Part two of my interview with Doug Gentile, Assistant Professor of Psychology at ISU, concerning the results of his study on violent games and aggressive behavior. (The interview follows below.)
Part One | Part Three | Part Four
Game On: I noticed you didn't include Grand Theft Auto in any of these studies. Why no M-rated games?
Doug Gentile: Not in this study. This was focused on T-rated games. In other studies we've looked at M-rated games, though I've never used GTA in an experimental setting. It's partly because, if what I want to do is measure the effect of the violent content, and I can only get kids in here for 20 minutes or so, you can play GTA for 20 minutes and not do anything violent because of its open architecture. Now most people don't play it that way, but we want to make sure we're not measuring 20 minutes of just driving around listening to the different radio stations.
GO: You need to see explicit violent activity in the game to test for correlation with increased aggression.
DG: Right. And also, it may just be we never found another non-violent game to match with GTA. I only use violent games that match non-violent games in all of our test dimensions. So I test a whole bunch of games, and some of them are just more fun than others. I'd love to do one on GTA because it's such a clear example for most parents, aside from the fact that it's a landmark in terms of its gameplay. It totally changed the face of video games. There are a number of things that are very admirable about that game. But it certainly is a nice clear example when you want to explain to parents why they should be paying attention to the games their kids play.
GO: What about competition though? Isn't competitive behavior itself basically aggression-inducing?
DG: Certainly competition, even without the presence of an aggressive stimulus, is another thing to add to the likelihood of aggressive behavior. Now that said, we have done a series of studies looking at sports video games compared to sports video games that include gratuitous violence. For example NFL Blitz versus Madden. So you've got equally competitive games, and the rules are basically the same. But in one you can try to intentionally injure the other players with late hits and out of bounds and piling on and going below the knees and all sorts of things that would get you thrown out of the game, if not the league, if you'd actually done these things. And it does seem in a series of several studies that playing the games that include this additional aggressive content--that makes the difference. People think more aggressive thoughts and behave more aggressively immediately after playing NFL Blitz or MLB Slugfest compared to equally competitive football and baseball games that don't include the ability to rumble with the other team.
GO: Did you find that the nature of interactivity in any way lends itself to the increase in aggressive behavior?
DG: Theoretically that is what we would expect. For example, every teacher knows that if you can get kids involved in their own learning, so they're not just sitting there listening to the teacher lecture, but they actually do a project, and figure it out for themselves, that they learn much better. And there are several other reasons to believe rewards increase learning. So for instance, TV and movies don't have a reward structure, whereas the games do. If the violence is continuous it has a larger effect, but in TV and movies, violence is never continuous, because they know that you get desensitized just watching it. So even in a horror film, it will switch between a horror scene and then a love scene, and then more violence, and then a comedy scene, because they know they've got to break up the pace. And in TV, it's always broken up because in addition to these other directorial reasons, you have commercial breaks. But in a violent first-person shooter, the whole time you're watching it is aggressive. So there are a number of theoretical reasons why we would expect interactive violent games to have a larger effect, but there's very little evidence to date that they do. This is some of the first evidence. It's not really strong yet, but it is leaning that way.
GO: Do you see an aggression effect increase moving from non-interactive to interactive media with violent content?
DG: It's not a big jump. It's not doubling the size of the effect over violent television or movies. And least in the short term. And that's the issue. You always need to focus on, are we talking about the short term effect or the long term effects? And it may be that in the short term, it's not much bigger. That immediately after playing the game or watching the movie, you're more willing to be aggressive. But the aggregate across time, that may be a very different question. And it may be a much bigger effect there, because then your continued practicing may have an impact. And here's where I sometimes say facetiously when people seem surprised by these results, it's not brain science--oh wait, yes it is.
GO: It's long term programming?
DG: I wouldn't use the word programming, but I would say the way the brain learns is through repetition. How do you memorize a phone number? You repeat it. And so this is why practice matters. The more you practice piano the better you get. Similarly, the more you practice thinking aggressive thoughts, being alert for aggressive situations, and then responding aggressively, which is kind of what you do in a violent video game, the better you're going to get at that thought pattern.
