Punishing video game violence: Does it reduce aggressive behavior?. 
Carmageddon 2 (source: Gamespot)
is a gory racing game where players control drivers with names like
“Max Damage” as they tear through city streets mowing down pedestrians
and forcing competitors into bloody collisions. The game settings can
be adjusted so that running down innocent bystanders actually increases a player’s point total. Surely, if there’s any video game that might raise a parent’s ire, Carmageddon 2 is one of them.
Studies have shown
that violent video games are more likely than non-violent games to
induce aggressive behavior, even after very short playing sessions. But
more recent research (by Dmitri Williams and Marko Skoric) has
suggested that violent game play does not always lead to aggression.
In Asheron 2, Williams and Skoric note, players are not allowed to
attack other humans, only monsters, and they must cooperate with other
players to succeed. Perhaps by limiting violent actions and rewarding
cooperation, Asheron 2 discourages aggressive behavior. Other studies
have shown that people who watch violent television shows where the
perpetrator is punished are less aggressive than those watching violent
TV behavior that is rewarded.
Nicholas L. Carnagey and Craig
A. Anderson wondered if punishment and reward are keys to whether
violent video games lead to real-world aggressive behavior. Video games
are different from TV, and players might become frustrated if they are
punished for violence, leading to more real-world aggression. Noting
that no study had previously controlled the punishment and rewarding of
violence in video games, they designed a study to do just that.
Carnagey and Anderson utilized Carmageddon 2’s customizability to
create three study groups: in one group, participants were rewarded
with points for killing innocent pedestrians and smashing into
opponents; in a second group, they were punished for it; in a third
“non-violent” group, pedestrians were removed from the game entirely
and computerized opponent cars were programmed to behave passively.
Participants
played the game for just 20 minutes, but even in this short time,
different game-playing behavior was observed. Players who were rewarded
for violence typically killed 80 pedestrians; those who were punished
killed fewer than a third as many in the same period of time. Next the
researchers studied post-game aggression in three different ways. First
they measured aggressive affect. This was done by giving the State
Hostility Scale, in which participants rate their feelings in
categories such as anger, hostility, and aggravation, on a simple
1-to-5 scale. For a second group of players, they used a Word Fragment
Task, where participants complete as many words as possible in 5
minutes. For example, “K I _ _” could be completed as “kiss,” “kill,”
“kick,” or “kilt.” Those who used more aggressive options in this task
were rated as having more aggressive cognition.
Finally, a
third group was tested for aggressive behavior. Participants were led
to believe that they were competing against another participant playing
a different game in an adjoining cubical (after the experiment,
participants were debriefed and the true purpose of the study was
explained). They were cleverly primed to dislike this “player” by being
asked to write an essay expressing their opinion on a controversial
issue — abortion. After they completed their essay, the experimenter
took it and told them their competitor was going to “grade” the essay.
Then the participants graded the fake competitor’s essay, which was
chosen from two pre-prepared essays, so that participants always saw a
paper expressing the opposite opinion from their own on the topic.
They
played one of the three versions of Carmageddon for 20 minutes, and
were given their “graded” essay, marked by the fictitious competitor
with the lowest possible grade and indicating that “this is the worst
essay I have ever read!”
Now, they were asked to perform a
competitive reaction-time test. If a player won, he or she got to
choose the “penalty� for their new nemesis (who they believed to be
either a baby-killer or a woman-hater and also a poor judge of writing
ability). The penalty was a painful noise played through headphones.
Players chose before each test how loud the noise would be, and how
long it would be played. In reality, the “test� was rigged so that
the participant won 13 times and the non-existent “competitor� won
12 times, inflicting a noise blast of a pre-selected length and
intensity. When the participant won, he or she got to get “revenge.”
Even though the real participants weren’t really hurting anyone, they
certainly believed they were. Players who gave louder and longer
penalties were clearly behaving more aggressively than those who gave
less extreme penalties.
Now let’s take a look at the results
for these three different measures of aggression. The different rating
systems have been converted into z-scores, which is a way of placing
numerically different scores onto a similar scale so that they can be
compared. In each case, a greater z-score corresponds to more
aggressive behavior or attitude.
It’s
clear that the version of Carmageddon 2 that rewarded violence led to
the most aggression. Though the difference between the
reward/punishment scores was actually not significant in the aggressive
affect measure, it was in the other two measures, and in every case,
the version that rewarded violence led to more aggression than the
nonviolent version. However, it’s important to realize that the
negative z-scores in this graph do not suggest that a nonviolent game
leads to decreased aggression — this is an artifact of the
way z-scores are computed. All we can say from this graph is that
playing nonviolent games leads to less aggressive behavior and
attitudes than playing violent games.
Many defenders of
violent video games argue that they are in control of their own
actions, and that video games should not be restricted due to
statistical correlations between playing violent games and aggression.
In this, they may be correct, but that does not invalidate the results
of this study. Playing games that reward violence leads to more
aggressive behavior and attitudes than playing games which do not
reward violence. Even if this knowledge doesn’t reduce the number of
people playing violent games, the knowledge can be used in other ways.
For
example, I talked to my son Jim about the study. He’s a typical
13-year-old who plays games that, while not as gory as Carmageddon 2,
certainly offer their share of violence. When I pointed out to him that
he is more likely to behave aggressively after an especially vicious
gaming session, it was difficult for him to disagree. After he figured
out that I wasn’t going to take away his favorite games, he even
admitted that it was a handy bit of knowledge to have.
Carnegey,
N.L., & Anderson, C.A. (2005). The effects of reward and punishment
in violent video games on aggressive affect, cognition, and behavior. Psychological Science, 16(11), 882-889
[Cognitive Daily]
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