The Psychological Effect of Violent Video Games

In Psychology and other social and behavioral sciences, aggressive behavior is known as the intention to cause harm or pain. In everyday life, aggressive behavior can be either physical and/or verbal even if it fails at causing harm or pain. Aggression can be seen as a behavior that we humans have adapted and one hypothesis David buss gives is “a key function of verbal and physical aggression is to conflict costs on same-sex rivals” which basically means that intrasexual competition is one reason we humans adopted aggression as a behavior. David Buss concludes in his paper, “Human Aggression in Evolutionary Psychological Perspective” that aggressive behavior in humans is because of “host of adaptive problems, such as resource procurement, intrasexual competition, hierarchy negotiations, and male retention". One part of the brain that is known to cause aggression is the amygdala and when this part of the brain is stimulated it is known to increase aggressive behavior and when this part of the brain suffers lesions, it tends to reduce the person's competitive drive and also reduces the person aggressive behaviors article called.

“The Neurological roots of Aggression” by Emily Singer talks about an experiment that was done to study adolescent boys that were categorized as aggressive and when these boys were faced by a threat they “tend to overreact, they punch someone, or kick a door, but afterward, they regret it" and also “In the moment, they can’t control themselves”. This goes to show that aggressive behavior can not be controlled and can make anyone react to a situation without knowing the consequences they will face in the future When gaming, gamers tend to get mad when an obstacle comes in the way and when they can not get passed this obstacle they tend to rage and show aggressive behavior When they can not get passed this obstacle the gamer will tend to throw the controller, start screaming out curses and some cases the gamer will use physical violence towards the people around him or herself.

This experiment was to done to see how much a fourteen-year-old high school student will commit these kinds of actions while playing a game called Call Of Duty Ghost, which is rated M for mature, and also playing another participant in another competitive game called Fifa 15, which is rated for everyone since the first. The participant is playing a game that is not meant for his age, the participant will commit more of these acts of rage when an obstacle shows up that he can not get passed then when he is playing the other sixteen-year-old participant in virtual soccer match when the two participant player each other in the game Fifa 15, there is an expectation that the participant who is losing will commit the acts of rage more than the subject that is winning the game. From studies done at the University of Rochester, researchers came to the conclusion that the aggression and frustration shown by the gamer is because of the gamer not being able to “master a game and its controls“ and not having anything to do with “a game’s violent content” while another study that was published in the American.

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Psychological Association states that violent games actually “increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants” which is one reason this experiment is being done,to check whether violent video games causes more violent reaction than when playing nonviolent games. One part of this experiment will be to check if the rating of the game that is being played have any effect on how much the participant will show any type of aggression. According to the same study done at the University of Rochester, researchers say that the violent content of any game has “no influence on whether a person becomes aggressive” which is the opposite of the first hypothesis that is being tested in this experiment since the first hypothesis is saying that participant one will show more aggressive behavior while playing COD than when playing Fifa because COD has way more violent content than Fifa. Method: The observations were taken around sunset on a sunny saturday evening.

For the first 30 minutes the fourteen year old participant was being observed while he was wearing a headset and not being disturbed. The participant was playing COD: Ghost online mode, so he was playing other people on multiplayer. Then the other part of the experiment took time around 9 pm the same Saturday evening the two participants were playing each other in Fifa 15 and they had played each other about three times,which was around 40 minutes The settings for this match were it was on the legendary difficulty and the match’s were 6 minutes a half, so one game should be around 12 minutes without the stoppages during the game, which include making a substitution and extra time that is usually given in a soccer match for injuries and things like that. When the two were playing each other, there was music being played and the type of music that was being played was hip hop/rap one can see that the first participant had cursed three times during the first thirty minutes of playing Call of Duty: Ghost and also got up twice to use force to move his mom when she came in the room to get something.

Also participant number one did not rage quit or attempt to throw the controller when he was playing COD. Then in one can see that Participant had cursed a total of 5 times, while participant cursed a total number of 13 times, had restarted the game twice and also attempted to throw the controller only once, while the first participant did not attempt to do either i  In terms of physical and verbal aggression, participant one shown more aggression while playing a game that he is not supposed to, since it is not meant for his age than playing a competitive soccer game against another participant. This goes to show that the first hypothesis, that participant will commit aggressive behavior when he is playing a game that is rated for older audiences than when he is playing a soccer game that is rated E for everyone is correct, since participant number one commits more physical signs of aggression when playing COD than when he is playing Fifai.

By looking at the first table and and the first column of the second table, one can tell that the first table, which represents the counts of aggression while playing COD, that participant number one shown way more signs of aggressiveness and that is because he was cursing and showing physical force on others that were around him. By only looking at the number of times participant one show aggressive behavior when playing a violent game and when he was playing a non violent, it goes to show that violent games does make a person act more aggressive. Participant number one used force twice when his mother came into the room and got in front of the tv when he was playing the violent video game,but did not act with force when he was playing a nonviolent game.

This goes to prove that the violent content of a game does make the player aggressive and by doing that the results of this experiment goes against the results the experiment that was done at the University of Rochester. The second hypothesis, that the participant that is losing while playing Fifa will tend to show aggressiveness is also correct this can be told by just looking at table, where it shows that participant number 2 had shown way more signs of aggressiveness and even at one point tried to throw the controller,but managed to control his anger. One way to take this experiment to the next level is by not watching participants playing casually,but observing gamers that are under pressure and what is meant by that is watching gamers that are in tournaments that have a large amount of prize money.

Since these players would be playing for money and they will be playing the same violent video game that is used in this experiment, Call Of Duty, they will act more aggressively when things do not go their way and since it is going to be a team tournament, all the operationalized terms from this experiment will stay the same, but one more will be added,which is going to be to count the number of times a member of a team curse and/or blame another team member. One hypothesis would be that since these teams would be playing for money the team that is losing would blame each other and act more aggressively in general than the team that is winning, who would try to act calm and keep up what they are doing.

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