12/10/12
Violent Video Games: More Playing Time Equals More Aggression
COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new study provides the first experimental evidence that the negative effects of playing violent video games can accumulate over time.
Researchers found that people who played a violent video game for three consecutive days showed increases in aggressive behavior and hostile expectations each day they played. Meanwhile, those who played nonviolent games showed no meaningful changes in aggression or hostile expectations over that period.
Brad Bushman
Although other experimental studies have shown that a single session of playing a violent video game increased short-term aggression, this is the first to show longer-term effects, said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University.
"It's important to know the long-term causal effects of violent video games, because so many young people regularly play these games," Bushman said.
"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."
Bushman conducted the study with Youssef Hasan and Laurent Begue of the University Pierre Mendes-France, in Grenoble, France, and Michael Scharkow of the University of Hohenheim in Germany.
Their results are published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and will appear in a future print edition.
The study involved 70 French university students who were told they would be participating in a three-day study of the effects of brightness of video games on visual perception.
They were then assigned to play a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 minutes on each of three consecutive days.
Those assigned the violent games played Condemned 2, Call of Duty 4 and then The Club on consecutive days (in a random order). Those assigned the nonviolent games played S3K Superbike, Dirt2 and Pure (in a random order).
After playing the game each day, participants took part in an exercise that measured their hostile expectations. 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.
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.)
The results showed that, after each day, those who played the violent games had an increase in their hostile expectations. In other words, after reading the beginning of the stories, they were more likely to think that the characters would react with aggression or violence.
"People who have a steady diet of playing these violent games may come to see the world as a hostile and violent place."
"People who have a steady diet of playing these violent games may come to see the world as a hostile and violent place," Bushman said. "These results suggest there could be a cumulative effect."
This may help explain why players of the violent games also grew more aggressive day by day, agreeing to give their opponents longer and louder noise blasts through the headphones.
"Hostile expectations are probably not the only reason that players of violent games are more aggressive, but our study suggests it is certainly one important factor," Bushman said.
"After playing a violent video game, we found that people expect others to behave aggressively. That expectation may make them more defensive and more likely to respond with aggression themselves, as we saw in this study and in other studies we have conducted."
Students who played the nonviolent games showed no changes in either their hostile expectations or their aggression, Bushman noted.
He said it is impossible to know for sure how much aggression may increase for those who play video games for months or years, as many people do.
"We would know more if we could test players for longer periods of time, but that isn't practical or ethical," he said.
"I would expect that the increase in aggression would accumulate for more than three days. It may eventually level off. However, there is no theoretical reason to think that aggression would decrease over time, as long as players are still playing the violent games," he said.
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Contact: Brad Bushman, (614) 688-8779; Bushman.20@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
Liz Woolley
Decided to withdraw post.
I don't see how continuing to play something that induces anger will stop doing that over the course of time.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, help me to be realistic about the challenge I'm facing and to take good care of myself. If you need help PM me! I will gladly offer you whatever aid I can.
"People who have a steady diet of playing these violent games may come to see the world as a hostile and violent place."
For whatever reason the violent games didn't hook me so much, but still, even with the games I did spend so many hours on, the generally poor behavior, lack of common decency displayed by the majority of players seriously rocked my faith in my fellow man. Now I can attribute it to the environment, but when I was in it, I found myself thinking people were pretty lousy creatures.
Acceptance. When I am disturbed, it is because a person, place, thing, or situation is unacceptable to me. I find no serenity until I accept my life as being exactly the way it is meant to be. Nothing happens in God’s world by mistake. Acknowledge the problem, but live the solution!
For every study that suggests that violent videogames make people violent, there is another one just as credible that shows no connection. I was shooting up people in Half-Life when I was a pre-schooler, beside my father, gleefully squealing "look dad, I killed the soldiers!", yet I've never in my life started a fight. During elementary school, I was relentlessly bullied by other children, with the climax being a pencil being driven deep into my back. However, I grew up to be an extroverted person, free from insecurity to a great extent. Back then, videogames provided a way for me to vent certain unpleasant feelings, so that I would neither swallow them and wait for them to consume me from within nor release them violently. You could say they were comparable to a punching bag or a stress ball. Video game addiction is a huge problem, but it's no reason to make a scapegoat for each and every one of society's problems out of them.
I don't think that the study set out to diagnose society's problems..
What I do find interesting though, is that there was a notable change in the participants after gaming. I can only speak from personal experience, I was a different person after I got hooked on gaming.
I do recognize after a big gaming binge, there was a big difference in my ability to reason and think congnitively. That in and of itself, is very significant.
Specially since I am sort of wanting to know about stuff that might hurt my son's mental development.
I made the point to educate my son about the potential dangers of excess gaming, and you know what? He quit gaming.
Recall of game images is like programming the mind. This is a phenomenon referred to as the "Tetris Effect". We become what we think. Here are my responses on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ZXiVxe_Tw and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpadp5YR_gQ
Science. 2000 Oct 13;290(5490):350-3.Replaying the game: hypnagogic images in normals and amnesics.Stickgold R, Malia A, Maguire D, Roddenberry D, O'Connor M.Source
Laboratory of Neurophysiology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, 74 Fenwood Road, Boston, MA 02115, USA. rstickgold@hms.harvard.edu
Abstract
Participants playing the computer game Tetris reported intrusive, stereotypical, visual images of the game at sleep onset. Three amnesic patients with extensive bilateral medial temporal lobe damage produced similar hypnagogic reports despite being unable to recall playing the game, suggesting that such imagery may arise without important contribution from the declarative memory system. In addition, control participants reported images from previously played versions of the game, demonstrating that remote memories can influence the images from recent waking experience.
Andrew P. Doan, MPH, MD, PhD
My Gaming Addiction Videos on YouTube: YouTube.com/@DrAndrewDoan
*The views expressed are of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, DHA or Department of Defense.
Decided to withdraw post.
Decided to withdraw posts. My mission here is to recover and help others recover.
The addiction to video games poses a huge problem and challenge to overcome. It takes away days, weeks, years from your life without you even noticing, then one day you wake up from a trance and find out you've missed out on too much. That's reason enough to consider it a very serious risk to the quality of one's life. However, beyond that, the consequences of obsessive gaming are debatable at best, and wildly vary from one person to another. I'm not trying to play the Devil's advocate here, nor am I defending videogames, but I think that, when not providing counsel to someone in specific, we should stick to things that apply to most, if not all obsessive gamers. Anyone who finds his/her way here undoubtedly regrets the days and nights that videogames have taken away, but not all obsessive gamers become violent as a result of their addiction.
Dear deadlysteak,
First, the article did not say ALL addicted gamers became violent.
Second, the study was comparing the affects of violent, anti-social games vs. social games on a person.
Third, I watched what gaming did to my son and how he changed after he became addicted to Everquest. (He played on the Player vs Player server, which was more violent). He became a different person. You, as gamers, do not realize how much you change because you are too busy playing your games. I, as a parent saw how my son changed after the played that game, and it was NOT for the good. For over 10 years now, I have heard the same story from other family members and loved ones about their loved one, who played games. Today, I honestly can say, that I believe if he did not play that game, he would still be alive today.
Liz
Liz Woolley
Video Game Addiction + Violent Games = Huge Social Problem (if you let your kids play them... then it's your problem).
Recall of game images is like programming the mind. This is a phenomenon referred to as the "Tetris Effect". We become what we think. Here are my responses on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ZXiVxe_Tw and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpadp5YR_gQ
I believe the most recent shootings are related to video games and technology being introduced too early to the youth. Consider this formula that Cris Rowan (clinical psychologist) and I came up with:
(technology addiction from youth, with Tetris Effect) + (violent media exposure) +/- (psychotropic medication) + (deprivation of movement, touch, human connection and nature) = pathologic shooter
Andrew P. Doan, MPH, MD, PhD
My Gaming Addiction Videos on YouTube: YouTube.com/@DrAndrewDoan
*The views expressed are of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, DHA or Department of Defense.
amen.
Exactly. Not enough research has been done on the effects of excess gaming. Honestly, that's what makes it all more scary.
But again, drawing on my own experience, binge gaming has a big effect on players, and from what little research has been done, is not good.
This is incorrect. There is A LOT of research to show the consequences of obsessive gaming is BAD.
go to www.pubmed.org and search "video game addiction"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=video%20game%20addiction
This is no longer a "one person to another". The studies are clear, 1 in 10 kids are affected where there is dysfunction in their lives.
As addicted gamers, we need to 1) wake up and 2) stop denying gaming is destroying multiple facets of our lives. My life was in ruin. I almost lost my family and medical career.
Andrew P. Doan, MPH, MD, PhD
My Gaming Addiction Videos on YouTube: YouTube.com/@DrAndrewDoan
*The views expressed are of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, DHA or Department of Defense.
Withdrawn post. Sticking with recovery.
Personally, I hope someone in the medical community or the journalism community finds this thread and explores the connection.
I absolutely agree with you Kate, 100%. Just isn't going to be me, because the entire scope of discussion on violence in our society is making me ill.
I would love to spend more time supporting every effort to erradicate violence, but I can't. So for now, will focus on recovery and help others; maybe in this small way I can erradicate violence/aggression in myself and others around me.
"First remove the mote in my eye..."
And since I am neither in the medical community or the journalism community, I will leave this to them.
Liz and I, as well as others are working on this. Stay healthy. We are a team!
Andrew P. Doan, MPH, MD, PhD
My Gaming Addiction Videos on YouTube: YouTube.com/@DrAndrewDoan
*The views expressed are of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, DHA or Department of Defense.
Thank you Mudphud. I never ever want to sound as if I am opposed to informing the world. I just have to do my own part with what I can do.
Hugs.
Done. Merry Christmas
Newtown slaughter renews debate over violent video games
Congressional gun-rights supporters said they would consider new legislation to control firearms, provided it also addresses mental-health problems and the impact of violent video games.
By LOU KESTEN
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- In the days since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., a shellshocked nation has looked for reasons. The list of culprits includes easy access to guns, a strained mental-health system and the "culture of violence": the entertainment industry's embrace of violence in movies, TV shows and, especially, video games.
"The violence in the entertainment culture -- particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, et cetera -- does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent," Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said.
"There might well be some direct connection between people who have some mental instability and when they go over the edge -- they transport themselves, they become part of one of those video games," said Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, where 12 people were killed in a movie theater shooting in July.
White House adviser David Axelrod tweeted: "But shouldn't we also quit marketing murder as a game?"
Congressional gun-rights supporters said Tuesday they would consider new legislation to control firearms, provided it also addresses mental-health problems and the impact of violent video games.
"Put guns on the table, also put video games on the table, put mental health on the table" in a comprehensive anti-violence effort, said 10-term Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., who has an A+ rating with the National Rifle Association (NRA).
There have been unconfirmed media reports that Newtown shooter Adam Lanza, 20, enjoyed a range of video games, from the bloody "Call of Duty" series to the innocuous "Dance Dance Revolution."
But the same could be said for about 80 percent of Americans in Lanza's age group, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Law-enforcement officials haven't made any connection between Lanza's possible motives and his interest in video games.
Protected expression
The video-game industry has been mostly silent since Friday's attack, in which 20 children and six adults were killed at the school. Lanza also fatally shot his mother at home before killing himself at the school. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which represents game publishers in Washington, has yet to respond to politicians' criticisms. Hal Halpin, president of the nonprofit Entertainment Consumers Association, said: "I'd simply and respectfully point to the lack of evidence to support any causal link."
It's unlikely lawmakers will regulate the sales of video games, though Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., introduced a bill Wednesday directing the National Academy of Sciences to examine whether violent games and programs lead children to act aggressively.
"Recent court decisions demonstrate that some people still do not get it," Rockefeller said. "They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons. Parents, pediatricians and psychologists know better."
But laws regulating video games were rejected again and again in a series of court cases in the past decade, culminating last year, when the Supreme Court, voting 7-2, revoked a California law criminalizing the sale of violent games to minors.
The Supreme Court decision focused on First Amendment concerns; in the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that games "are as much entitled to the protection of free speech as the best of literature."
Scalia also agreed with the ESA's argument that researchers haven't established a link between media violence and real-life violence: "Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively."
Scalia wrote that constitutional limits on governmental action against video games apply, "even where the protection of children is the object."
Christmas favorites
Shares of video-game makers and retailers fell Wednesday as investors weighed possible fallout. Combat titles such as the top-selling "Call of Duty" series from Activision Blizzard generate more than 20 percent of video-game software sales.
But the attention generated by the Connecticut school shooting is unlikely to reduce sales during the Christmas season, said Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen & Co., who recommends investors buy shares of the largest game companies.
"If you go to Amazon.com right now, and you look at their top selling games, four of the five are what you'd classify as violent games," Creutz said. "People are still buying these games. It's not kids playing these games, by and large. Parents already don't buy their kids these types of games."
Those top sellers at the site include Microsoft's "Halo 4," "Call of Duty" and "Assassin's Creed 3" from Ubisoft Entertainment.
The drop in the shares is largely a knee-jerk reaction, Creutz said.
Industry soul-searching
That doesn't make games impervious to criticism, or even soul-searching within the gaming community. At this year's E3 -- the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the industry's largest U.S. gathering -- some attendees were stunned by the intensity of violence on display. A demo for Sony's "The Last of Us" ended with a villain taking a shotgun blast to the face. A scene from Ubisoft's "Splinter Cell: Blacklist" showed the hero torturing an enemy. A trailer for Square Enix's "Hitman: Absolution" showed the protagonist slaughtering a team of lingerie-clad assassins disguised as nuns.
"The ultraviolence has to stop," designer Warren Spector told the GamesIndustry website after E3. "I do believe that we are fetishizing violence, and now in some cases actually combining it with an adolescent approach to sexuality. I just think it's in bad taste. Ultimately I think it will cause us trouble."
Brian Crecente, news editor for the gaming website Polygon, said Monday: "The violence of these games can be off-putting. The video-game industry is wrestling with the same issues as movies and TV. There's this tension between violent games that sell really well and games like 'Journey,' a beautiful, artistic creation that was well-received by critics but didn't sell much."
During November, typically the peak month for preholiday game releases, the two best-sellers were the military shooters "Call of Duty: Black Ops II," from Activision, and "Halo 4," from Microsoft. But even with the dominance of the genre, Crecente said: "There has been a feeling that some of the sameness of war games is grating on people."
Critic John Peter Grant said: "I've also sensed a growing degree of fatigue with ultraviolent games, but not necessarily because of the violence per se."
The problem, Grant said, "is that violence as a mechanic gets old really fast. Games are amazing possibility spaces! And if the chief way I can interact with them is by destroying and killing? That seems like such a waste of potential."
There are some hints of a self-awareness creeping into the gaming community. One gamer -- Antwand Pearman, editor of the website GamerFitNation -- has called for other players to join in a "Day of Cease-Fire for Online Shooters" Friday, one week after the school massacre.
"We are simply making a statement that we as gamers are not going to sit back and ignore the lives that were lost," Pearman said.
Information from Bloomberg News was used in this report.
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019939829_violentvideogames20.html
Andrew P. Doan, MPH, MD, PhD
My Gaming Addiction Videos on YouTube: YouTube.com/@DrAndrewDoan
*The views expressed are of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the U.S. Navy, DHA or Department of Defense.
Education. Helping parents become aware of the potential effects of excessive gaming would be a great start. My son is hitting middle school next year and I am not sure what the parent involvement looks like at that level.
I've been involved with PTA as both a teacher and parent for a lot of years, and I've presented for many parent sessions on behavior, but never approached doing any kind of parent session on the dangers of excessive gaming.
Communication with kids at a younger age is so important. I really believe prevention is key.