No link between violent video games and behaviour: study

Scientists have found no evidence to support the theory that video games make players more violent.

In a series of experiments, with more than 3,000 participants, the researchers demonstrated that video game concepts do not 'prime' players to behave in certain ways and that increasing the realism of violent video games does not necessarily increase aggression in game players.

The dominant model of learning in games is built on the idea that exposing players to concepts, such as violence in a game, makes those concepts easier to use in 'real life'. This is known as 'priming', and is thought to lead to changes in behaviour.

The researchers from the University of York in the UK expanded the number of participants in experiments, compared to studies that had gone before it.

They also compared different types of gaming realism to explore whether more conclusive evidence could be found, according to the study published in the journal Entertainment Computing. In one study, the participants played a game where they had to either be 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. "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," said David Zendle, from the University of York. "Across the two games we didn't find this to be the case. Participants who played a carthemed game were no quicker at categorising vehicle images, and indeed in some cases their reaction time was significantly slower," Zendle said.

In a separate, but connected study, the researchers investigated whether realism influenced the aggression of game players. Research in the past has suggested that the greater the realism of the game the more primed players are by violent concepts, leading to antisocial effects in the real world. "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," Zendle said. "Human characters are modelled on the movement of the human skeleton and how that skeleton would fall if it was injured," he said.

The experiment compared player reactions to two combat games, one that used 'ragdoll physics' to create realistic character behaviour and one that did not, in an animated world that nevertheless looked real. Following the game the players were asked to complete word puzzles called 'word fragment completion tasks', where researchers expected more violent word associations would be chosen for those who played the game that employed more realistic behaviours.