If you press someone's competencies, they'll become more aggressive, and our effects held up whether the games were violent or not." (Starr)
Richard noted that players that felt competent had a positive relationship with motivation and a negative relationship with aggressive behavior, but experiences that damage your ego tend to lead people to act hostile towards each other. (Starr) Tetris is a video game that has absolutely no form of violent content, which shows that violence is not necessary to trigger a shift toward violent behavior.
The relationship between difficulty and anti-social behavior is also something that has gone without much attention in the forms of studies. However, just as cooperative game-play can be seen, difficulty can also be observed in many ways without the need of a study. Not long after the video on cooperative game-play, I came across a video on YouTube called "Top 10 hardest NES Games" that shows clips of frustrating games to play because of how difficult they were. (Beware of profanity if watching the video) The following is a portion of the video where his thoughts clearly show how behavior can change while playing difficult video games:
"The hardest part in the entire game besides Dracula is the hall right before the Grim Reaper. You have Medusa heads coming at you from both directions and you two Knights throwing axes at two different altitudes. I mean, look at the pattern going on here. Anything that hits you drains a quarter of your health, so that means four hits and you're dead. Oh but the Knights, the knights take nine hits. Nine ******* hits! You can't even concentrate on attacking it because you're too busy dodging Medusas, but you can't dodge the Medusas because you're too busy dodging the axes, but you can't dodge the axes because you're trying to hit the Knight, but you can't hit the Knight because the game's driving you ******* crazy! It's like a test!"
The description above was about a game that had too much going on at one time that made it difficult to stay alive. The important part to note about the video is the aggressive behavior shown by the presenter while describing how difficult and frustrating those video games were and still are. Another factor that plays into the difficulty of a game, which has less to do with the environment inside the game, are the controls used to play the game.
Many times, the frustration from video games does not even come from the nature of winning or losing. There have been plenty of video games, both violent and non-violent, that generate aggressive behavior because of how they are played. There is another video on YouTube called "Top 10 worst video game controls" that shows how something as simple as controls can alter behavior while playing a video game. This ties in with the difficulty of the game, but the reason these games were difficult was because of the different control combinations that differed from common practice in video games. (Rolfe) For example, platform games usually assign the X button on a PlayStation controller as the jump button. How would PlayStation fans feel if they change the jump button over to the start button? The habit of always using the X button will cause confusion that will more than likely lead to errors that then lead to death. Over time, this will build frustration unless they can accustom themselves to the different controls. It is worth noting that there are close to no studies made on how control layouts of video games affect the behavior of a player. This shows yet another direction that studies can be directed toward to learn more about the link between video games and violent behavior.
Competitive multi-player, cooperative game-play, difficulty, control layouts to video games, and the status of anonymity have all proven to have some kind of effect on how people behave while playing video games. In all the examples above, violent content was not the reason for a shift in behavior. Games that are completely non-violent, like Candy Crush and Tetris, but competitive in the form of leaderboards, are still able to generate anger and frustration in players. These aspects may not have many studies connecting them and violence, but it is more than enough to put more time into studying these aspects instead of generalizing an entire game based on how much shooting there is and the amount of blood shown. It is important to study these aspects in order to form a definite solution to violent behavior that is generated from video games, instead of wasting time criticizing something that has proven to not be a driving factor in aggressive behavior.
Works Cited Page
- Chen, Vivian Hsueh Hua, and Yuehua Wu. "Group Identification as a Mediator of the Effect of Players' Anonymity on Cheating in Online Games." Taylor & Francis. N.p., 06 Dec. 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
- Chang, Jenna. "The Role of Anonymity in Deindividuated Behavior: A Comparison of Deindividuation Theory and the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE)." Baylor.edu. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
- Starr, Michelle. "Video Games May Cause Aggression Based on Difficulty, Not Violence - CNET." CNET. CBS Interactive, 10 Apr. 2014. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
- Pearson, Rob. "6 Co-op Games That Will Tear Your Friendship Apart."YouTube. YouTube, 23 Jan. 2015. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
- Rolfe, James. "Top 10 Hardest NES Games - AVGN Clip Collection."YouTube. YouTube, 10 Oct. 2013. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
- Rolfe, James. "Top 10 Worst Video Game CONTROLS - AVGN Clip Collection." YouTube. YouTube, 1 Nov. 2013. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
- "Playing Highly Competitive Games May Lead to Aggressive Behavior."American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association, 29 Aug. 2011. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.
Possible Points of Improvement
- I think that my draft can improve with a little more variation in word usage. I feel the the words violent behavior, aggressive behavior, and the word behavior in general are used too many times. I feel it justified considering the subject of my paper, but I feel like there is a way to remedy that.
- The quotes seem a little big, but I am not sure how talking about videos is handled on research papers. The reason I quoted parts of a video was because I am assuming that the reader does not have immediate access to a video search engine or they may consider it too much of a hassle to try and look it up. Like this, they can get a good idea of the video without having to look at it.
- I tried to concentrate a little more on the flow between topic points, but I think the transfer between anonymity and the other topic points was questionable. I did not want to make it sound like anonymity was connected to everything but I feel like that is how it was conveyed.
There have been many studies regarding the relationship between violent content in video games and violent behavior changes. However, there have also been many kinds of conclusions that contradict each other. The reason for this is because there are many aspects of a video game that can lead to a behavioral change. For this reason, some recent studies have concentrated on key components of the gaming experience like difficulty, competitive multi-player, and cooperative game-play. There will be many times where a study will not even be necessary. There are enough videos of people getting extremely frustrated with video games that will have you question whether or not it is actually violent content that is changing their behavior.
Since most video games are commonly played with strangers through matchmaking, it would be a good start to see how the status of anonymity affects behavior. According to studies, anonymity does not drive people to behave negatively, but removes the consequences of behaving poorly. This is due to the lack of a personal image, which means that players would not have to worry about their reputation because no one knows who they actually are. This becomes an even bigger issue when playing alongside other like-minded players. According to Vivian Hsueh Hua Chen, "The effect of anonymity on game cheating, however, was found to be mediated by group identification within gaming communities". (Chen) People that are part of a large group tend to act differently because they lose a sense of self-awareness and the need to evaluate what they are doing as individuals. (Chang) Since players do not have to worry about facing any real-life consequences from their online behavior, especially if they are mixed in a group of people that behave poorly as well, they tend to behave in a manner that would not be exhibited in real-life because of the consequences. Even though video games come with ratings, the reason that developers insert "Game experience may change during online play" is because it is impossible to know the kind of personalities playing and the behavior exhibited by them. It is important to keep anonymity in mind when observing behavior changes in video games that require or promote matchmaking.
One of the largest and most popular aspects of video games, which is filled with unknown and anonymous players, is competitive multi-player. By nature, a competition implies that there is a winner declared. Some competitors may be there for personal improvement, but most are there for the sake of winning. It is common for negative feelings to develop the more a competitor loses, which could come in the form of verbal abuse, fights, and lack of self-esteem. There have been many occasions where crowds start rioting at sport events because of a loss, which is pretty violent behavior considering how insignificant of an effect it has on daily life.
Paul Adachi, a PhD candidate at Brock University, decided to study the competitive side of video games and their impact on aggressive behavior by carrying out two experiments. The first experiment involved having college students play "Conan" and "Fuel" for 12 minutes with "Conan" being a violent game and "Fuel" being a non-violent game. The second experiment had college students play "Mortal Kombat versus DC Universe", "Left 4 Dead 2", "Marble Blast Ultra", and "Fuel", which all had different combinations of violent content and competitiveness. Following the gaming sessions, the hot sauce paradigm was used to observe behavior changes. The first experiment found that violent content was not enough to cause a shift in behavior. However, the second experiment found that players that played "Fuel" and "Mortal Kombat Versus DC Universe" prepared hotter sauces than others, which shows a shift toward aggressive behavior. "Fuel" is considered a highly competitive and non-violent racing game while "Mortal Kombat Versus DC Universe" was considered a highly competitive and violent game. As the first experiment concluded, the second experiment suggests that the level of competitiveness in a video game is a factor in behavior change that should be observed more often. (Adachi) Most of the games used in this study only rely on personal performance, but what happens when you have to count on others to accomplish your goals?
Many studies have been made to connect violent behavior to violence in video games. For that reason, many people ignore the different modes of gameplay that exist in video games like competitive multi-player and cooperative modes. However, the cooperative portion of a video game has shown to have a negative effect on behavior. There have not been many studies that observe cooperative modes and behaviors, which indicates a new direction for researchers to focus on for video games and violent behavior, but there are many opportunities to observe those from a different form of media.
There are a countless amount of YouTube videos that show the frustrations of having to depend on another person. As you browse through a selection of game related videos, you may run into some "Top 10" videos. While spending the time looking through interesting videos on YouTube, I came across a video called "6 Co-op Games That Will Tear Your Friendship Apart". This video shows how having to rely on the performance of others could be frustrating. The following is quoted from the video:
"Less about thinking and more about shooting is FarCry 4, which finally listened and let us do co-op in the same open world as the single player campaign. 'Yes!' We all thought quickly followed by 'What the hell are you doing?' Crashing into each other because we can't decide who gets to drive, getting shot because we're not listening to each other, trying to storm a fortress with no preparation because Nathan" (Pearson)
This portion of the video was followed by an argument between both players after failing to take over a settlement in FarCry 4. Performance in another player is more than being able to shoot accurately or not dying. Being able to communicate effectively, strategize carefully, and execute plans successfully are essential to cooperative game play. This video shows two people playing that already know each other. Something that was mentioned in the video was related to the inability to communicate effectively in some cooperative moments. From personal experience, most of the players that take part in cooperative gaming have no means of communication, making it difficult to accomplish a goal. Imagine what it would be like to be grouped with people whose playstyle you know nothing about and without a way to communicate. This commonly leads to frustrated players that turn to aggressive behavior to communicate that frustration in the form of verbal abuse over the microphone, sending abusive text messages, and sometimes purposely ruining the gaming experience for the other person by killing them or prohibiting them from being able to progress any further. Most cooperative gaming is not too difficult assuming that you are playing with people that are familiar with the game. However, how does the difficulty of a game affect behavior? If less difficult games are already frustrating, imagine the reactions from more difficult games.
Throughout daily life, many people get frustrated over not being able to accomplish something. Those same emotions exist in the gaming world. The difficulty of a game is comparable to competition in any area. Normally, the goal of the player is to win. Understandably, constantly losing starts to build up frustration in many people. The harder a video game is, the more likely it is going to frustrate the player, which often leads to aggressive behavior.
A study conducted by Andrew Przybylski, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and Richard Ryan, a motivational psychologist at the University of Rochester observed the connection between the difficulty of a game and the psychological effects of failure on players. The study had university-aged students play games that were modified to have easy and difficult versions. One of the experiments had the subjects dip their hand in cold water for 25 seconds, while being told that the previous subject had determined the amount of time they have to leave their hand there. The experiment found that players that played a difficult version of Tetris assigned an average of 10 seconds more than players that played the easy version of Tetris, which shows the shift to negative behavior. Rachel quoted the following from Richard Ryan:
"When people feel they have no control over the outcome of a game that leads to aggression" he said. "We saw that in our experiments. If you press someone's competencies, they'll become more aggressive, and our effects held up whether the games were violent or not." (Starr)
Richard noted that players that felt competent had a positive relationship with motivation and a negative relationship with aggressive behavior, but experiences that damage your ego tend to lead people to act hostile towards each other. (Starr) Tetris is a video game that has absolutely no form of violent content, which shows that violence is not necessary to trigger a shift toward violent behavior.
The relationship between difficulty and anti-social behavior is also something that has gone without much attention in the forms of studies. However, just as cooperative game-play can be seen, difficulty can also be observed in many ways without the need of a study. Not long after the video on cooperative game-play, I came across a video on YouTube called "Top 10 hardest NES Games" that shows clips of frustrating games to play because of how difficult they were. (Beware of profanity if watching the video) The following is a portion of the video where his thoughts clearly show how behavior can change while playing difficult video games:
"The hardest part in the entire game besides Dracula is the hall right before the Grim Reaper. You have Medusa heads coming at you from both directions and you two Knights throwing axes at two different altitudes. I mean, look at the pattern going on here. Anything that hits you drains a quarter of your health, so that means four hits and you're dead. Oh but the Knights, the knights take nine hits. Nine ******* hits! You can't even concentrate on attacking it because you're too busy dodging Medusas, but you can't dodge the Medusas because you're too busy dodging the axes, but you can't dodge the axes because you're trying to hit the Knight, but you can't hit the Knight because the game's driving you ******* crazy! It's like a test!"
The description above was about a game that had too much going on at one time that made it difficult to stay alive. The important part to note about the video is the aggressive behavior shown by the presenter while describing how difficult and frustrating those video games were and still are. Another factor that plays into the difficulty of a game, which has less to do with the environment inside the game, are the controls used to play the game.
Many times, the frustration from video games does not even come from the nature of winning or losing. There have been plenty of video games, both violent and non-violent, that generate aggressive behavior because of how they are played. There is another video on YouTube called "Top 10 worst video game controls" that shows how something as simple as controls can alter behavior while playing a video game. This ties in with the difficulty of the game, but the reason these games were difficult was because of the different control combinations that differed from common practice in video games. (Rolfe) For example, platform games usually assign the X button on a PlayStation controller as the jump button. How would PlayStation fans feel if they change the jump button over to the start button? The habit of always using the X button will cause confusion that will more than likely lead to errors that then lead to death. Over time, this will build frustration unless they can accustom themselves to the different controls. It is worth noting that there are close to no studies made on how control layouts of video games affect the behavior of a player. This shows yet another direction that studies can be directed toward to learn more about the link between video games and violent behavior.
Competitive multi-player, cooperative game-play, difficulty, control layouts to video games, and the status of anonymity have all proven to have some kind of effect on how people behave while playing video games. In all the examples above, violent content was not the reason for a shift in behavior. Games that are completely non-violent, like Candy Crush and Tetris, but competitive in the form of leaderboards, are still able to generate anger and frustration in players. These aspects may not have many studies connecting them and violence, but it is more than enough to put more time into studying these aspects instead of generalizing an entire game based on how much shooting there is and the amount of blood shown. It is important to study these aspects in order to form a definite solution to violent behavior that is generated from video games, instead of wasting time criticizing something that has proven to not be a driving factor in aggressive behavior.
Works Cited Page
- Chen, Vivian Hsueh Hua, and Yuehua Wu. "Group Identification as a Mediator of the Effect of Players' Anonymity on Cheating in Online Games." Taylor & Francis. N.p., 06 Dec. 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
- Chang, Jenna. "The Role of Anonymity in Deindividuated Behavior: A Comparison of Deindividuation Theory and the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE)." Baylor.edu. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
- Starr, Michelle. "Video Games May Cause Aggression Based on Difficulty, Not Violence - CNET." CNET. CBS Interactive, 10 Apr. 2014. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
- Pearson, Rob. "6 Co-op Games That Will Tear Your Friendship Apart."YouTube. YouTube, 23 Jan. 2015. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
- Rolfe, James. "Top 10 Hardest NES Games - AVGN Clip Collection."YouTube. YouTube, 10 Oct. 2013. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
- Rolfe, James. "Top 10 Worst Video Game CONTROLS - AVGN Clip Collection." YouTube. YouTube, 1 Nov. 2013. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
- "Playing Highly Competitive Games May Lead to Aggressive Behavior."American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association, 29 Aug. 2011. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.
Possible Points of Improvement
- I think that my draft can improve with a little more variation in word usage. I feel the the words violent behavior, aggressive behavior, and the word behavior in general are used too many times. I feel it justified considering the subject of my paper, but I feel like there is a way to remedy that.
- The quotes seem a little big, but I am not sure how talking about videos is handled on research papers. The reason I quoted parts of a video was because I am assuming that the reader does not have immediate access to a video search engine or they may consider it too much of a hassle to try and look it up. Like this, they can get a good idea of the video without having to look at it.
- I tried to concentrate a little more on the flow between topic points, but I think the transfer between anonymity and the other topic points was questionable. I did not want to make it sound like anonymity was connected to everything but I feel like that is how it was conveyed.
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