We’ve all heard that people blame violent video games for mass shootings, but is that claim valid? A study published in Collabra: Psychology refutes the claims and finds that playing shooting video games does not lead to increased aggression.
With the rise of mass violence comes the desire to understand what might be driving this behavior. Whether or not violent video games may be a contributing factor has been a hotly debated and highly contentious conversation in the field for several decades. While previous research seems to support that violent video games cause aggression, these studies have been criticized for poor quality data and analysis.
“So far, a central deficiency in the evidence is poor data quality: Most studies investigate the effects of playing violent video games without actually measuring that game play,” study authors Niklas Johannes and colleagues wrote. “If we do not measure the behavior in question, we cannot advise politicians on its effects”
These problems can lead to inaccurate meta-analyses. This study seeks to provide a methodologically sound view of the link between aggression and violent video games.
Johannes and his colleagues used 1,092 Apex Legends players and 1,488 Outriders players as a sample. All participants had to be active players of the game in the previous 2 weeks, speak English, and live in the US, UK, or Canada. Participants were asked to participate in 3 waves of the study, approximately 2 weeks apart. The researchers measured time spent playing the game and aggressive affect.
The results showed that for both shooting games, there was no significant effect of playing the violent video game on aggressive affect. Additionally, there was no significant effect of aggressive affect when playing violent video games, meaning that in weeks when gamers felt more angry about other factors, they did not turn to video games significantly more.
This study found that to see a half-point increase on the aggressive affect scale, each player would need to play between 25 and 50 more hours per day, which is not possible. These results are consistent with meta-analyses and more recent studies that show no significant link between violent video games and aggression.
This study took steps to better address the much-debated question of whether video games cause aggression and violence. Despite this, it has some limitations. One of those limitations is that players choose themselves to participate, which makes it possible for people who choose to participate to find the game more relaxing than other players. Also, only two video games were used, and both are shooting games; future research could test video games that show other types of violence.
“Research on games featuring violence has long been a low-credibility field that suffered from poor research practices as well as poor data quality,” the researchers concluded. “Like few other fields, it can benefit from open collaborations with industry partners within an open data framework. We demonstrate how this open data enables the field to test research questions cumulatively. Playing two online shooters did not cause significant changes in aggression; We are confident that future work can use the same data to answer more questions about the psychology of play.”
The study, “Time Spent Playing Two Shooters Online Has No Measurable Effect on Aggressive Affect,” was authored by Niklas Johannes, Matti Vuorre, Kristoffer Magnusson, and Andrew K. Przybylski.
