Part three 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 Two | Part Four
Game On: The popular assumption is that the less abstract and more graphically detailed a game, the more affective it is. In your research, adults played children's games that included non-graphical violent activity, and their aggressive behavior increased. Does that mean the assumed correlation between increased graphical fidelity and an increase in aggressive behavior isn't as strong? In other words, it doesn't matter as much if it looks violent, it matters whether what I'm doing in the game is violent according to your definition of aggression?
Doug Gentile: There are other issues. I think its important to realize the word abstract you used means more than just visually abstract. Some of the violent games that were used in studies in the 1980s were things like Missile Command, which by an aggression researcher's definition would not count as aggression. Because you're not intending harm to another individual. You're shooting missiles at incoming ICBMs to protect your cities. Those ICBMs don't care whether you shoot them down, so there's no intent to harm in it. So it's abstract in this other sense of its broader violent themes, I guess, but what you're practicing is not really aggressive action compared to, say, Street Fighter. So the abstraction is not just in "the graphics were 8-bit or 16-bit." I pumped a lot of quarters into Asteroids, and yeah, shooting at things, but mostly asteroids or the little spaceship.
GO: Highly depersonalized.
DG: Yeah, so that probably wouldn't count as a violent game. Not just because it was vector graphics, but because the context was "not harming another person who wouldn't want to be harmed."
GO: What about the distinction between solo and multiplayer games? Are the aggression factors different if you know you're fighting live bodies on the other end of a connection?
DG: It's a fascinating question no one has looked at. What happens with MMOs? Because I could make an equally plausible hypothesis in both direction for MMOs. On the one hand, there are reason to think the effect would be greater. One as you just mentioned is because it is another person. And the other is because often when you're doing things, you go out on a raid, you're with your guild or a group of friends, and so you're supporting each other being aggressive. So you're actually getting rewarded by people for your aggressive actions. You know, think about gang behavior. It might have a greater effect there. But let's look at it this way. Often when you're going out on a raid, your goal is not to actually go injure the mobs or the other team. Your goal is to support your team, your goal is to support your guild members, your goal is to do this pro-social thing helping each other.
GO: Cooperative behavior.
DG: Yes, and so it mixes violence and cooperation. Maybe that totally mitigates the effect. The truth is probably going to be that some types of people have the effects enhanced and some types of people have them mitigated, but we don't know how to measure that yet. What are those personality characteristics? So it's a really interesting question where MMOs could make it worse, or they could actually totally wipe out the effect of the violence.
