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Study: Video Gamer Aggression Result of Game Experience, Not Violent Content
An anonymous reader writes "A new study published in the March edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology indicates that a gamer's experience of a video game and not the content of the game itself can give rise to violent behavior. In other words, 'researchers found it was not the narrative or imagery, but the lack of mastery of the game's controls and the degree of difficulty players had completing the game that led to frustration.' Based on their findings, researchers note that even games like Tetris and Candy Crush can inspire violent behavior more so than games like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto if they are poorly designed and difficult to play."
Poorly designed, difficult to play
Now every games will be made so even a 4 year old kid can beat them easily.
It's lack of self-control that inspires violent behaviour. Whether it's a game or a nagging spouse that sends a person into a rage, the problem still resides with the individual, so enough with the scapegoating.
The original NES must have raised a generation of cold-blooded killers.
Going postal after Tetris
You mean like the infinite spin that has been a standard rule in Tetris since 2001?
I have to disagree with that. I strongly doubt poorly designed gameplay/games will make you turn violent.
As for hard games? Games were much "harder"/tougher to complete (overall) 20 years ago than they are now and we're seeing a much higher level of violence in today's youth.
That makes sense. No wonder why @dongatory was bombed by so many threats from ignorant users.
:)
The only winning move is not to play...
(Ghosts & Goblins for you older folks)
How many lives were destroyed because of these games?
So, with enough experience that I hit level 80, I can expect to specialize in School Shooting Rank 5?
I should know: I've played Assassin's Creed.
fucking camera. fucking ezio, going in the wrong fucking direction. running into fucking walls. jumping off fucking roofs. fucking FUCK.
So, all videogames should be banned.
says that teenage males display undulating aggressive behavior due to high and fluctuating levels of testosterone.
A fact of life for young males for over 100000 years now.
Turns out video games is just a contemporary outlet for this aggressive behavior.
They're also inexcusable. Hell, it's already a computer and in a PvE situation, it has the hands down advantage on reflex and targeting.
they took the 'video game' factor out of the experiment, in a sense, by testing with different control factors
they tested whether it was **the game** or **frustration with technology** and **frustration with losing**
they tested across all kinds of games, Candy Crush to Call of Duty....same result...aggression comes from frustration
however, "poorly designed gameplay" does indeed equate to aggression...which mirrors non-gaming behavior as well..ex: BSOD
so no, they don't "make" you turn violent...they cause you to express aggression for the same reason **other things** do
Thank you Dave Raggett
I'm sure we can scientifically link **ALL** bad technology design to negative behaviors.
And those negative behaviors, like feeling frustration repeatedly for a routine task, correlate in a proven way to high blood pressure & all kinds of other health problems.
Bad design is ruining our health now too...we have the data to prove it.
Thank you Dave Raggett
You can't master a game, you get pissed.
Big surprise!
Atari E.T. inspired violence. And now they are trying to dig it back up.
How many ballistics experiments were performed with a Rubik's Cube?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Watching sad movies makes you sad. Listening to happy music can cheer you up. Reading a sad book can make you unhappy.
Video games are just another entertainment form.
I appreciate that TFA is referring to a lack of mastery of the controls makes you aggressive (or frustrated)...but so does lack of mastery of anything you spend time on.
And my bugbear is XCOM classic ironman... damn those aliens.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
In other words, people with little emotional self control over themselves in general, also have little emotional self control while playing games. Surprise surprise. Just because video games can place a person in a "stressful" situation in which failure happens often, and thus triggers the person's natural behavior that may not occur as often in less-stressful day to day real-life situations, does not mean video games *caused* that person to have that tendency.
Better known as 318230.
Most people seem to be missing the point, which would be fairly straightforward: frustration may lead to anger may lead to violence. All of which are potentials with aggregate certain probabilities, swimming in a sea of personal and contextual variables.
It doesn't say any particular game. One could study the relative effects of Windows/Unix/OSX. Or one car vs. another. Or big company (Office Space, anyone) vs. small company (oh, wait - the Office).
Nobody contends that Windows causes causing violence, but they do content that violent games do. Therefore, the study compares passably "violent" against non-violent "puzzles", with a finding that is perhaps not so odd after all. It isn't the apparent pixelated gore, but how you feel.
Money is merely a non-violent token, yet bankruptcy is a decent predictor for personal meltdown, etc.
Now waiting for the next study, comparing hard and soft-core porn. (Prediction: vandalizing the hotel TV is more likely than sexual assault).
Thorough play of Gimmick! will cause you to act more violently than a thorough play of Grand Theft Auto IV.
I always did say that even the darkest, bloodiest, goriest games have nothing on Mario Kart.
.. is a recipe for busted keyboards, peeled off mouse buttons, broken monitors, and bloody knuckles.
I think this conclusion is correct, although there are other contributors besides the games controls... the thing that inspires aggression in me is
THE GOD DAMN RETARDS I GET TEAMED WITH IN WOT THAT CAN'T PLAY FOR SHIT
eeeerrrRRReeeee nnnnurrrrrgg aaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR GGgggg!!!
sputter
Games can be bad for you. Very bad.
Wonderful review of the most masochistic platformer I've ever seen. (NSFW Language)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Some days I feel like throwing my Android phone into a brick wall because it's so freaking hard to text on it. My jimmies have been seriously rustled while trying to text people and getting the ever-so-annoying Android alerts/popups/etc that I was being mean to people over the phone.
So yes, I believe struggles with technology in general drive people crazy.
This is why Dong Nguyen got so many death threats.
Nope. Lack of self control causes violence. But lack of game control causes the anger and frustration that leads to a need for self control.
Basically this, if proven as opposed to found once and reported, explains why all studies that blamed video games found the same results consistently. Not because it was bad science, but poor design.
Prior studies were missing basic control groups that had input requirements similar to violent games with only the content different.
Every such study is now suspect at best, and more likely invalid. And, unless you see a flaw, this result means that anyone blaming purely the individual's self control is just as ignorant as blaming purely the game's violent content.
That's why I always bring two pistols to a Monopoly game. One for the banker - you give a guy a position of power like that, sooner or later his inner nature will get the better of him and he starts skimming off the top.
The other's for that guy that sets his sights on developing Park Place and Boardwalk. You can't abide that shit. You know that it's just a matter of time before those houses turn into hotels and it will not end well.
This obviously means that /. will stop forcing people to use the rage inducing beta.
Ever tried completing Super Mario Sunshine's Plinko's Pinball Machine the intended way?
Nuff said.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I mean, if they don't cause people to go on massive shooting sprees, that means some politicians will have spent decades on a pointless crusade against the latest craze among youth. It's like they did that with novels, comic books, or rock and roll, or anything...
It all boils down to the perception how much control of the situation I have lost.
In a public matchup situation, this sense trips rather quickly. When playing with friends almost never at all, and during solo game play it's my own fault, but I still get tweaked. Having been in the same room with friends, their reactions are different. *big shock* 1) One of them, he is grinning the whole time, for everything. He is the ubiquitous poster child for the "Serotonin! Fuck YEAH!" club. Hell of a lot of fun to be around. 2) Another friend, in anything multiplayer, he is Ghandi. Be the change you want to be type attitude, very helpful when others get tweaked about doing not so well or water off a duck type calm. Yet during single player, you'd think he is another person. Damn near that nerd rage from that viral video, screaming at the monitor, hyperventilating, has been known to break keyboards. 3) Another friend, has zen like concentration, and other than his fingers and his eyes moving, you'd swear he was a statue. Hell of a good player though.
So yeah, we all have different reactions to these type of situations. I'd hazard a guess it's related to how competitive we are, but that's not the whole picture either.
if i start feeling too much frustration i just quit.....
i stop playing , paying and having the stress.....
its easy
Dragon's Dogma
Windows 8 will be responsible for several mass murders.
Either a lot of researchers are really retarded or are living in a different world than me. This has been so obvious after so many years of Quake! No one became violent from this, only those who loses sulks and gets frustrated. That was always the case.
Am amazed at how money is spent in stupid researches like these when these things are pretty obvious. Pffft, I guess when funding is given for researchers, whoever manages to give head to whoever is funding, gets the money. There are so many interesting and worthwhile researches out there that shall benefit humanity more than dumb researches like this, and then you wonder, why bright kids start selling drugs to sponsor their own researches.
Can I just say, "duh"?
No, my aggression is because inevitably I get stuck with the DUMBEST motherfuckers on my team. I swear to god I have never met people so stupid as the idiots I get stuck with on my team. And I can't do a goddamn thing about it. They are beyond fucking help.
please stop blaming a hobby for what some mentally unstable people do god dammit...
- my sweet little child became a cold bloded murderer because that devil GTA vice city
- but ma'am, your child has a history of violent behavior since he started to go to school...
- IT WAS GTA'S FAULT!!!!
jack the ripper, charles manson and countless others were already violent without the help of "hard to master" games... you are only fabricating a scapegoat for violent behavior... if a child can't handle a stressfull situation as the dicifulty level of today's carebear games then what he'll do in the more stressfull situation of school and homeworks???
children are more messed up than in the previous generations not because videogames or internet, but because parents are more focused on their work and their lives to pay attention to their children, they expect the school, the tv, the console and the babysitters to raise them while they focus all their energy on their careers, and then we see studies like this making the perfect scapegoat for the busy parent who doesn't understand why his child who barelly see the weekends behaves like bart simpson
I saw people never as emotional as when you beat them nasty in the multi-player version of tetris. Some really physically attacked and tried to beat other people after that.
... is linked to insults, not abuse when growing up.
I won't repeat everything I posted elsewhere, but really, that's the stupidest research I've heard of in a long time. First of all, starting with calling a version of Half Life 2 where enemies evaporate "non-violent". So, if there's no blood it's not violence? If you just disintegrate people that's a non-violent game? That's such a basic problem with definitions that I feel that the researchers should be taken out and evaporated non-violently.
Then there's the conclusion. Sure, people can get angry when they are frustrated. You don't have to be a genius to know that. A more interesting question would be how well people deal with that frustration. Do players of violent game tend to have worse control of their temper in this respect than others? That would be more interesting than the stupid conclusions here.
(And I'd like to apologise to the researchers, I haven't read the research paper, just the articles on various sites, and it's possible that it's only the writers of these editorials who are jumping to conclusions. However I'm sure that the "non-violent Half life 2" is part of the original article, and as such I can believe that the rest of the stupidity also exists there.)
Hostility = aggression = violence = "being mean to others"? Really? Hard to believe these people are psychologists. Killing sprees are not linked to aggressivity. But they ate demonstrably modeled on games whose subject is killing people.
So this is perfectly normal.
And now it's scientifically proven..
Lack of self-control can easily be induced: the more control you have over them, the easier it is to deprive them of control over themselves.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
This, I am sure, will sound totally silly, but I've seen this in action. My wife's favorite games are the old "House Of The Dead" rail-shooters, and Angry Birds. House of the Dead noticeably relaxes her, and she doesn't hit much frustration it it. Angry Birds makes me fear for my life, practically, if she hits a losing streak. It's made worse by the social aspect - she gets furious if she is lower in the rankings than people she knows and competes against.
Note: My wife and I don't have fancy new gaming systems or high-powered computers. We're poor, which is fine with me, but it does limit our gaming options to things like the above.
To be honest, I take every psychology study with a grain of salt. If constantly using subjective measurements and being biased isn't highly frowned upon, you know something is wrong with the field.
Is this one of the few places where the Goat Simulator Expansion (GoatSE) is on topic?
Then i would have to say aggression. is contagious. The most frustrating aspect of video games (to me anyway. That is why i very rarely play multi-player) is not so much the interface but other players. Griefers, cheaters little kids with poor impulse control that scream obscenities at you through the voice chat, constant name calling and the likes. THAT degrades the gaming experience. Say you really like a game and would like to get better at it but it is multi-player only and every time you try to play, you have to contend with that. Would it not get on your nerves after a while? Sure you can pick another server but they are everywhere. And contrary to popular belief (or what my mommy told me when i was young) ignoring them does not make them go away. The only solution is to find another game to play.
Video games don't cause violence. Lag causes violence!
Easy solution, just ban bad games!
Did the researchers also study aggression that result from job experience?
In my experience, frustration coming from you job is usually many times that which can come from a game, any game.
With a game, you can just give up and play another game if the frustration reached a certain level. With you job, most people don't have that luxury.
Oliver.
....with slashdot, since you seem to only reprint stories featured on reddit anyways.
Last week, I was playing a particularly high level of Tetris, desperately trying to get to the next level before I had to move house. After playing for several hours, I had an overwhelming urge to punch my removal men.
It's called Rage Quit.
Why do I get the feeling Slashdot is trolling me?
There are plenty of studies that prove violent content has a direct impact on immediate behaviour, and behaviour in the next hours.
I think that poor gameplay is only an additionnal factor to violent behavior linked to video game use.
They should take 5 goups, one playing GTA 5, one playing a non-violent videogame with a decent gameplay, and one playing a regular game (cards, monopoly, etc...) to check the difference.
BTW, violent video-games have not been proven to exacerbate violence, but to diminish empathy, which can be equally dangerous.
This study just reeks of poor design. After all, doesn't the violent content create the experience which then leads to gamer aggression? Sounds to me like a poorly conducted study to try and take the heat off of the gaming industry. It's almost as bad as guns don't kill people, people kill people. Come up with a logical argument. That much said, I'm fully for ownership of firearms and no regulation of video games.
So now the leading cause of violence is Flappy Bird....
Abe's Oddworld? 58 people dead in a sledgehammer rampage. Doom? Orderin' another pizza for the overnight LAN party.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YvJwFQnA3o
Friends play gw2 before and now he play swtor, and has spent lots of money to buy some gold or item or leveling from igxe website ,even every time he can get 8% codes ( IGXECODE69562 )from there, but i also feel it is so expensive, and can save some money .
I can tell you I've had more frustration just installing software over the years, let alone using poorly designed software or games. I'm not sure it's ever led to actual violence, but I have contemplated just hitting the stupid thing with a hammer on more than one occasion. The same level of frustration is induced trying to teach a relative about the difference between a wifi signal and an ISP; Trying to help non-tech people choose a new computer and weigh options, etc. So far, I have yet to go postal.
Video gamer and agression are two concepts that don't really match too well.
In any case it would result in extremely comical situations, because the last think on earth one could possibly be afraid of is of an obese soft couch dweller who brakes a leg just from trying to lift his butt from the sofa.
So, what's the point? They get aggressive? Who cares? They also get fucking fat.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
I would also say that everyone has limits. Backing individuals into impossible situations passive aggressively is something that modern society has become very good at.
...and then, there's the different ways that an individual will react and cope once the limits are broken.
To take the current subject: Video games.
Some will react violently to furstration, and angrily throw their controler accros the room.
Other will simply go "meh", consider the "unwinnable game" uninteresting and move onto something and not even mind.
Same could apply to lots of other situations in life.
Some people will just go mad. Other will just chose to ignore and move to something else.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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