A team of researchers at the University of York have investigated the existence of a link between violent games and violent behaviour of players, finding no evidence of such connection.

The study involved several test and experiments where more than 3,000 participants took part. The researchers demonstrated that playing video games do not drive players towards specific behaviours, and that, in case of realistic violent video games, these do not make players more violent. The usual way of thinking sees the use of violent video games as a force driving the adoption of games’ violent concepts in the players’ real life.

This is known as ‘priming’, which is considered a phenomenon capable of altering behaviours. Previous experiments on this effect, however, have so far provided mixed conclusions.

Researchers at the University of York increased the number of players taking part in the experiments, compared to previous studies, and compared different types of gaming realism to evaluate the existence of significant evidence capable of leading to a clear conclusion.

In one study, participants played a game where they had to play the role of a car avoiding collisions with trucks or a mouse avoiding being caught by a cat. Following the game, the players were shown various images, such as a bus or a dog, and asked to label them as either a vehicle or an animal.

Dr. David Zendle, from the University’s Department of Computer Science, said: “If players are ‘primed’ through immersing themselves in the concepts of the game, they should be able to categorise the objects associated with this game more quickly in the real world once the game had concluded.

“Across the two games we didn’t find this to be the case. Participants who played a car-themed game were no quicker at categorising vehicle images, and indeed in some cases their reaction time was significantly slower.”

In a separate, but connected study, the team investigated whether realism influenced the aggression of game players. Research in the past has suggested that greater level of realism in the game could be reconnected to more players primed by violent concepts, leading to antisocial effects in the real world.

Dr. Zendle said: “There are several experiments looking at graphic realism in video games, but they have returned mixed results. There are, however, other ways that violent games can be realistic, besides looking like the ‘real world’, such as the way characters behave for example.

“Our experiment looked at the use of ‘ragdoll physics’ in game design, which creates characters that move and react in the same way that they would in real life. Human characters are modelled on the movement of the human skeleton and how that skeleton would fall if it was injured.”

The experiment compared player reactions to two combat games. One of the games used ‘ragdoll physics’ to create realistic character behaviour. The other game did not use such ragdoll physics, still in an animated world that looked real.

Following the game step, the next step required the players to complete word puzzles called ‘word fragment completion tasks’, where researchers expected more violent word associations would be chosen by those who played the game with the ragdoll physics and higher levels of realistic behaviours.

They compared the results of this experiment with another test of game realism, where a single famous war game was modified to form two different games. In one of these games, enemy characters used realistic soldier behaviours, whilst in the other game they did not employ realistic soldier behaviour.

Dr. Zendle said: “We found that the priming of violent concepts, as measured by how many violent concepts appeared in the word fragment completion task, was not detectable. There was no difference in priming between the game that employed ‘ragdoll physics’ and the game that didn’t, as well as no significant difference between the games that used ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ more solid tactics.

“The findings suggest that there is no link between these kinds of realism in games and the kind of effects that video games are commonly thought to have on their players.

“Further study is now needed into other aspects of realism to see if this has the same result. What happens when we consider the realism of by-standing characters in the game, for example, and the inclusion of extreme content, such as torture?

“We also only tested these theories on adults, so more work is needed to understand whether a different effect is evident in children players.”

Written by: Pietro Paolo Frigenti

Journal Reference: Zendle, D., Kudenko, D., & Cairns, P. (2018). Behavioural realism and the activation of aggressive concepts in violent video games. Entertainment Computing, 24, 21-29. ISO 690