
It’s November 10th, 2009.  The long-awaited sequel to the award-winning first person shooter, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, has finally been released.  People have been waiting in line outside of video game stores across the country in order to be the first to buy and play the game.  One of those people is a 14-year-old boy.  He is in line with his mother, who is the one who must purchase the game due to its M (for mature) rating, which requires the buyer to be 18 years or older in order to make the purchase.  This is the first game of its type (first person shooter) the boy will get to play for extended periods of time.  The mother doesn’t do much research on what the game is, or even on what her son will be doing in the game.  Weeks have now gone by since the release and the mother notices a change in her son’s behavior.  He is not the same since he started playing the game.  When she tries to ask him to do chores, he talks back, has an attitude, and sometimes even yells.  She doesn’t understand why he is acting this way.  She finally has a realization: it’s the video game.  She takes her time to research and get an idea of what the game her 14-year-old son is playing allows him to do, and it shocks her.  He is being put into the shoes of a military soldier, tasked with killing other virtual players, and people; something that is bound to have an effect on anybody who partakes in it.  Playing violent video games is what is causing the boy’s—and many other people’s—aggression level to increase, but not enough to make a noticeable real-world difference.

Video games have been around for some time now.  The first video game was invented back in 1958 by physicist William Higinbotham.  His creation, called Tennis for Two, was essentially a tennis game, similar to the 1970s game Pong.  The game was played by two players with controllers which were connected to a computer, and the screen was displayed via oscilloscope, or an “electronic-display device containing a cathode-ray tube (CRT) that generates an electron beam that is used to produce visible patterns, or graphs, on a phosphorescent screen” (Encyclopædia Britannica).  The game was the first of its kind.  Nobody had ever seen anything like it before simply because the technology did not exist.  Higinbotham wanted to create the game in order to the make science exhibits at the time more interesting and interactive for the people viewing them.  He most likely had no idea what kind of industry he had just created, or to what extent video games would get to, positively and negatively.

It wasn’t until 1976 when the first big controversy over a video game occurred.  The controversy was over the game Death Race (working title: Pedestrian), which called for players to race a car and run over stick-figure-like “gremlins.” (The International Journal of Computer Game Research).  This doesn’t sound that bad, but what caused controversy was the sound the gremlins made when a player would run them over.  They would make a sound that sounded like they were in discomfort, or pain, a sort of “ahhck” sound, followed by a gravestone, pointing to the idea of death (National Coalition Against Censorship).  This caused public turmoil because it made people uncomfortable about the idea of killing something, even if it was through a virtual machine.  Only around 500 copies of the game were made and it was later pulled from store shelves due to all of the controversy.  If a game like this, which contained only minimal violence, was pulled from shelves in the 1970s due to the idea of killing a stick figure, what does that say about video games nowadays which are much more popular, life-like, and violent?

Violent video games and the implications of playing them has significantly changed over the course of three decades.  Nowadays they are much more realistic, with the graphics improving at a seemingly exponential rate.  The different forms of violence and ways violence is portrayed has changed, with more and more diverse and number of games being developed each year, many of which have different end goals and objectives.  In the extremely popular first-person shooter game Call of Duty, players essentially have one duty which is the basis of the game’s objective: kill.  Players are put into the eyes of soldiers who wield firearms and must kill other players in order to win.  They are rewarded (winning) by performing a violent act (killing).  Considering that “97% of US kids age 12-17 play video games” (ProCon.org), how does this affect the young players who play violent M rated games, (who shouldn’t be allowed to play the game in the first place due to the Mature rating)?

When trying to figure out if playing violent video games cause an increase in aggression, how would one do so?  Before you can do anything, you must come to a conclusion of what “aggression” actually entails.  There are many insufficient ways of defining aggression, but a psychological science article by Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman do a good job of explaining what aggression is and what it consists of in the context of real life scenarios.

Aggression is behavior intended to harm another individual who is motivated to avoid that harm. It is not an affect, emotion, or aggressive thought, plan, or wish. This definition excludes accidental acts that lead to harm, such as losing control of an auto and accidentally killing a pedestrian, but includes behaviors intended to harm even if the attempt fails, such as when a bullet fired from a gun misses its human target. (Anderson & Bushman 2001)

A very important factor is coming up with a method in measuring the person’s level of aggression in order to assess the correlation between gameplay and the amount of aggression increase or decrease.  This is important because if you’re trying to measure a person’s aggression level to determine if it increases, decreases, or does neither, and you do it wrong, then the entire study will end up with false results.  There are several different ways researches have gone about measuring the levels of aggression in people while and after playing a violent video game, but we will be focusing on just one.

The method of measuring someone’s level of aggression we will be talking about is the Taylor Competitive Reaction Time (TCRT) task.  In a study by Craig A. Anderson, Douglas A. Gentile, and Katherine E. Buckley, Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adolescents : Theory, Research, and Public Policy, they explain how the Taylor Competitive Reaction Time task works.

In this task, the participant’s goal is to click the mouse (or track pad) button sooner than his or her opponent after receiving auditory or visual cues.  When participants lose, they hear a punishing noise blast at an intensity supposedly set by their opponent (but actually set by the computer because there is no real opponent).  This technique has been extremely validated, meaning that people who are higher in aggression in the “real world” also provide higher noise blasts in the laboratory, and that laboratory findings based on this technique usually replicate when conceptually analogous studies are done in real-world contexts. (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley 2007)

This method is very useful for this study in determining a person’s immediate and temporary level of aggression because it assesses the participant’s decision making when choosing how punishing of a noise blast to send to their opponent soon after playing a violent or nonviolent video game.  The tasks are done after the participants have played the violent or nonviolent game in order to deduce that their choices were influenced by the playing of the game.  Anderson, Gentile, and Buckley based their technique on the TCRT in order to measure the levels of aggression in players ranging from ages 9 to 29, male and female.  They had some of the participants play a nonviolent children’s game, some play two violent children’s games, and others (only older players) play two violent T-rated video games.  With each Taylor Competitive Reaction Time trial, the participant set a noise intensity level they wanted to send to their opponent by clicking on a scale ranging from 0 to 10 (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley 2007).  The aggression level of participants was “defined as the number of high-intensity noise blasts (settings of 8, 9, or 10) the participant chose to deliver to his or her opponent” (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley 2007).  This data was then used to list the increase (or stagnation) of the participant’s aggression by looking at their score from the TCRT tasks.

After conclusion of the participants performing the TCRT tasks, the results the researchers got were varied, but somewhat expected.  In terms of entertainment, the violent video games got higher ratings of how entertaining the game was than the nonviolent video games.  Although the participants’ ratings of frustration of the violent and nonviolent games alike did not differ enough to cause concern, “the nonviolent game was rated as somewhat more frustrating than the children’s violent games” (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley 2007).  As expected, the violent games were rated as significantly more violent than the nonviolent games.  Interestingly, females gave more ratings indicating that the games were violent than males did.

For this study, the level of a player’s aggression was not the only factor taken into place to assess someone’s aggressiveness and why it was higher or lower than the others.

Participants rated the game that they had been randomly assigned to play on seven dimensions. They did so by indicating their agreement with statements that the game was action packed, entertaining, exciting, frustrating, fun, boring, and violent. The scale was verbally anchored at –3 (strongly disagree), 0 (neutral), and 3 (strongly agree) (Anderson & Dill, 2000). Five of the items were combined into a single “entertainment” scale; these were the items on how action packed, entertaining, exciting, fun, and boring (reverse coded) the game was. (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley 2007)

This extra data gathered about what the participant thought of the game itself is important to their overall response, whether good or bad, to the game.  If a person scored higher on the TCRT after playing a game they gave a violence score of 3 on, there is an obvious correlation between how violent the participant perceived the game to be and their aggression level.

Another significant factor within the study was assessing the participants past with acting aggressively or violently, which was done through a questionnaire.

The questionnaire included a nine-item violent behavior (VB) subscale from the Delinquency Scale used in a series of studies collectively called the National Youth Survey (e.g., Elliot, Huizinga, & Ageton, 1985; see also Anderson & Dill, 2000). The items ask participants to estimate how many times in the past year they have done each of the nine types of aggressive or violent behaviors, such as “attacked someone with the idea of seriously hurting him or her” and “used force (or threatened to use force) to get money or things from a teacher or other adult at school.” (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley 2007)

This is an important factor to take into place when figuring out if a participant’s aggression level directly correlates with the game they played.  A participant’s past with aggressive behavior and/or violence could alter the end results.  One participant may inherently be aggressive due to the city or place they grew up in, as well as the parents they had (and if they had both) and how they treated them, and the people they hung/hang around with on a daily basis.  On the other hand, another participant may be a calm and nonviolent person also because of their home location, parental guidance, and friendships.

There were multiple other aspects the researchers took into place with this study, such as asking the participants about how much they interact with adults “as an assessment of how involved adults are in the media habits of children” (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley 2007).  Furthermore, they asked the participants about their general media use habits, or how often they watch certain TV channels or shows, when and where they watch TV or play video games, how frequently they watch TV shows or movies that involve violence, and how much violence they prefer in games, television, and movies.  All of these questions factor into a person’s level of aggression and need to be addressed in order to get the most accurate results in the end, and to make sure said results are skewed as little as possible by these external factors.

In one study by Jack Hollingdale and Tobias Greitemeyer, they concluded that “participants who had played the violent video game online were more aggressive (M = 16.81, SD = 16.57; contrast weight: 3) compared to participants who had played the violent video game offline (M = 15.35, SD = 14.04; contrast weight: 21)” (Hollingdale & Greitemeyer 2014).  This is an interesting finding because it answers the question if online gameplay with other humans would affect a player more or less than offline gameplay, which is not with other human players.

Even though the above studies clearly state that playing violent video games will cause an increase in aggression, does that statistic stand in the real world?  The statistics in the studies are the result of a completely controlled environment.  They didn’t take any statistics on real life events in order to distinguish aggression that is only prominent in controlled studies, rather than in real world events.  But is that even possible?  The study by Anderson, Gentile, and Buckley had to carefully word what they were telling the participants in order to not make the end result biased, “each participant was told that the researchers were interested in how playing different types of video games affected people’s reaction times” (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley 2007), which is only partially true.  They were indeed measuring the response time but they didn’t explain why.  If they had explained the reason for measuring the participant’s response time then the participants would have had that idea circling in their head, which would alter how they did on the TCRT and the results in a way that isn’t on par with reality.  They performed the studies the way they did because it would be extremely difficult, almost impossible, to measure real life scenarios having to do with a person’s aggression level that was not somewhat biased due to experimental environments.

In critiquing the steps in the research process a number of questions need to be asked. However, these questions are seeking more than a simple 'yes' or 'no' answer. The questions are posed to stimulate the reviewer to consider the implications of what the researcher has done. Does the way a step has been applied appear to add to the strength of the study or does it appear as a possible limitation to implementation of the study's findings? (Coughlan, Cronin, Ryan 2007)

In this study coined a “Step-by-step guide to critiquing research”, Michael Coughlan, Patricia Cronin, and Frances Ryan give multiple viewpoints on the process of nurses critiquing research.  This quote is important and also ties in with research done about violent video game play because it discusses how we view and critique research.  We shouldn’t just say research is either “good” or “bad,” but we should critically view, comprehend, and talk about what researches of a specific topic do that is considered good or bad and explain why.  In the case of research studies on the topic of violent video game effects on aggression, we should look at how the researchers are determining a user’s level of aggression and explain why it is or is not an effective way of doing so.  In this specific case, it will be almost impossible to study a person’s true level of aggression simply because we cannot yet analyze a person’s behavior completely unbeknownst to them in order to get the most true-to-life results.

There is also people who suggest that violent video games are the cause of mass shootings or school shootings in the United States, but

A new report from the American Psychological Association (APA) found there is insufficient research to support that link. It found that there is evidence showing the games increase aggression but not enough to demonstrate that playing the games lead to criminal behavior or delinquency. (CBS News)

This is most definitely an important aspect to look at considering mass shootings are an extremely relevant and serious matter that seems to be occurring more often lately, and it’s important to distinguish the inclinations the shooters have for actually committing the acts.

All of this information and these statistics are fascinating and all, but why do they matter? They matter because what the above studies say is that violent video games do indeed cause an increase in a person’s aggression level, but that it is only statistically significant, rather than realistically significant.  What this means is that the results from the study were significant only in the context of taking statistics about the problem at hand.  Just because a participant demonstrated an increase in aggression in that exact controlled environment, that doesn’t mean they will demonstrate an increase in aggression in a real-world scenario.  This is important because we as a society must be as specific and as precise as possible with determining serious matters such as the one discussed in this paper.  We must do this in order to make sure any future studies or researches don’t come up with more false information due to basing their research on previous research which may have been wrong, even if they didn’t know it at the time.
