Young People Who Play Video Games Have Higher Moral Reasoning Skills (inews.co.uk)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Young people who play video games, including violent titles, display more developed moral reasoning skills than their non-gaming peers, a study has found. Researchers from Bournemouth University asked 166 adolescents aged between 11 and 18-years old about their video game habits and questions designed to measure their moral development -- the thought process behind determining what is right or wrong. The children and teenagers who said they played more video games from a wide variety of genres had increased moral reasoning scores, including titles containing violent content. Violent games were found to have a positive relationship with moral reasoning while mature content was more likely to produce a negative one, the report published in published in journal Frontiers in Psychology found.

Comments

Re:Finish them off?

[jellomizer]

For most healthy humans, they know how to draw the line between imagination and reality. In a video game there is no lasting life consequence for your action, if you die, then you start the game over again or just respawn. In real life we don't see Gen Xers jumping off buildings because of all the platform games they played. Because we know it isn't real, and much of the violence in video games, is often played to see what will happen, because there are no consequences, and there is always a reset switch ready for any major mistake. I can play a game where I wipe out woodland creatures, however in real life I feel bad for having to setup a kill trap for that mouse which is chewing threw the back seat in my car (After numerous human traps have failed), heck I would normally just take a spider and put it outside vs just killing it.

Now if Grand Theft Auto was setup where you had to learn the life story of every person you have ran over, spend the rest of the game with a non-save, non-restart and non-quit state. Learning about the harm you have done, spending years of game time in jail. For those who played the game would be playing it like in real life.

Video games give us an outlet for a what if, nothing mattered, we are able to take risks in games that we wouldn't in real life. Heck just running down a mountain in Fallout isn't something I would do in real life, because a simulated fall where you loose 100HP vs a real fall where you may survive, but you will be hurting for much longer.