thesis statement for violent video games essay

Essay on Banning Violent Video Games

Students are often asked to write an essay on Banning Violent Video Games in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Banning Violent Video Games

Introduction.

Violent video games have been a topic of concern for many. Some believe they can lead to aggressive behavior in children.

Reasons for Banning

Critics argue that violent games can desensitize players to real-world violence, making them more likely to behave aggressively.

Counter-Arguments

However, others argue that such games can provide a safe outlet for natural aggression and have no proven link to real-world violence.

The debate on banning violent video games is complex. It is essential to consider both the potential risks and benefits before making decisions.

250 Words Essay on Banning Violent Video Games

The argument for banning.

Those in favor of banning violent video games posit that they contribute to increased aggression and desensitization to violence. They believe that the interactive nature of video games, where players actively participate in violence, can lead to real-world aggression. This is particularly concerning for young players who may not yet fully differentiate between virtual and real-world consequences.

The Counter-Argument

However, opponents of the ban argue that there is no definitive proof linking video game violence to real-world violence. They contend that millions of people play violent video games without exhibiting aggressive behavior. They further argue that video games, like any form of media, are a form of expression protected by the right to free speech.

While the debate continues, it’s crucial to consider the potential effects of violent video games on individuals and society. A middle-ground approach might be more effective, such as implementing stricter age restrictions and parental controls. This way, the rights of gamers are preserved, while potentially harmful effects on impressionable minds are minimized.

500 Words Essay on Banning Violent Video Games

The debate on whether violent video games should be banned has been a topic of intense discussion among policymakers, psychologists, and the general public. The critical concern is the potential influence these games could have on the behavior of players, especially young people.

The Impact of Violent Video Games

Research has shown that violent video games can have both positive and negative effects on players. On the one hand, they can enhance cognitive skills, decision-making abilities, and hand-eye coordination. Conversely, they are also associated with increased aggression, desensitization to violence, and decreased empathy.

Arguments for Banning Violent Video Games

Counter arguments.

Opponents of the ban, however, argue that it infringes upon freedom of expression and the right to access information. They posit that there is not enough empirical evidence linking violent video games directly to criminal violence. They also argue that parental control, rather than a blanket ban, should be the solution.

The Role of Parental Control

Parental control plays a pivotal role in mitigating the potential negative effects of violent video games. Parents can limit the time their children spend playing these games, monitor the content of the games, and explain the difference between video game violence and real-world consequences. This approach may be more effective than a ban, as it encourages responsible consumption of media.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Do Video Games Cause Violence: Essay Sample

Do video games cause violence: essay introduction, violence in video games essay: problem analysis, positive effect of violent video games: essay body paragraph, effects of violent video games: essay conclusion, works cited.

Video games are electronic devices that require the interaction of a user. This enables the generation of visual feedback. Video games vary from handheld devices to mainframe computers.

Video games started as early as the mid-20th century, and today their popularity has grown tremendously. The entertainment industry that produces them has grown in leaps and bounds.

Video games have both positive and negative effects on the consumers. This paper will focus on how exposure to violent video games can have major negative effects on children’s behavior in terms of education, aggressiveness, and creativity.

In recent times, the debates about aggressiveness in children due to exposure to video games have been on the rise. There is much violence in video games, and it is estimated that “over 85% of the games contain some violence and approximately half of the video games include serious violent actions” (Carnagey, Anderson and Bushman 489).

Most video games are rated E, meaning they can be sold to children of all ages starting from six years old. However, a close examination of these games shows that the parents consider them violent. This is detrimental to the youths because exposure to violence in video games has worse effects than those caused by abusive parents, coming from a broken home, or associating with antisocial peers.

Children who play violent video games have increased aggressive cognitions, aggressive behavior, psychological arousal as well as antisocial behavior. Furthermore, exposure to violence in the games leads to desensitization- “a reduction in emotion-related physiological reactivity to real violence” (Carnagey et al 490).

This means that when children are exposed to violence, they become used to it and may grow up thinking violence is the norm. For example, when children are shown a violent clip for the first time, they react with a lot of anxiety, but a second clip with similar content does not have the same effect because they have become immune to violence. This is dangerous because it lowers the children’s responsiveness to real violence.

In video games, children are exposed to violence in a positive manner, with exciting music and sounds and beautiful visual effects, which are used as rewards for violent actions in the game. This leads to reduced physiological arousal, for example, the heart rate. Eventually, desensitization occurs, and such children are less likely to notice violent acts or events or sympathize with victims of violence.

They also have a less negative attitude towards violence and generally believe the world is unsafe, which leads to the need for violence to protect oneself. Such children are less likely to seek for help in cases of violence because they have a decreased perception of injury. In addition, such children have increased aggression and are more likely to unleash violence toward other children at school.

Some children spend a considerable amount of time playing video games which impacts their school performance negatively. This is because they devote a lot of time to playing video games at the expense of schoolwork. This is especially true for children who have already had a problem with schoolwork

. They prefer to play video games instead of doing homework, especially if they keep failing. To enjoy a bit of success, they turn to video games where they can achieve victory. For example, for killing the villain in the game, they get rewarded with points, music, or sounds.

The negative effect on education is more evident among children who begin playing video games at a very young age.

These children become addicted to video games and thus ignore schoolwork. Video games also impact children’s education. Most of the time, they will be talking about their video game heroes instead of discussing useful things that might help them to improve their academics.

Some children can remember all the aspects of video games but can find it difficult to remember simple mathematical or science concepts taught in class. Some children will play video games for long periods and may fail to get enough sleep. This may lead to a lack of concentration in class the following day. Thus, they fail to grasp the content taught by teachers and jeopardize their educational growth.

The evidence is in lower grades in school exams and tests.

Still, some scholars argue that video games are good for children as they help to improve their cognitive and motor skills. This is because the “skills learned during game playing may be applied in instructional setting” (Vorderer and Bryant 336).

Video games have killed creativity in children. This is because children spend most of their time sitting in front of computers playing games. They engage in shooting, killing, and kidnapping instead of doing creative things that might help improve their cognitive skills.

They do not have an opportunity to engage with the environment or even play with their peers (Lakhanpal 1). This kind of environment allows the children to develop social skills, become inquisitive by asking questions regarding their surroundings, and learn about daily activities. On the contrary, “being glued to the video games all the time hinders this”(Lankhanpal 1).

At the same time, video games provide children with virtual worlds where they can practice skills such as leadership. These are the same skills necessary in real life. The children get a chance to learn the skills through taking roles. For instance, a child may take the part of a police officer in the game and learn a thing or two about being a police officer. This is because the games “mimic social structure” (Kiefabar 1).

Finally, it is the responsibility of parents to control how their children play video games. Too much exposure to the games has more negative effects than positive ones. Parents should therefore protect their children from the adverse effects of the games. Just as they would not allow their children to watch X-rated movies, they should also stop them from playing violent video games.

Carnage, Nicholas, Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman. “The effect of video game violence on physiological desensitization to real-life violence.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43 (2007): 489-496.

Kiefabar, Matt. Video Games. 2009. Web.

Lakhanpal, Bhardwaj Priyanka. Is addiction to video games killing creativity . 2010.

Vorderer, Peter and Bryant Jennings. Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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WHY questions ask for an explanation of something--why something happened, why it did not happen, or why one thing is better than another. For instance, why are video games so popular among young teenage boys?

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Violent video games: content, attitudes, and norms

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Published: 16 October 2023
Volume 25 , article number 52 , ( 2023 )

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Alexander Andersson ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4911-3853 1 &
Per-Erik Milam 1

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Violent video games (VVGs) are a source of serious and continuing controversy. They are not unique in this respect, though. Other entertainment products have been criticized on moral grounds, from pornography to heavy metal, horror films, and Harry Potter books. Some of these controversies have fizzled out over time and have come to be viewed as cases of moral panic. Others, including moral objections to VVGs, have persisted. The aim of this paper is to determine which, if any, of the concerns raised about VVGs are legitimate. We argue that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. Our view suggests that the moral badness of a game depends on how well its internal logic expresses or encourages the players’ objectionable attitudes. This allows us to recognize that some games are morally worse than others—and that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs—but that the moral badness of these games is not necessarily dependent on how violent they are.

Value, violence, and the ethics of gaming

Integrating poor taste into the ongoing debate on the morality of violent video games, violent video games and morality: a meta-ethical approach, explore related subjects.

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Introduction

Moral objections to VVGs have three main components, which can be understood as answers to the following three questions:

Moral Question: Why are VVGs morally bad or wrong?

Comparison Question: Why are they worse than other forms of violent entertainment?

Regulation Question: What should be done about them?

For example, one might argue that VVGs desensitize players to violence thereby making them more likely to act violently themselves, that VVGs do this more effectively than violent films or books, and that VVGs should therefore be prohibited or strongly regulated.

In this paper, we evaluate the most common answers to the moral and comparison questions, but set aside the regulation question. Not only does regulation raise a number of other ethical considerations—including free speech, paternalism, and policy design and enforcement—it also requires that we first understand the comparative badness of VVGs.

The paper is structured as follows. Section “ Background and preliminaries ” gives a brief overview of the controversies surrounding VVGs and explains how we will structure and focus our evaluation. Section “ The causation argument ” considers the claim that it is wrong to design and play VVGs in virtue of their bad consequences and concludes that the empirical evidence that playing VVGs causes bad outcomes is inconclusive, and that even if we grant that they have bad effects, VVGs are not distinctively bad in this respect. Section “ The violence argument ” considers the claim that VVGs are bad in virtue of features like realism that are independent of their consequences, but we conclude that existing accounts of these features fail to adequately explain why some VVGs should be considered morally objectionable. Having rejected these accounts of the comparative badness of VVGs, Sect. “ The internal logic of violent video games ” offers an alternative explanation.

Background and preliminaries

There is a history of blaming VVGs for violent acts such as school shootings, mass shootings, and murder in the United States. Footnote 2 Games such as Mortal Kombat, Doom , and Manhunt have all caused controversy in the past. They depict gory, brutal, and gratuitous violence as entertainment. For the uninitiated it may be inexplicable why anyone would enjoy what is happening on screen. Hence, the popular sentiment seems to be that there must be something morally bad about these games.

Since VVGs have been picked out as especially bad, we want to investigate whether it is justified to single them out for criticism. We will argue that most, but not all, common criticisms of VVGs are unjustified. Moreover, any justified criticism will also apply to other forms of entertainment. Thus, for any particular VVG, we must conclude either that it is morally permissible to design and play it or that it is morally wrong to create and consume other relevantly similar entertainment products. Which conclusion is warranted will depend on the details of the case.

However, there are multiple ongoing debates about the comparative badness of VVGs, so, before making any substantive claims, let us first explain how we will structure and focus our investigation.

Targets . While concerns about VVGs appear to be about the video games themselves, games are not natural evils like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. They are designed and played—not to mentioned commissioned and distributed—by moral agents. We therefore focus on the two most plausible targets of these criticisms: players and developers. Insofar as a game is criticized on moral grounds, we take this to be a criticism either of those who created its content or those who created the particular instances of violence by playing the game. Some may object that critics should direct their objections and blame at the companies that commission the games and the governments that fail to regulate them properly. Maybe so. But such criticisms presuppose that there is something objectionable about the games themselves or about playing them.

Topics . Even limiting our attention to developers and players leaves many issues to consider. Multiplayer online gaming has given rise to concerns about toxic environments and interactions, which may be influenced by the violent content of many of these games. This is a serious problem and one where reforms are possible and can make a real difference to the well-being and experience of gamers, but we will not address it here. Nor will we consider the moral status of violent assault on another player’s avatar—e.g. robbing them for items, killing them out of spite, or ‘griefing’ them. These kinds of behaviors also deserve attention, but they introduce potentially confounding variables into an analysis because they involve moral agents who can be harmed through the treatment of their avatars. We therefore limit our focus to single-player VVGs Footnote 3 —i.e., video games that include violence or violent themes—including those singled out in debates about the ethics of VVGs, like Doom, Grand Theft Auto V, Last of Us II.

It should also be noted that while we use the term “VVG” to denote a specific category of games, what we are essentially interested in is moral agency in games in general. However, since most discussions relating to this topic focuses on violence and VVGs, that is where our main focus will be as well. Having restricted our task in these ways, let us now consider why it might be morally wrong to develop or play VVGs.

The causation argument

Probably the most common objection to VVGs is that they have (or risk) bad effects. According to the Causation Argument, video game violence is morally bad because it causes players to be more aggressive and violent, which is bad both for the players themselves and for those who are therefore more likely to be victims of their aggression and violence (e.g. classmates, family members, coworkers). This claim—that VVGs influence players’ behavior outside of the game—is sometimes called the ‘contamination thesis’ (Goerger, 2017 : p. 97). Peter Singer puts the point succinctly: “The risks are great and outweigh whatever benefits violent video games may have. The evidence may not be conclusive, but it is too strong to be ignored any longer” (Singer, 2007 ).

Because this moral argument relies on empirical premises, it is important to spell out what would constitute a strong empirical case against VVGs. We identify four criteria:

The violent content of VVGs must cause the bad effects.

The bad effects must be worse than other tolerable forms of violent entertainment.

The bad effects must counterbalance whatever good effects these games have.

There must be sufficient consensus among researchers about (i), (ii), and (iii). Footnote 4

Let us be clear about these requirements. One need not show that VVGs are entirely, or even overall, bad in order to condemn them on moral grounds. Societies rightly criticize and regulate many products that are overall bad even while acknowledging that they are good in some respects (e.g. cigarettes). Societies sometimes even criticize products that are good overall on the grounds that they should be better (e.g. unsafe cars or energy inefficient appliances). Insofar as the Causation Argument is concerned with the effects of VVGs, our suggestion is simply that we think like consequentialists when assessing them. We should be concerned with all the effects and with everyone who is affected; we should be concerned with the magnitudes of the effects, their likelihood , and our confidence in the empirical evidence of their risks and consequences; and we should assess these effects relative to all available alternatives .

We can start with the empirical case against VVGs. The large empirical literature suggests four ways that players might be affected. First, players may become more aggressive after playing VVGs (Anderson et al., 2010 ; Lin, 2013 ; Kepes et al., 2017 ; Farrar et al., 2017 ; Shao & Wang, 2019 ). Measures of aggression range from self-reports of engaging in aggressive behavior to indictors like “how long a participant blows an air horn at an opponent after playing a violent game” (Goerger, 2017 : p. 98). Second, VVGs may desensitize players to violence (Deselms & Altman, 2003 ; Funk et al., 2004 ; Carnagey et al., 2007 ; Bushman & Anderson, 2009 ; Engelhardt et al., 2011 ). Desensitization is also measured in different ways, including how long it takes for participants to help others in (simulated) need or how lenient a sentence they give an imagined criminal. Third, it has been suggested that VVGs train players how to kill (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999 ; Leonard, 2007 ; Bushman, 2018 ). For instance, Bushman showed that players firing a real gun at a human-shaped mannequin were more likely to aim at the mannequin’s head after having played a violent first-person shooter (FPS) game. Footnote 5 Fourth, Wonderly and others suggest that playing VVGs, especially given their increasingly realistic depictions of violence, may diminish one’s capacity for empathy (Wonderly, 2008 ; Funk et al., 2004 ; Bartholow et al., 2005 ). If any of these four causal hypotheses is correct, then condition (i) would seem to be satisfied.

However, there is significant disagreement about these findings and their significance. First, none of the existing research claims that playing VVGs has directly caused anyone to commit actual acts of violence in the real world. This is not surprising, but it is a notable point of contrast with other products and behaviors that we might wish to regulate or ban (e.g. dangerous toys or incitements to violence). Second, there is disagreement about how to interpret the results of the studies cited above. Some have questioned the practical significance of increased aggressive behavior measured in a lab environment (Ferguson and Kilburn 2010 ; Goerger, 2017 ; Hall et al., 2011 ). Others have argued that the field suffers from a publication bias that favors finding an effect of VVGs on aggression (Ferguson, 2007 ; Ferguson & Kilburn, 2009 ; Hilgard et al., 2017 ). Footnote 6 Third, and perhaps most interesting, some have argued that it is the form of a game, rather than its content, that causes aggression. One study suggests that playing games that thwart a player’s fundamental need for competence led to increased aggression (Przybylski et al., 2014 ). Another showed that competition rather than violence causes aggression (Dowsett & Jackson, 2019 ). These studies suggest that features other than violence are of equal or greater concern. Thus, while there is provocative evidence about the bad effects of playing VVGs, there is insufficient scientific consensus. Footnote 7

Suppose that empirical studies had decisively demonstrated that VVGs cause increased aggression and violence. Do we have reason to believe that the bad effects of VVGs are worse than the bad effects of other violent entertainment that we presently tolerate? Some research suggests that VVGs cause more aggressive behavior than watching violent movies or violent gameplay because they are interactive (Lin, 2013 ). However, Lin points out that, “very little prior research has directly addressed the issue of media interactivity with regard to violent effects” ( 2013 : p. 535). Thus, while there is some support for condition (ii), there is far too little evidence to reasonably conclude that VVGs have worse effects than other violent entertainment (e.g. movies, television, books, or board games).

Even if the evidence supporting the Causation Argument satisfied conditions (i) and (ii), we could not yet condemn VVGs. We must also consider the benefits of playing these games. Studies suggest that some non-violent games enhance prosocial behavior among gamers (Sestir & Bartholow, 2010 ), that cooperative games decrease aggression (Gentile et al., 2009 ; Schmierbach, 2010 ), and that video games strengthen our ability to engage in ethical decision making (Madigan, 2016 ). We should be as critical of these studies as we are of those that condemn VVGs, but our point is simply that potential harms should be weighed against potential benefits. One compelling point in favor of VVGs is their incredible popularity. While it is difficult to find concrete and specific information, the following data give a rough picture of gamers’ revealed preferences: as of 2019 more than 2.5 billion people play video games, the average gamer plays more than 6 h per week, roughly half of that play is on consoles and computers (the rest is on tablets or phones), 9% of games are rated M for Mature (the category that contains most controversial VVGs), but those games are among the most popular in terms of sales. For example, Grand Theft Auto V is the third highest selling video game, and the highest grossing entertainment product, of all time (Narula, 2019 ; Limelight, 2020 ). Another compelling point is the suggestion that VVGs, like all games, are experiments in agency. For designers they are an art form whose medium is the agency of the player. And for players they are an opportunity to experiment with the alternative forms of agency created by designers (Nguyen, 2019 : p. 423).

The strength of the Causation Argument depends on various empirical claims. We have shown that none of the relevant claims has been established to a sufficient level of confidence. Furthermore, even if they had been, an outcome-focused argument must assess VVGs in the same light as other risky phenomena and it is not obvious why we should view VVGs as overall worse than many products and activities we accept (or tolerate). Nonetheless, if VVGs are harmful to the players, even relatively weak empirical evidence might be sufficient to ground a moral imperative to develop and play non-violent games rather than VVGs.

The violence argument

Perhaps it is not the effects of VVGs that make them morally objectionable but rather some feature of the games themselves. A second kind of argument, call it the Violence Argument, pursues this line of thought, arguing that VVGs are bad because they represent violence for the purpose of entertainment and that it is therefore (at least pro tanto ) wrong to develop and play such games. Footnote 8

Of course, many types of media represent violence, whether for educational purposes (e.g. non-fiction and journalism) or for entertainment (e.g. poetry, novels, comics, film, and television). Thus, if we are justified in appreciating or tolerating violence in these genres, then the Violence Argument must show that the ways VVGs represent violence are distinctively bad. The most common suggestions are that they are distinctively bad because they are much more realistic, interactive, and immersive.

The depiction of violence in video games has become more realistic as technology has improved. While Mortal Kombat and Doom’s 16-bit violence provoked American parents in the 1990s, they could scarcely have imagined the high-fidelity violence of games such as The Last of Us II. Nothing is left to the imagination as headshots leave a spray of blood and brains, heads are smashed to pieces with baseball bats, all while the victims plead for mercy or shriek in agony. These kinds of advances led Waddington to worry that, as video game violence becomes more realistic, it will be increasingly difficult to differentiate real from simulated transgressions ( 2007 : p. 127).

However, in order to support the Violence Argument, it must be the case that VVGs represent violence in a way that is more realistic than other media and that more realistic representations of violence are morally worse than less realistic representations.

On the first point, video game violence does not seem more realistic than violence in other media. Consider two related forms of realism: content realism and context realism. Footnote 9 A representation is content realistic to the degree that it depicts what would happen in real life. For example, a game might accurately depict how bones break or what happens when a bullet strikes a torso. In this respect, VVGs can be surprisingly realistic, but less so than many films (e.g., Saving Private Ryan ) and much less so than many real videos that people watch for amusement (e.g., the watermelon catapult). Moreover, their content realism is mostly limited to the visual modality. A written representation of violence might have similar content realism, but no visual component (outside of imagination). A representation is context realistic to the degree that it represents a situation that could plausibly occur. This is somewhat relative. A war setting is surely more realistic than, say, battling demons on another planet, but is World War II a realistic context for a millennial gamer? Here too, most VVGs seem less realistic than other media, which often depict disturbing forms of violence for dramatic purposes (e.g., intimate partner violence or police brutality).

On the second point, representing violence may sometimes be worse if it is more realistic—even ignoring any harmful effects on the player like stress or nightmares. Some realistic contexts seem obviously morally worse than others. Public reactions to games seem to match this intuition, as when many objected to The Slaying of Sandy Hook , whose setting was the location of a tragic school shooting. However, this worry does not necessarily transfer to those VVGs that are common targets of criticism, like the Grand Theft Auto series.

The game (GTA) not only depicts drug and gang related violence, but it presents that violence in a largely consequence free environment. Further, this crime is ‘real’ in the sense that similar crimes and criminal enterprises currently control broad swaths of metropolitan areas like Los Angeles … Players are, essentially, being entertained by the misery of others and are thus disrespecting the object of value (Goerger, 2017 : p. 102).

While there is plenty to criticize about GTA , Georger’s comments are mistaken. First, he seriously misrepresents (or misunderstands) the degree to which GTA accurately depicts the level of crime in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles. There are no “broad swaths” of American cities that are controlled by criminal enterprises. Second, while such games do make light of real violence, these representations are neither more realistic nor more violent than many films and television series. Thus, even if we accept that representing violence can be morally bad, it is not the case that most VVGs, including common targets of criticism, are worse in this respect than other tolerated forms of media.

Interaction

Another salient feature of VVGs is that they are interactive in a way that some other media are not. While a movie audience may hope that Woody Harrelson decides to stop at a supermarket and kill some zombies in order to get a Twinkie, a player of Redneck Rampage can make that happen. The player’s experience is interactive insofar as their actions, “make a significant difference to what happens in the environment” (Chalmers, 2017 : p. 312). Some therefore press a version of the Violence Argument according to which being a passive consumer of violent films or books is less bad than “performing” violent acts in a video game (Tillson, 2018 ). Footnote 10

Our view is that violent interaction itself, ignoring the realism and immersive experience of the interaction, is not morally bad. Moreover, even if it were, it would not be worse than other forms of entertainment. A writer interacts with her fictional characters with a similar degree of agency as a gamer does with the non-playable characters (NPCs) she encounters. The writer’s interaction is unrealistically one-sided, but she can nonetheless choose to kill them off and to do so in a brutal fashion [e.g., (redacted to avoid spoilers)]. This does not seem bad at all. Or consider games of make-believe. Kids playing war with toy guns is just as interactive as video gaming. In order for there to be a war, the kids must perform some actions, just as a player must control her avatar in order for there to be in-game violence. Traditional roleplaying games and board games—whose content can be just as violent as VVGs—requires a similar degree of interaction. In order to claim that VVGs are worse than other violent entertainment, one would have to show that video game interactions are different in kind from the forms of make-believe involved in writing fiction, roleplaying, and other violent entertainment. If anything, the fact that enemies are programmed and that experience is mediated by controllers and other devices would seem to make video games less interactive than your average game of Cops and Robbers or Dungeons and Dragons. We therefore conclude that VVGs are not worse than other violent entertainment in virtue of being interactive.

Finally, VVGs might seem morally bad, and worse than other media, because players can more easily become immersed in the violence of the game. This is bad because, regardless of whether a game is visually realistic, it is bad to experience that violence as real. If part of the value of games is that they allow us to inhabit a ‘temporary practical agency’ (Nguyen, 2019 : p. 438) within which we can “occupy alter-ego points of view and practice new strategies by accessing possible spaces of action and affective responses” (Schellenberg, 2013 : p. 509), then the value of such experiments presumably depends on the design of those practical agencies and the contexts in which players inhabit them, including whether they are suffused with violence that is experienced by the player as real.

Immersion occurs when a player experiences the game as if it is real or as if she herself were experiencing the events of the game in the shoes of her character. One dimension of immersion is ‘presence,’ or “the sense of being present at that perspective” (Chalmers, 2017 : p. 312). The immersiveness of a game depends, in part, on its realism. Content and context realism can make immersion more likely, but perspectival fidelity is also important (Ramirez, 2019 ). A representation has perspectival fidelity to the degree that the structure of the experience is realistic. For example, a video game has lower perspectival fidelity if the player uses a controller rather than a VR set up, if the representation includes non-diegetic sound (e.g., music) or a heads-up display (e.g., location, health, remaining ammo), and if the point of view is third- rather than first-person. Importantly, VVGs are unlikely to have greater perspectival fidelity than other media, except insofar as they are more likely to have a first-person perspective. Footnote 11 However, even in this respect the experience they provide has lower fidelity than, say, children playing war, teens playing paintball, or adults performing historical recreations of famous battles.

A more general problem with the argument that VVGs are bad because players are more likely to have an immersive experience of violence is that it is simply not clear whether being immersed in a VVG is worse than being immersed in another violent or disturbing source of entertainment. For example, films and novels are generally praised when they effectively draw in a viewer. Such praise may reflect their aesthetic value, which is compatible with being morally bad, but the same could be said about VVGs. Footnote 12

An objection

At this point, defenders of the Violence Argument might object that, by addressing these factors in isolation, we have made a strawman of their position. Movies can be realistic but not interactive; novels can be immersive but not interactive; tabletop roleplaying games can be immersive but are not usually realistic; and kids playing war can be interactive but lacks a certain kind of realism. The problem with VVGs—and what makes them distinctive among violent forms of entertainment—is precisely that they are realistic, interactive, and immersive.

If the problem is the combination, then VVGs might be distinctively morally bad even if possessing just one of these features is tolerable. Just as a gun is composed of innocuous pieces which, once assembled, constitute a dangerous weapon, so the combination of realism, interactivity, and immersiveness may render video game violence morally objectionable.

However, the problem with this line of argument can be seen by reflecting further on the analogy. The problem with an assembled gun is not that all of its components are in one place. The problem is that a functioning handgun affords certain actions that its unassembled pieces do not. Footnote 13 This is not true of VVGs—or, at least, the evidence for this claim remains inconclusive. In order for the combination of realism, interactivity, and immersion to render video game violence distinctively bad, opponents of VVGs must show either that developing such games makes them dangerous (the Causation Argument) or that this combination is itself distinctively bad (the Violence Argument).

This latter point seems to be what Ali ( 2023 ) alludes to in relation to virtual reality experiences: “VR pushes the virtual closer to the nonvirtual, making, e.g., VR experiences as valuable (in reproductions), or closer in value (as simulations), to their nonvirtual counterparts” (Ali, 2023 : p. 241). It seems plausible that realism, interactivity, and immersion can enhance one’s experience of some piece of entertainment—as actors in films and plays can attest. However, Ali’s ( 2023 , 2015 ) account falls short when it comes to explaining what makes a VVG morally objectionable. According to his view, badness varies with realism. This may be true for reproductions and simulations, which, by definition, vary with realism. Yet, it is not obviously true for video games, where the badness appears to be dependent on other factors. Ali ( 2015 ) highlights one aspect that appears to be the decisive factor for why this is the case. VR simulations, unlike VVGs, lack context and story. Footnote 14 Thus, in order to make the case that virtual violence can be morally bad even in games where the violence is situated within a narrative and performed in pursuit of a goal (i.e., VVGs), we must look for explanations elsewhere. In the next section, we consider alternative critiques of video games and offer an account of our own.

The internal logic of violent video games

We have argued that the level of concern about the outcomes of developing and playing VVGs and about the fact that VVGs are realistic, interactive, and immersive is unjustified. However, there may nonetheless be something morally objectionable about developing or playing VVGs. In this final section, we try to capture the kernel of truth at the heart of the widespread and persistent objections to video game violence by identifying what we take to be a reasonable concern. Our account steers a middle course between moral panic and facile defenses of VVGs by embracing the similarities and continuities between violent and non-violent video games, as well as between video games and other forms of entertainment. In doing so, we build on other recent arguments that have illuminated legitimate ethical concerns about video games, while suggesting that these arguments indict video game violence in ways that they fail to recognize.

We suggest that the most plausible moral objection to VVGs is that some of them generate or perpetuate morally objectionable norms of appropriate violence—i.e., norms of when violence is an appropriate response to a situation. This objection suggests that violence is indeed problematic, but also that it is one dimension of a more general moral concern.

One way to assess VVGs is to imagine uncontroversially immoral games and isolate their objectionable features. It would be reasonable to condemn both the developers and the players of racist or misogynistic games in which the aim is to, say, exterminate Jews or sexually assault women. For many, such concerns depend neither on the kind of effects identified by the Causation Argument nor on their realism, interactivity, or immersion (Patridge, 2011 ). A natural explanation of what precisely makes such games objectionable is that it is wrong to be or act in racist or misogynistic ways and the developers and players of such games are (usually) acting in these ways simply by developing or playing the game. For example, we might say that a misogynistic game either subordinates women or depicts their subordination, and that players participate in that subordination—or at least demonstrates a failure of sensitivity to and sympathy for women (Patridge, 2011 : p. 310)—by playing the games, even if the women depicted are not real.

If one accepts this kind of explanation, one might further argue that non-racist and non-misogynistic VVGs could have content that is similar in morally relevant ways. Footnote 15 If a misogynistic game can subordinate women, then a game where the player aims to kill enemies can subordinate whichever group is depicted as the enemy. Just as misogynistic games depict female characters as fitting targets of assault or abuse, violent games depict certain characters as fitting targets of physical violence. And if sexual violence is bad, in part, because it is violence, then removing the sexual dimension cannot render the game morally innocuous—though it would certainly make it less bad. Call this the Analogy Argument .

This argument has a certain plausibility, but does not succeed as stated. To see why, consider two ways in which the defender of VVGs might reply. First, they could reply that what is morally objectionable is not the content of a game, but how one plays it. One who revels in killing innocent bystanders is acting wrongly in a way that a person who plays the same game in order to complete it as quickly and bloodlessly as possible is not. Call this the Sadism Reply . On this way of thinking, it is the mental state of the player, not the content of the game that explains its badness.

The inadequacy of the Sadism Reply is fairly obvious. Sadism—understood as taking pleasure in the wrongful treatment of others (i.e., in moral evil)—is not the only attitude we find morally objectionable. Schadenfreude—understood as taking pleasure in the non-moral suffering of others (i.e., natural evil)—is another, and there are more, from racism and sexism to simple indifference to others’ well-being. If sadism in VVGs is problematic, then so are these others attitudes. Moreover, non-violent games can be played in sadistic ways—e.g., choosing, in The Sims , to drown your neighbors in your swimming pool—and are therefore open to the same critiques, which seems implausible. Finally, it is unclear how we can condemn a player’s sadistic pleasure in doing virtual violence when we cannot condemn virtual violence itself. The wrongness of taking sadistic pleasure in another’s suffering arguably presumes the wrongness of causing that suffering, but the Sadism Reply attempts to deny the latter while shifting criticism to the former.

Second, the defender of VVGs could point out that misogyny is morally objectionable because its targets—women—are an oppressed group in society. Call this the Power Reply . On this way of thinking, an otherwise identical gender-reversed game, where women victimize men, would not be objectionable in the same way. And, they might say, what we find in most VVGs is precisely that, violence that is admittedly gratuitous but nonetheless morally acceptable—or at least tolerable—because it is not gendered. (Similar points could be made about other dimensions of oppression.) Patridge argues that the content of some video games has “incorrigible social meaning” that targets women and marginalized groups ( 2011 : p. 308). For example, the meaning of a black character eating watermelon is explained by particular social realities (e.g., the persistence of demeaning racial stereotypes) and is incorrigible in the sense that it is difficult to interpret in any other way because of those realities (i.e., there is no plausible interpretation of that image that does not reference those stereotypes). However, Patridge suggests that violent content often either lacks social meaning or has social meaning that is reasonably interpretable in a way that does not implicate some reprehensible feature of our shared moral reality, like racism, misogyny, or homophobia ( 2011 : p. 310).

Even if Patridge is right that most video game violence itself is unlikely to have the incorrigible social meaning of games like Custer’s Revenge , it does not follow that it does not implicate reprehensible features of our shared moral reality. Whether it does is an open question. Content with incorrigible social meaning implicates our shared moral reality by forcing us to recognize that some words, images, or ideas are inextricably linked to hateful and prejudicial ideologies. If video game violence can itself implicate other reprehensible features, what might those features be and how would they be implicated? Our answer is that power norms—i.e. norms of domination and subordination—are just one type of objectionable norm that can be built into the ‘logic’ of a game. Footnote 16 Another type is norms of appropriate violence, which, while often bound up with power norms, are separable. We would rightly criticize a society whose logic of appropriate physical violence included, say, occasions when one is frustrated with a coworker—and this is true independently of the coworkers’ respective social status. But if this is right, then why is a game whose logic of appropriate violence includes anyone who gets in the way of your mission not objectionable on similar grounds? Thus, while both replies warrant revisions and qualifications of the Analogy Argument, we can begin to see how a revised version of the argument might be successful.

Call this revision of the Analogy Argument the Internal Logic Argument (ILA). The ‘logic’ of a video game is the structure, incentives, and constraints that guide player behavior. It is a matter of what the player can do and what they are encouraged to do in the game. In other words, it is the set of ideas (mission/quest, combat, survival) and practices (enacting those ideas via the means provided and avoiding obstacles to doing so) that allow the player to have a successful playthrough—e.g., to progress in the game, to be enjoyable, and be an opportunity to engage in the ‘art of agency’ (Nguyen, 2019 ). Footnote 17 Understood in this way, the logic of a game includes what Nguyen calls its “value clarity,” in that it stipulates a clear structure and conditions for success ( 2020 : 20). However, whereas Nguyen is most concerned about players applying the simplified logic of a video game to contexts where values are more opaque and complex, we are concerned with the content of a game’s internal logic. Our suggestion is that the logic of a game can express, encourage, and legitimate objectionable attitudes and norms of appropriate violence.

As noted above, games such as Custer’s Revenge can express attitudes of hatred and prejudice by targeting specific groups in its gameplay. When it comes to VVGs, Postal 2 , whose tongue-in-cheek comments are prompted when excessive and degrading violence is exerted on innocent bystanders, expresses a lax attitude towards violent behavior. The logic of the game, manifested in minor rewards, treats civilians as fair game when the player’s character is on his way to pick up milk from the store.

A game’s logic and gameplay mechanics can also encourage problematic player behavior. The internal logic of some games is straightforward and explicit. A game may have an obvious theme that directly guides gameplay (e.g., Duck Hunt or Super Columbine Massacre ), or it may incentivize particular ways of playing by awarding points, experience, and trophies for particular results. But a game’s explicit themes, rewards, and punishments do not exhaust its logic. Just like real life, games are full of subtle incentives and nudges that shape how one behaves. Examples include whether a particular NPC can be killed, how players’ treatment of NPCs affects their success, and how the design of a level or quest privileges particular strategies for completing it. Footnote 18 A game embodies norms of appropriate violence based on how violence is afforded by the structure of the game (whether enemies can be avoided, how they can be dealt with, what kinds of items one can acquire and how frequently, etc.). Christopher Bartel gives a relevant example from Grand Theft Auto IV , in which the player is forced to shoot their way out of a bank robbery scenario by attacking the police ( 2015 : p. 290). It is not possible to try to evade the police or succeed in the scenario in any other way.

Miguel Sicart has argued that developers set the ethical boundaries of a game through the formal structure of the game (e.g., game rules) and the actions afforded to the player (e.g., game mechanics). As a result, games are “always ethically relevant systems, since they constrain the agency of an ethical being” (Sicart, 2009 : p. 6). We extend this idea, holding that if a game can constrain players’ behavior, then it can also funnel their behavior in particular directions—though the influence the game exerts may not reflect any intention on the part of the designer. For example, in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City the player can have sex with a prostitute in order to temporarily increase their maximum health. This is not a necessary feature, since the success of a playthrough in Vice City is not dependent on the player’s ability to buy sex. However, it represents a decision by the game designers which codes this act as ‘good’ by increasing the player’s max health.

If a game can express and encourage certain morally problematic attitudes and behaviors, it can also legitimate those attitudes and behaviors. Just as “games threaten us with a fantasy of moral clarity” (Nguyen, 2020 : p. 21), some ways of playing VVGs and the attitudes expressed by doing so may extend beyond the game. In one of the main missions of GTA V , titled “By the book”, the player is forced to torture an NPC in order to progress in the main story. The player can only achieve a “gold rank” on the mission if they waterboard, electrocute, and pull out the teeth of the NPC without killing him. Not only does the logic of this specific mission express and encourage certain attitudes towards torture. It may also legitimate the practice by presenting it as a viable means to an end or a “necessary evil”.

One might share our concern about how the internal logic of video games may legitimate certain attitudes and norms, but deny that violent content is a serious problem. Nguyen agrees that games can exert a subtle and malign influence on our values, but claims to be “more worried about games breeding Wall Street profiteers than…about their breeding serial killers” ( 2020 : p. 190). Footnote 19 He gives two reasons for this. First, he finds plausible Young’s suggestion that fictional game events tend not to be exported to players’ real lives. This would presumably include a game’s norms of appropriate violence. Second, he is more concerned that some games—especially those that result from gamifying activities like exercise, academic performance, etc.—will seduce players with a misleading but attractive “value clarity” ( 2020 : Chap. 9). In brief, Nguyen argues that part of the attraction of games is their clear and simple values—complete the quest, get the high score, kill your enemies—but that, unlike fictional game events, this simplicity can infiltrate players’ real world thinking in a problematic way. In particular, it can cause them (a) to view the real world through the lens of simplified values, (b) to be drawn to simplified values over the more complex values that are needed to navigate our messy moral lives, and (c) to “lose facility and readiness with … subtler value concepts” ( 2020 : p. 214). On this view, it’s unlikely that we’ll come to value violence of the sort we experience in games, and more likely that we’ll embrace simplified and gamified versions of our ordinary values, whether moral or non-moral.

However, we think Nguyen, like Patridge, fails to recognize how his reasoning might ground a legitimate worry about video game violence. The ILA suggests that violent content might be problematic precisely in the ways he thinks values might be undermined. Admittedly, lots of video game violence is unlikely to influence our values or norms simply because it is easily set aside when one stops playing. There is little chance that my in-game goal of winning a martial arts tournament while brutalizing and humiliating my opponents will influence my actual behavior or even instrumentalize my attitudes toward martial arts competition. However, the ILA is concerned precisely about in-game norms that appear innocuous and are accepted without reflection. There is no reason to think that violence norms are not subject to the same seductions of clarity as other values. Moreover, even if some violence norms are unlikely to be applied in the real world, an internal logic that expresses or legitimates those norms is still morally objectionable (e.g., Postal 2 or “By the Book” in GTA V ).

Let us address some potential worries about the ILA. First, one might reply that the logic of a VVG need only fit its content. If one is playing a war game and one’s avatar is a soldier, it makes sense that most of the NPCs one encounters are fitting targets of violence. This would undermine the criticisms of games such as Sniper Elite or Wolfenstein . Moreover, protecting oneself from enemy combatants is plausibly a matter of self-defense, which can permit lethal violence. This would render games like Doom or Fallout 4 unobjectionable. Similar points could be made about other genres of VVGs. Thus, it may be that the violence norms of many VVGs are roughly consistent with common sense morality. The ILA can accommodate this intuition, while still allowing that some VVGs are morally objectionable and, in those cases, explaining why.

Second, one might think that, while developers ought to design games whose logics meet some moral criteria, those criteria do not include eliminating or even minimizing violence. Some would claim, for example, that developers aren’t required to create a morally optimific logic that encourages players to, say, maximize the total well-being of other characters. Indeed, many would insist that the logic of a VVG can permissibly be much worse than the actual logic of our society, just as action films implicitly permit much more destruction of public and private property for the sake of catching criminals than is permitted by actual societies (see, e.g., Bad Boys or any movie in the Marvel Comics Universe). Footnote 20 This isn’t obviously right, though, and we would suggest that a game’s logic of appropriate violence should not be excessively cruel or indifferent to human suffering and that, sometimes, it should even improve on the logic of appropriate violence prevalent in our actual society. Footnote 21

One might object that the ILA does not pick out VVGs as distinctively bad or worse than other innocuous or tolerable video games or other media. This, however, is only partially true. It’s true that the ILA does not distinguish between games that have similar logics. As such, it would not necessarily be better to play Chex Quest than Doom , since zorching flemoids and shooting demons is motivated by a concern for one’s own survival in both cases. This also helps explain why games like Postal 2 and GTA are more appropriate targets of criticism than, say, Last of Us II (Goerger, 2017 : p. 101). While Last of Us II is much more graphic and gorier in its violent depictions, that violence is fitting in a way that the violence of Postal 2 is not. Footnote 22 Nor would it be worse to play violent video games than to watch action movies in which innocent bystanders are viewed as acceptable collateral damage. The ILA identifies a property found in some VVGs (and some movies, board games, etc.) and explains why it is inappropriate.

For all of these reasons, we think the ILA provides a plausible framework for critiquing VVGs. What emerges from the above discussion is a substantive and unified account of video game ethics. It explains how violent games can be open to similar criticisms as racist and misogynistic games. At the same time, it acknowledges that one might worry, not just about the violent content of such games, but about how gamers play them—i.e., the attitudes they manifest in doing so. The ILA unifies these concerns into a single critique that captures the kernel of truth running through traditional objections to VVGs, avoids the problems we raised for the Violence Argument, and extends the insights of two other illuminating critiques of video games, namely, those developed by Patridge ( 2011 ) and Nguyen ( 2020 ).

The core of our critique consists of four claims. First, a game’s content can be morally objectionable and violence is one, but not the only, kind of objectionable content. This is the lesson we learned from assessing real and imagined games with racist or misogynistic content and extending the reasoning underlying critiques of such games to a critique of violence. Second, the attitudes that a gamer expresses or enacts in playing a game can be morally objectionable. Sadism is one, but not the only, such attitude. Just as misogyny is not limited to the explicit, endorsed hatred of women as a group (Manne, 2017 ), sadism does not exhaust the objectionable attitudes one can have toward violence and the suffering of others. However, condemning such attitudes toward violence presupposes an objection to the violence itself. Third, while objectionable attitudes can arise on their own, games can express or encourage morally objectionable attitudes and gameplay in the same way that they shape other aspects of play. This does not mean that all players of VVGs will manifest the attitudes and behaviors encouraged by a game’s norms of appropriate violence, but it is a reasonable worry in light of the influence that the logic of a game exerts. Footnote 23 This is the lesson of the ILA. The most obvious examples of this are games in which the plot of the game requires actions that express or encourage objectionable attitudes (e.g. Custer’s Revenge or Battle Raper ). However, other games may encourage or shape players’ attitudes in more subtle ways—e.g. by normalizing violence, exploitation, and racism. Fourth, if these three points are correct, then our critique is not limited to VVGs, or even to video games. Gamers can manifest their sadistic, misogynistic, racist, and other attitudes in non-violent video games (e.g., The Sims or Civilization ), board games (e.g., Puerto Rico or Andean Abyss ) and tabletop RPGs (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons ), or any other kind of game. Moreover, any entertainment medium can, through its internal logic, express or encourage such attitudes. This means that our critique can embrace its generalizability in a way that was unavailable to the Violence Argument. On our account, the source of concern is neither violence per se nor its potential realism, interactivity, or immersiveness, but rather the logic of the game. Non-violent games and games that are minimally realistic, interactive, and immersive can have objectionable internal logics—e.g., by legitimating or glorifying imperialism, exploitation, or indifference toward the suffering of others. Moreover, the ILA explains why a game might warrant moral praise. For example, we might praise a game which logic expresses acceptance of a wrongly vilified group, encourages reflection on the complexity of a moral dilemma, or simply requires that one work through a problem real people might face. Footnote 24

Together these claims constitute a unified but limited critique of VVGs that avoids the implausible implications of some existing objections (e.g., that VVGs are distinctively bad) while explaining, substantiating, and extending the plausible claims of other critics. Our view suggests that how bad a game is depends on the attitudes, behaviors, and norms that its internal logic expresses, encourages, and legitimates. A game developer can be criticized for the internal logic of their game and a gamer can be criticized both for the attitude they bring to a game and for their acceptance, whether implicit or explicit, of a game’s internal logic. This account also plausibly implies that some games are morally worse than others and that their badness does not necessarily correlate with how violent they are or how realistic that violence is.

Before concluding, let us emphasize that its internal logic is one, but not the only, aspect of a game open to evaluation and criticism. Games are also, and perhaps foremost, aesthetic objects that can be beautiful, compelling, funny, disgusting, overwhelming, or just boring. The internal logic is that part of a game that tells the player how to progress and succeed within the game world. Indeed, this is what makes this kind of art object a game rather than a passive aesthetic experience (perhaps the “walking simulator” genre falls somewhere in between these categories). But it does not determine, by itself, a game’s value.

We have argued that common moral objections to VVGs are unsuccessful, but that a plausible critique can be developed that captures the insights of these objections while avoiding their pitfalls. The upshot of our account is that it can be morally wrong to design and play some VVGs, but that violence per se—no matter how realistic or immersive—is less likely to be problematic than the internal logic of a game and the attitudes it expresses and encourages.

In making our argument, we have not said which are the worst offenders, how bad they are, or what kind of response to their moral failings is warranted. These are tasks for another paper, but also for gamers, activists, regulators, and policy makers who want to know which games to play, which to educate the public about, and which to restrict access to. Some philosophers have developed frameworks that may provide guidance in answering these questions (Liberman, 2019 ), but there is much more to be said.

The most zealous campaigns against VVGs have been in the United States. We will not try to explain why that is the case, but we note that the industry’s implementation of a rating system following US Congressional hearings about video game violence 1993 may have forestalled similar controversies elsewhere as similar ratings systems were applied outside the US.

For an overview of the history of VVGs and their alleged relation to acts of violence see Campbell ( 2018 ).

Our arguments also apply to multiplayer games that can be played in single player mode, such as Mortal Kombat or Unreal Tournament .

What level of consensus is sufficient will depend on the magnitude of the risk/harm.

None of the studies critical of VVGs claim that they directly cause real world violence, though commentators sometimes make or imply such claims. Young emphasizes that “any attempt to posit a direct causal link between video game content and violent (real-world) behaviour should be regarded as overly simplistic, largely uncorroborated, and ultimately contentious” ( 2015 : p. 315).

See Anderson et al. ( 2010 ) for a reply to this objection.

There is room for improving the experimental design of VVGs, including eliminating confounds by studying the same games and controlling for variables like difficulty, competitiveness, and level of violence. Moreover, studies that find evidence that VVGs cause increased aggression should measure and compare the magnitude of that effect to other phenomena known to increase aggression—e.g., being insulted.

While some argue that realistic, interactive, and immersive violence are bad in themselves, others claim that it is these features of contemporary VVGs that cause violence or aggression in players. However, the latter is just a version of the Causation Argument, so we focus on those who take violence to be significant independently of its consequences.

Some might consider ‘perspectival fidelity’ to be a form of realism, but we consider this variable more relevant to a game’s immersiveness than to its realism (Ramirez, 2019 ).

Notice that, if video game violence is bad because it is interactive, designers are, at worst, guilty of facilitating violent interactions. The player is the primary wrongdoer. This asymmetry is reversed for those who worry about realism. Designers create realistic violence (e.g. fatalities in Mortal Kombat ), while players simply activate it.

Even this claim ignores the actors who do actually simulate the violence that the audience sees. They have a first-person point of view on the violence in a play or film. Of course, they know that they are not actually hurting their costars, but VVG gamers know this, too.

It is also worth noting that for many, the concern about immersion is a concern about the player’s experience and the effects of having such an experience (Waddington, 2007 : p. 127). However, this is ultimately a causation question and one that can be answered either by asking gamers about their immersive experiences or by measuring the effects of those experiences.

This is why gun control advocates often emphasize that the presence of a gun allows an altercation that might have resulted in a painful fist fight to instead result in a fatal shooting.

As is evident from the following passage: “[S] imulation games do not provide their own narrative, they simply allow the gamer’s context to define the in-game context. So, when a gamer enacts murder or pedophilia in these games, the act is one of virtual murder or virtual pedophilia because the gamer defines it in this way.” (Ali, 2015 : p. 273).

Some criticisms of games like Super Columbine Massacre , The Slaying of Sandy Hook , or Active Shooter/Standoff seem to make precisely this point.

This is not at all to imply that the sets of norms that sustain hateful and prejudicial attitudes and behavior toward members of oppressed groups are not especially important or deserving of particular attention and opposition.

Hence, the logic is in most cases intentional, meaning that certain player behavior is incentivized and rewarded in the game. But it could also be unintentional, such as when players find and exploit bugs that incentivize them to play in a way the developer did not intend nor expect.

Game designers have long recognized this and some have chosen, seemingly for moral reasons as well as aesthetic ones, to make the logic of a game virtuous. Richard Garriott has said this about his design choices for Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar .

Nguyen’s topic is games in general, but his claims are meant to apply as much to video games as other types.

At the same time, some criticisms of the criminal justice ‘logic’ of action films seems both reasonable and overdue. Hollywood’s cavalier depiction of police brutality is receiving more scrutiny as protests against actual police violence received widespread attention and support. Depictions of rape in film have received similar critiques, with critics arguing that these scenes are often gratuitous or voyeuristic (Wilson, 2017 ).

Notice that the ILA does not merely imply that the most gratuitous violence is the most objectionable. The gratuitousness of a violent act may diverge from how strongly the act supports an objectionable norm. For example, a film in which casual physical violence is normalized can seem much more insidious than a gory slasher flick. A parallel point on objectionable comedy will help further elucidate this idea. Comedy should not indulge in facile jokes about sexual violence in prisons any more than it should indulge in facile jokes about rape generally. Many prison rape jokes legitimate the idea—seemingly widely held—that prisoners deserve whatever might happen to them in prison.

Last of Us II also depicts its violence in very ambiguous ways. It is not obviously portrayed as morally justified, just as humanly intelligible.

Jennifer Saul makes a similar point about the attitudes of those who watch pornography ( 2006 : p. 58).

A good example of this is This War of Mine where the player controls a group of civilians that are trapped in a war-torn country. The player is constantly prompted to make choices between the survival of the group and helping other civilians in need, forcing the player to reflect on the effects and ethics of war.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The relation of violent video games to adolescent aggression: an examination of moderated mediation effect.

1 Research Institute of Moral Education, College of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
2 The Lab of Mental Health and Social Adaptation, Faculty of Psychology, Research Center for Mental Health Education, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

To assess the moderated mediation effect of normative beliefs about aggression and family environment on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, the subjects self-reported their exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggressive behavior. The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression had a mediation effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while family environment moderated the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with a good family environment, exposure to violent video games had only a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, it had both direct and indirect effects mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. This moderated mediation model includes some notions of General Aggression Model (GAM) and Catalyst Model (CM), which helps shed light on the complex mechanism of violent video games influencing adolescent aggression.

Introduction

Violent video games and aggression.

The relationship between violent video games and adolescent aggression has become a hot issue in psychological research ( Wiegman and Schie, 1998 ; Anderson and Bushman, 2001 ; Anderson et al., 2010 ; Ferguson et al., 2012 ; Greitemeyer, 2014 ; Yang et al., 2014 ; Boxer et al., 2015 ). Based on the General Aggression Model (GAM), Anderson et al. suggested that violent video games constitute an antecedent variable of aggressive behavior, i.e., the degree of exposure to violent video games directly leads to an increase of aggression ( Anderson and Bushman, 2001 ; Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson, 2004 ; Anderson et al., 2004 ). Related longitudinal studies ( Anderson et al., 2008 ), meta-analyses ( Anderson et al., 2010 ; Greitemeyer and Mugge, 2014 ), event-related potential studies ( Bailey et al., 2011 ; Liu et al., 2015 ), and trials about juvenile delinquents ( DeLisi et al., 2013 ) showed that exposure to violent video games significantly predicts adolescent aggression.

Although Anderson et al. insisted on using the GAM to explain the effect of violent video games on aggression, other researchers have proposed alternative points of view. For example, a meta-analysis by Sherry (2001) suggested that violent video games have minor influence on adolescent aggression. Meanwhile, Ferguson (2007) proposed that publication bias (or file drawer effect) may have implications in the effect of violent video games on adolescent aggression. Publication bias means that compared with articles with negative results, those presenting positive results (such as statistical significance) are more likely to be published ( Rosenthal and Rosnow, 1991 ). A meta-analysis by Ferguson (2007) found that after publication bias adjustment, the related studies cannot support the hypothesis that violent video games are highly correlated with aggression. Then, Ferguson et al. proposed a Catalyst Model (CM), which is opposite to the GAM. According to this model, genetic predisposition can lead to an aggressive child temperament and aggressive adult personality. Individuals who have an aggressive temperament or an aggressive personality are more likely to produce violent behavior during times of environmental strain. Environmental factors act as catalysts for violent acts for an individual who have a violence-prone personality. This means that although the environment does not cause violent behavior, but it can moderate the causal influence of biology on violence. The CM model suggested that exposure to violent video games is not an antecedent variable of aggressive behavior, but only acts as a catalyst influencing its form ( Ferguson et al., 2008 ). Much of studies ( Ferguson et al., 2009 , 2012 ; Ferguson, 2013 , 2015 ; Furuya-Kanamori and Doi, 2016 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ) found that adolescent aggression cannot be predicted by the exposure to violent video games, but it is closely related to antisocial personality traits, peer influence, and family violence.

Anderson and his collaborators ( Groves et al., 2014 ; Kepes et al., 2017 ) suggested there were major methodological shortcomings in the studies of Ferguson et al. and redeclared the validity of their own researches. Some researchers supported Anderson et al. and criticized Ferguson’s view ( Gentile, 2015 ; Rothstein and Bushman, 2015 ). However, Markey (2015) held a neutral position that extreme views should not be taken in the relationship between violent video games and aggression.

In fact, the relation of violent video games to aggression is complicated. Besides the controversy between the above two models about whether there is an influence, other studies explored the role of internal factors such as normative belief about aggression and external factors such as family environment in the relationship between violent video games and aggression.

Normative Beliefs About Aggression, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

Normative beliefs about aggression are one of the most important cognitive factors influencing adolescent aggression; they refer to an assessment of aggression acceptability by an individual ( Huesmann and Guerra, 1997 ). They can be divided into two types: general beliefs and retaliatory beliefs. The former means a general view about aggression, while the latter reflects aggressive beliefs in provocative situations. Normative beliefs about aggression reflect the degree acceptance of aggression, which affects the choice of aggressive behavior.

Studies found that normative beliefs about aggression are directly related to aggression. First, self-reported aggression is significantly correlated to normative beliefs about aggression ( Bailey and Ostrov, 2008 ; Li et al., 2015 ). General normative beliefs about aggression can predict young people’s physical, verbal, and indirect aggression ( Lim and Ang, 2009 ); retaliatory normative beliefs about aggression can anticipate adolescent retaliation behavior after 1 year ( Werner and Hill, 2010 ; Krahe and Busching, 2014 ). There is a longitudinal temporal association of normative beliefs about aggression with aggression ( Krahe and Busching, 2014 ). Normative beliefs about aggression are significantly positively related to online aggressive behavior ( Wright and Li, 2013 ), which is the most important determining factor of adolescent cyberbullying ( Kowalski et al., 2014 ). Teenagers with high normative beliefs about aggression are more likely to become bullies and victims of traditional bullying and cyberbullying ( Burton et al., 2013 ). Finally, normative beliefs about aggression can significantly predict the support and reinforcement of bystanders in offline bullying and cyberbullying ( Machackova and Pfetsch, 2016 ).

According to Bandura’s social cognitive theory ( Bandura, 1989 ), violent video games can initiate adolescents’ observational learning. In this situation, not only can they imitate the aggressive behavior of the model but also their understanding and acceptability about aggression may change. Therefore, normative beliefs about aggression can also be a mediator between violent video games and adolescent aggression ( Duan et al., 2014 ; Anderson et al., 2017 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ). Studies have shown that the mediating role of normative beliefs about aggression is not influenced by factors such as gender, prior aggression, and parental monitoring ( Gentile et al., 2014 ).

Family Environment, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

Family violence, parenting style, and other family factors have major effects on adolescent aggression. On the one hand, family environment can influence directly on aggression by shaping adolescents’ cognition and setting up behavioral models. Many studies have found that family violence and other negative factors are positively related to adolescent aggression ( Ferguson et al., 2009 , 2012 ; Ferguson, 2013 ), while active family environment can reduce the aggressive behavior ( Batanova and Loukas, 2014 ).

On the other hand, family environment can act on adolescent aggression together with other factors, such as exposure to violent video games. Analysis of the interaction between family conflict and media violence (including violence on TV and in video games) to adolescent aggression showed that teenagers living in higher conflict families with more media violence exposure show more aggressive behavior ( Fikkers et al., 2013 ). Parental monitoring is significantly correlated with reduced media violence exposure and a reduction in aggressive behavior 6 months later ( Gentile et al., 2014 ). Parental mediation can moderate the relationship between media violence exposure and normative beliefs about aggression, i.e., for children with less parental mediation, predictability of violent media exposure on normative beliefs about aggression is stronger ( Linder and Werner, 2012 ). Parental mediation is closely linked to decreased aggression caused by violent media ( Nathanson, 1999 ; Rasmussen, 2014 ; Padilla-Walker et al., 2016 ). Further studies have shown that the autonomy-supportive restrictive mediation of parents is related to a reduction in current aggressive behavior by decreasing media violence exposure; conversely, inconsistent restrictive mediation is associated with an increase of current aggressive behavior by enhancing media violence exposure ( Fikkers et al., 2017 ).

The Current Study

Despite GAM and CM hold opposite views on the relationship between violent video games and aggression, both of the two models imply the same idea that aggression cannot be separated from internal and external factors. While emphasizing on negative effects of violent video games on adolescents’ behavior, the GAM uses internal factors to explain the influencing mechanism, including aggressive beliefs, aggressive behavior scripts, and aggressive personality ( Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson and Carnagey, 2014 ). Although the CM considers that there is no significant relation between violent video games and aggression, it also acknowledges the role of external factors such as violent video games and family violence. Thus, these two models seem to be contradictory, but in fact, they reveal the mechanism of aggression from different points of view. It will be more helpful to explore the effect of violent video games on aggression from the perspective of combination of internal and external factors.

Although previous studies have investigated the roles of normative beliefs about aggression and family factors in the relationship between violent video games and adolescent aggression separately, the combined effect of these two factors remains unstudied. The purpose of this study was to analyze the combined effect of normative beliefs about aggression and family environment. This can not only confirm the effects of violent video games on adolescent aggression further but also can clarify the influencing mechanism from the integration of GAM and CM to a certain extent. Based on the above, the following three hypotheses were proposed:

Hypothesis 1: There is a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression.

Hypothesis 2: Normative beliefs about aggression are the mediator of exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression.

Hypothesis 3: The family environment can moderate the mediation effects of normative beliefs about aggression in exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression constitute a moderated mediation model.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

All subjects gave informed written consent for participation in this investigation, and their parents signed parental written informed consent. The study was reviewed and approved by the Professor Committee of School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, which is the committee responsible for providing ethics approvals. A total of 648 Chinese middle school students participated in this study, including 339 boys and 309 girls; 419 students were from cities and towns, and 229 from the countryside. There were 277 and 371 junior and high school students, respectively. Ages ranged from 12 to 19 years, averaging 14.73 ( SD = 1.60).

Video Game Questionnaire (VGQ)

The Video Game Questionnaire ( Anderson and Dill, 2000) required participants to list their favorite five video games and assess their use frequencies, the degree of violent content, and the degree of violent images on a 7-point scale (1, participants seldom play video games, with no violent content or image; 7, participants often play video games with many violent contents and images). Methods for calculating the score of exposure to violent video games: (score of violent content in the game + score of violent images in the game) × use frequency/5. Chen et al. (2012) found that the Chinese version of this questionnaire had high internal consistency reliability and good content validity. The Chinese version was used in this study, and the Cronbach’s α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.88.

Aggression Questionnaire (AQ)

There were 29 items in AQ ( Buss and Perry, 1992 ), including four dimensions: physical aggression, verbal aggression, anger, and hostility. The scale used 5-point scoring criteria (1, very incongruent with my features; 5, very congruent with my features). Scores for each item were added to obtain the dimension score, and dimension scores were summed to obtain the total score. The Chinese version of AQ had good internal consistency reliability and construct validity ( Ying and Dai, 2008 ). In this study, the Chinese version was used and its Cronbach’s α coefficient was 0.83.

Family Environment Scale (FES)

The FES ( Moos, 1990 ) includes 90 true-false questions and is divided into 10 subscales, including cohesion, expressiveness, conflict, independence, achievement-orientation, intellectual-cultural orientation, active-recreational orientation, moral-religious emphasis, organization, and control. The Chinese version of FES was revised by Fei et al. (1991) and used in this study. Three subscales closely related to aggression were selected, including cohesion, conflict, and moral-religious emphasis, with 27 items in total. The family environment score was the sum of scores of these three subscales (the conflict subscale was first inverted). The Cronbach’s α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.75.

Normative Beliefs About Aggression Scale (NOBAGS)

There are 20 items in the NOBAGS ( Huesmann and Guerra, 1997 ), which includes retaliation (12 items) and general (8 items) aggression belief. A 4-point Likert scale is used (1, absolutely wrong; 4, absolutely right). The subjects were asked to assess the accuracy of the behavior described in each item. High score means high level of normative beliefs about aggression. The revised Chinese version of NOBAGS consists of two factors: retaliation (nine items) and general (six items) aggression belief. Its internal consistency coefficient and test-retest reliability are 0.81 and 0.79. Confirmative factor analysis showed that this version has good construct validity: χ 2 = 280.09, df = 89, χ 2 / df = 3.15, RMSEA = 0.07, SRMR = 0.04, NFI = 0.95, NNFI = 0.96, and CFI = 0.96 ( Shao and Wang, 2017 ). In this study, the Cronbach’s α coefficient of the Chinese version was 0.88.

Group testing was performed in randomly selected classes of six middle schools. All subjects completed the above four questionnaires.

Data Analysis

IBM SPSS Statistics 22 was used to analysis the correlations among study variables, the mediating effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression, and the moderating role of family environment in the relationship between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression. In order to validate the moderated mediation model, Mplus 7 was also used.

Correlation Analysis Among Study Variables

In this study, self-reported questionnaires were used to collect data, and results might be influenced by common method bias. Therefore, the Harman’s single-factor test was used to assess common method bias before data analysis. The results showed that eigenvalues of 34 unrotated factors were greater than 1, and the amount of variation explained by the first factor was 10.01%, which is much less than 40% of the critical value. Accordingly, common method bias was not significant in this study.

As described in Table 1 , the degree of exposure to violent video games showed significant positive correlations to normative beliefs about aggression and aggression; family environment was negatively correlated to normative beliefs about aggression and aggression; normative beliefs about aggression were significantly and positively related to aggression. The gender difference of exposure to violent video games ( t = 7.93, p < 0.001) and normative beliefs about aggression ( t = 2.74, p < 0.01) were significant, which boys scored significantly higher than girls.

Table 1 . Means, standard deviations, and Pearson correlations among study variables.

Mediating Effect Analysis

To examine the mediation effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression, gender factor was controlled firstly. Stepwise regression analysis showed that the regression of aggression to violent video games ( c = 0.28, t = 6.96, p < 0.001), the regression of normative beliefs about aggression to violent video games ( a = 0.19, t = 4.69, p < 0.001), and the regression of aggression to violent video games ( c ′ = 0.22, t = 5.69, p < 0.001) and normative beliefs about aggression ( b = 0.31, t = 8.25, p < 0.001) were all significant. Thus, normative beliefs about aggression played a partial mediating role in exposure to violent video games and aggression. The mediation effect value was 0.06, accounting for 21.43% (0.06/0.28) of the total effect.

Moderated Mediation Effect Analysis

After standardizing scores of exposure to violent videogames, normative beliefs about aggression, family environment, and aggression, two interaction terms were calculated, including family environment × exposure to violent video games and family environment × normative beliefs about aggression. Regression analysis was carried out after controlling gender factor ( Table 2 ).

Table 2 . Moderated mediation effect analysis of the relationship between violent video exposure and aggression.

In the first step, a simple moderated model (Model 1) between exposure to violent video games and aggression was established. The result showed that exposure to violent video games had a significant effect on aggression ( c 1 = 0.24, t = 6.13, p < 0.001), while the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on aggression was not significant ( c 3 = 0.05, t = −1.31, p = 0.19), indicating that the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression was not moderated by family environment.

Next, a moderated model (Model 2) between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression was established. The results showed that exposure to violent video games had a significant effect on normative beliefs about aggression ( a 1 = 0.13, t = 3.42, p < 0.001), and the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression was significant ( a 3 = −0.13, t = −3.63, p < 0.01).

In the third step, a moderated mediation model (Model 3) between exposure to violent video games and aggression was established. As shown in Table 2 , the effect of normative beliefs about aggression on aggression was significant ( b 1 = 0.24, t = 6.15, p < 0.001), and the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression was not significant ( b 2 = 0.02, t = 0.40, p = 0.69). Because both a 3 and b 1 were significant, exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression constituted a moderated mediation model. Normative beliefs about aggression played a mediating role between exposure to violent video games and aggression, while family environment was a moderator between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression. Mplus analysis proved that the moderated mediation model had good model fitting (χ 2 / df = 1.54, CFI = 0.99, TLI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.03, and SRMR = 0.01).

To further analyze the moderating effect of the family environment and exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression, the family environment was divided into the high and low groups, according to the principle of standard deviation, and a simple slope test was performed ( Figure 1 ). The results found that for individuals with high score of family environment, prediction of exposure to violent video games to normative beliefs about aggression was not significant ( b = 0.08, SE = 0.08, p = 0.37). For individuals with low score of family environment, exposure to violent video games could significantly predict normative beliefs about aggression ( b = 0.34, SE = 0.09, p < 0.001). Based on the overall findings, individuals with high scores of family environment showed a nonsignificant mediating effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relation of exposure to violent video games and aggression; however, for individuals with low scores of family environment, normative beliefs about aggression played a partial mediating role in the effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression.

Figure 1 . The moderating effect of the family environment on the relationship between violent video game exposure and normative beliefs about aggression.

Main Findings and Implications

This study found a significantly positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, corroborating existing studies ( Anderson, 2004 ; Anderson et al., 2010 ; DeLisi et al., 2013 ; Greitemeyer and Mugge, 2014 ). Anderson et al. (2017) assessed teenagers in Australia, China, Germany, the United States, and other three countries and found that exposure to violent media, including television, movies, and video games, is positively related to adolescent aggression, demonstrating cross-cultural consistency; 8% of variance in aggression could be independently explained by exposure to violent media. In this study, after controlling for gender and family environment, R 2 for exposure to violent video games in predicting adolescent aggression was 0.05, indicating that 5% of variation in adolescent aggression could be explained by exposure to violent media. These consistent findings confirm the effect of exposure to violent video games on adolescent aggression and can be explained by the GAM. According to the GAM ( Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson and Carnagey, 2014 ), violent video games can make teenagers acquire, repeat, and reinforce aggression-related knowledge structures, including aggressive beliefs and attitude, aggressive perceptual schemata, aggressive expectation schemata, aggressive behavior scripts, and aggression desensitization. Therefore, aggressive personality is promoted, increasing the possibility of aggressive behavior. The Hypothesis 1 of this study was validated and provided evidence for the GAM.

As shown above, normative beliefs about aggression had a partial mediation effect on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression. Exposure to violent video games, on the one hand, can predict adolescent aggression directly; on the other hand, it had an indirect effect on adolescent aggression via normative beliefs about aggression. According to the above results, when exposure to violent video games changes by 1 standard deviation, adolescent aggression varies by 0.28 standard deviation, with 0.22 standard deviation being a direct effect of exposure to violent video games on adolescent aggression and 0.06 standard deviation representing the effect through normative beliefs about aggression. Too much violence in video games makes it easy for individuals to become accustomed to violence and emotionally apathetic towards the harmful consequences of violence. Moreover, it can make individuals accept the idea that violence is a good way of problem solving, leading to an increase in normative beliefs about aggression; under certain situational cues, it is more likely to become violent or aggressive. This conclusion is supported by other studies ( Gentile et al., 2014 ; Anderson et al., 2017 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ). Like Hypothesis 1, Hypothesis 2 was validated the GAM.

One of the main findings of this study was the validation of Hypothesis 3: a moderated mediation model was constructed involving exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression. Family environment moderated the first half of the mediation process of violent video games, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression. In this study, family environment encompassed three factors, including (1) cohesion reflecting the degree of mutual commitment, assistance, and support among family members; (2) conflict reflecting the extent of anger, aggression, and conflict among family members; and (3) moral-religious emphasis reflecting the degree of emphasis on ethics, religion, and values. Individuals with high scores of family environment often help each other; seldom show anger, attack, and contradiction openly; and pay more attention to morality and values. These positive aspects would help them understand violence in video games from the right perspective, reduce recognition and acceptance of violence or aggression, and diminish the effect of violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression. Hence, exposure to violent video games could not predict normative beliefs about aggression of these individuals. By contrast, individuals with low scores of family environment are less likely to help each other; they often openly show anger, attack, and contradiction and do not pay much attention to morality and values. These negative aspects would not decrease but increase their acceptance of violence and aggression. For these individuals, because of the lack of mitigation mechanisms, exposure to violent video games could predict normative beliefs about aggression significantly.

The moderated mediation model of the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression could not only help reveal that exposure to violent video games can affect aggression but also provide an elaboration of the influencing mechanism. According to this model, for individuals with high scores of family environment, exposure to violent video games had only direct effect on aggression. However, for those with low scores of family environment, there was not only a direct effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression but also an indirect effect mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. In short, exposure to violence video games affecting aggression through normative beliefs about aggression is more likely to happen to adolescents with poor family environment than those with good family environment. That is, generation of adolescent aggression is not only related to internal cognitive factors but also to external situations. As Piotrowski and Valkenburg ( Piotrowski and Valkenburg, 2015 ; Valkenburg, 2015 ) pointed out, the effect of violent video games/media on adolescents is a complex interaction of dispositional, developmental, and social factors, and individual differences in susceptibility to these three factors determine the nature and the extent of this influence. The proposed model incorporated some perspectives of GAM and CM: while confirming the effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression occurrence, the combined effect of individual and environmental factors was verified.

Compared with the simple mediation or moderation model, the present moderated mediation model provided deeper insights into the internal mechanism of the effect of violent video games on aggression, providing inspirations for preventing adolescent aggression. First, in view of the close relationship between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, relevant government departments should continue to improve the grading system of video games; meanwhile, parents should appropriately monitor the types of video games used by teenagers as well as the time spent and reduce the degree of exposure to violent video games. Second, by allowing teenagers to objectively distinguish between violence in games and reality, the mediating role of normative beliefs about aggression could inspire people to identify rational ways to solve violence problems and to experience the hurtful consequences of aggression. This would help adolescents change normative beliefs about aggression, establish a correct view of right and wrong, and reduce the occurrence of aggression. Finally, the moderating effect of family environment on the mediation process suggests that more attention should be paid to the important role of family environment. On the one hand, family education is closely related to adolescent aggression. Then, parents should create a good family atmosphere, publicly show anger and aggression as little as possible, and advocate and practice positive moral values. Parents should adopt authoritative styles, abandoning autocratic and indulgent parenting styles ( Casas et al., 2006 ; Sandstrom, 2007 ; Underwood et al., 2009 ; Kawabata et al., 2011 ) to minimize the negative effect of exposure to violent video games. On the other hand, for teenagers with poor family environment, while reducing exposure to violent video games, it is particularly important to change their normative beliefs about aggression, no longer viewing aggression as an alternative way to solve problems.

Limitations

Limitations of the current study should be mentioned. First, only Chinese school students were assessed, in a relatively small number, which could affect sample representativeness. A large sample of teenagers from different countries and in different ages, also including juvenile offenders, would be more accurate in revealing the effect of violent video games on adolescent aggression. Second, this study only focused on violent video games, not involving violent media such as internet and television, daily life events, wars, and other major social events. Indeed, these factors also have important effects on adolescent aggression, and their influencing mechanisms and combined effect are worth investigating further. Third, this study mainly adopted the self-report method. Use of peer, parent, or teacher reports to assess exposure to violent video games and aggression would help improve the effectiveness of the study. Fourth, there might be other mediators, moderating variables and relational models. In addition to normative beliefs about aggression and family environment, individual emotions, personality characteristics, school climate, and companions may play mediating or moderating roles in the relationship between violent video games and aggression. This study developed a moderated mediation model between family environment and normative beliefs about aggression, but the possibility of multiple mediation and mediated moderation models cannot be ruled out.

The current study showed that exposure to violent video games is positively related to adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression have a mediating effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while the family environment regulates the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with good family environment, exposure to violent video games only has a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, there is an indirect effect mediated by normative beliefs about aggression alongside a direct effect. This moderated mediation model incorporates some perspectives of GAM and CM, enriching studies of generative mechanism of adolescent aggression.

Author Contributions

YW and RS conceived the idea of the study. RS analyzed the data. YW and RS interpreted the results and wrote the paper. YW discussed the results and revised the manuscript.

This study was supported by a grant from the National Social Science Foundation of China (14CSH017) to YW.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: violence video games, aggression, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, moderated mediation effect

Citation: Shao R and Wang Y (2019) The Relation of Violent Video Games to Adolescent Aggression: An Examination of Moderated Mediation Effect. Front. Psychol . 10:384. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00384

Received: 25 September 2017; Accepted: 07 February 2019; Published: 21 February 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Shao and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Yunqiang Wang, [email protected] ; [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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There is no evidence to support these claims that violent media and real-world violence are connected. Photo by kerkezz/Ad...

Christopher J. Ferguson, The Conversation Christopher J. Ferguson, The Conversation

Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-why-its-time-to-stop-blaming-video-games-for-real-world-violence

Analysis: Why it’s time to stop blaming video games for real-world violence

In the wake of the El Paso shooting on Aug. 3 that left 21 dead and dozens injured, a familiar trope has reemerged: Often, when a young man is the shooter, people try to blame the tragedy on violent video games and other forms of media.

This time around, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick placed some of the blame on a video game industry that “ teaches young people to kill .” Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California went on to condemn video games that “dehumanize individuals” as a “problem for future generations.” And President Trump pointed to society’s “glorification of violence,” including “ gruesome and grisly video games .”

These are the same connections a Florida lawmaker made after the Parkland shooting in February 2018, suggesting that the gunman in that case “was prepared to pick off students like it’s a video game .”

Kevin McCarthy, the GOP House minority leader, also tells Fox News that video games are the problem following the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. pic.twitter.com/w7DmlJ9O1K — John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) August 4, 2019

But, speaking as a researcher who has studied violent video games for almost 15 years, I can state that there is no evidence to support these claims that violent media and real-world violence are connected. As far back as 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that research did not find a clear connection between violent video games and aggressive behavior.

Criminologists who study mass shootings specifically refer to those sorts of connections as a “ myth .” And in 2017, the Media Psychology and Technology division of the American Psychological Association released a statement I helped craft, suggesting reporters and policymakers cease linking mass shootings to violent media, given the lack of evidence for a link.

A history of a moral panic

So why are so many policymakers inclined to blame violent video games for violence? There are two main reasons.

The first is the psychological research community’s efforts to market itself as strictly scientific. This led to a replication crisis instead, with researchers often unable to repeat the results of their studies. Now, psychology researchers are reassessing their analyses of a wide range of issues – not just violent video games, but implicit racism , power poses and more.

The other part of the answer lies in the troubled history of violent video game research specifically.

An attendee dressed as a Fortnite character poses for a picture in a costume at Comic Con International in San Diego, California, U.S., July 19, 2019. Photo by REUTERS/Mike Blake

Beginning in the early 2000s, some scholars, anti-media advocates and professional groups like the APA began working to connect a methodologically messy and often contradictory set of results to public health concerns about violence. This echoed historical patterns of moral panic, such as 1950s concerns about comic books and Tipper Gore’s efforts to blame pop and rock music in the 1980s for violence, sex and satanism.

Particularly in the early 2000s, dubious evidence regarding violent video games was uncritically promoted . But over the years, confidence among scholars that violent video games influence aggression or violence has crumbled .

Reviewing all the scholarly literature

My own research has examined the degree to which violent video games can – or can’t – predict youth aggression and violence. In a 2015 meta-analysis , I examined 101 studies on the subject and found that violent video games had little impact on kids’ aggression, mood, helping behavior or grades.

Two years later, I found evidence that scholarly journals’ editorial biases had distorted the scientific record on violent video games. Experimental studies that found effects were more likely to be published than studies that had found none. This was consistent with others’ findings . As the Supreme Court noted, any impacts due to video games are nearly impossible to distinguish from the effects of other media, like cartoons and movies.

Any claims that there is consistent evidence that violent video games encourage aggression are simply false.

Spikes in violent video games’ popularity are well-known to correlate with substantial declines in youth violence – not increases. These correlations are very strong, stronger than most seen in behavioral research. More recent research suggests that the releases of highly popular violent video games are associated with immediate declines in violent crime, hinting that the releases may cause the drop-off.

The role of professional groups

With so little evidence, why are people like Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin still trying to blame violent video games for mass shootings by young men? Can groups like the National Rifle Association seriously blame imaginary guns for gun violence?

A key element of that problem is the willingness of professional guild organizations such as the APA to promote false beliefs about violent video games. (I’m a fellow of the APA.) These groups mainly exist to promote a profession among news media, the public and policymakers, influencing licensing and insurance laws . They also make it easier to get grants and newspaper headlines. Psychologists and psychology researchers like myself pay them yearly dues to increase the public profile of psychology. But there is a risk the general public may mistake promotional positions for objective science.

In 2005 the APA released its first policy statement linking violent video games to aggression. However, my recent analysis of internal APA documents with criminologist Allen Copenhaver found that the APA ignored inconsistencies and methodological problems in the research data.

The APA updated its statement in 2015, but that sparked controversy immediately: More than 230 scholars wrote to the group asking it to stop releasing policy statements altogether. I and others objected to perceived conflicts of interest and lack of transparency tainting the process.

It’s bad enough that these statements misrepresent the actual scholarly research and misinform the public. But it’s worse when those falsehoods give advocacy groups like the NRA cover to shift blame for violence onto non-issues like video games. The resulting misunderstanding hinders efforts to address mental illness and other issues, such as the need for gun control, that are actually related to gun violence.

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article . This story was updated from an earlier version to reflect the events surrounding the El Paso and Dayton shootings.

Christopher J. Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University. He's coauthor of " Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong ."

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Home > GRADUATE > THESES > 2570

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The effects of violence in video games on individual levels of hostility in young adults.

Grant Jones , Western Kentucky University Follow

Publication Date

Spring 2018

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Douglas Clayton Smith (Director), Carrie Trojan, Holli Drummond

Degree Program

Department of Sociology

Degree Type

Master of Arts

For a while, video games have been the target of scrutiny with regards to their perceived potential to adversely affect younger individuals. In particular, it is often argued that these video games, particularly those of violent nature, may increase hostility to an extent that it manifests itself in violent behavior. This thesis aims to denote what effects these video games have on young adults, particularly in relation to the respondents’ indicated extent of adverse childhood experiences, trait anger, and competitiveness, all three of which were assumed to have a positive relationship with hostility. A survey was distributed to students attending Western Kentucky University in an attempt to measure what effects these three aforementioned variables have on young adults, in addition to what affects video game playing and violence in video games may have on hostility and aggression. From the data acquired, it was clear that while adverse childhood experiences had no statistical significance in this study and higher competitiveness indicated a very slight decline in hostility, trait anger did in fact appear to raise hostility in the respondents. Additionally, increases in exposure to both video game play and violence in video games were shown to lead to a decrease in hostility. From this, it would appear that trait anger was the only variable to truly increase hostility in young adults, and the often-discussed variables of video game play and violence in video games both appear to decrease hostility in respondents as exposure to either factor increases, thus going against the common assumptions.

Disciplines

Other Sociology | Social Psychology | Social Psychology and Interaction | Sociology

Recommended Citation

Jones, Grant, "The Effects of Violence in Video Games on Individual Levels of Hostility in Young Adults" (2018). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 2570. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2570

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The contagious impact of playing violent video games on aggression: Longitudinal evidence

Tobias greitemeyer.

1 Department of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck Austria

Meta‐analyses have shown that violent video game play increases aggression in the player. The present research suggests that violent video game play also affects individuals with whom the player is connected. A longitudinal study ( N = 980) asked participants to report on their amount of violent video game play and level of aggression as well as how they perceive their friends and examined the association between the participant's aggression and their friends’ amount of violent video game play. As hypothesized, friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 was associated with the participant's aggression at Time 2 even when controlling for the impact of the participant's aggression at Time 1. Mediation analyses showed that friends’ aggression at Time 1 accounted for the impact of friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 on the participant's aggression at Time 2. These findings suggest that increased aggression in video game players has an impact on the player's social network.

1. INTRODUCTION

Given its widespread use, the public and psychologists alike are concerned about the impact of violent video game play. In fact, a great number of studies have addressed the effects of exposure to violent video games (where the main goal is to harm other game characters) on aggression and aggression‐related variables. Meta‐analyses have shown that playing violent video games is associated with increased aggression in the player (Anderson et al., 2010 ; Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014 ). The present longitudinal study examines the idea that violent video game play also affects the player's social network, suggesting that concern about the harmful effects of playing violent video games on a societal level is even more warranted.

1.1. Theoretical perspective

When explaining the effects of playing violent video games, researchers often refer to the General Aggression Model (GAM) proposed by Anderson & Bushman ( 2002 ). According to this theoretical model, person and situation variables (sometimes interactively) may affect a person's internal state, consisting of cognition, affect, and arousal. This internal state then affects how events are perceived and interpreted. Based on this decision process, the person behaves more or less aggressively in a social encounter. For example, playing violent video games is assumed to increase aggressive cognition and affect, which in turn results in behavioral aggression. An extension of this model further assumes that increased aggression due to previous violent video game play may instigate an aggression escalation cycle in that the victim also behaves aggressively (cf. Anderson & Bushman, 2018 , Figure 5). The present research tested key predictions derived from the GAM and its extension, that (a) violent video game play is associated with increased aggression in the player and that (b) individuals who are connected to the player will also become more aggressive.

1.2. Effects of violent video game play on aggression

The relationship between violent video game play and aggression has been examined in studies employing cross‐sectional, longitudinal, and experimental designs. Cross‐sectional correlational studies typically show a positive relationship between the amount of violent video game play and aggression in real‐world contexts (e.g., Gentile, Lynch, Linder, & Walsh, 2004 ; Krahé & Möller, 2004 ). Several longitudinal studies have been conducted, showing that habitual violent video game play predicts later aggression even after controlling for initial aggressiveness (e.g., Anderson, Buckley, & Carnagey, 2008 ). That violent video game play has a causal impact on aggression and related information processing has been demonstrated by experimental work (e.g., Anderson & Carnagey, 2009 ; Gabbiadini & Riva, 2018 ). Finally, meta‐analyses corroborated that violent video game play significantly increases aggressive thoughts, hostile affect, and aggressive behavior (Anderson et al., 2010 ; Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014 ). Some studies failed to find significant effects (e.g., McCarthy, Coley, Wagner, Zengel, & Basham, 2016 ). However, given that the typical effect of violent video games on aggression is not large, it is to be expected that not all studies reveal significant effects.

1.3. The contagious effects of aggression

Abundant evidence has been collected that aggression and violence can be contagious (Dishion, & Tipsord, 2011 ; Huesmann, 2012 ; Jung, Busching, & Krahé, 2019 ). Indeed, the best predictor of (retaliatory) aggression is arguably previous violent victimization (Anderson et al., 2008 ; Goldstein, Davis, & Herman, 1975 ). However, even the observation of violence can lead to increased violence in the future (Widom, 1989 ). Overall, it is a well‐known finding that aggression begets further aggression. Given that violent video game play increases aggression, it thus may well be that this increased aggression then has an impact on people with whom the player is connected.

Correlational research provides initial evidence for the idea that the level of people's aggression is indeed associated with how often their friends play violent video games (Greitemeyer, 2018 ). In particular, participants who did not play violent video games were more aggressive the more their friends played violent video games. However, due to the cross‐sectional design, no conclusions about the direction of the effect are possible. It may be that violent video game players influence their friends (social influence), but it is also conceivable that similar people attract each other (homophily) or that there is some shared environmental factor that influences the behavior of both the players and their friends (confounding). That is, it is unclear whether indeed aggression due to playing violent video games spreads or whether the effect is reversed, such that aggressive people are prone to befriend others who are attracted to violent video game play. Moreover, it is possible that some third variable affected both, participants’ reported aggression and their friends’ amount of violent video game play. There is also the possibility that people are unsure about the extent to which their friends play violent video games. In this case, they may perceive their friends as behaving aggressively and then (wrongly) infer that the friends play violent video games. To disentangle these possibilities and to show that the effect of violent video game play (i.e., increased aggression in the player) indeed has an impact on the player's social network, relationships among variables have to be assessed over time while covarying prior aggression (Bond & Bushman, 2017 ; Christakis & Fowler, 2013 ).

Verheijen, Burk, Stoltz, van den Berg, and Cillessen ( 2018 ) tested the idea that players of violent video games have a long‐term impact on their social network. These authors found that participants’ exposure to violent video games increased their friend's aggressive behavior 1 year later. However, given that the authors did not examine whether the violent video game player's increased aggression accounts for the impact on their friend's aggressive behavior, it is unknown whether violent video game play indeed instigates an aggression cycle. For example, players of violent video games may influence their friends so that these friends will also play violent video games. Any increases in aggression could then be an effect of the friends playing violent video games on their own.

1.4. The present research

The present study examines the longitudinal association between the participant's aggression and their friends’ amount of violent video game play, employing an egocentric networking approach (Stark & Krosnick, 2017 ). In egocentric networking analyses, participants provide self‐reports but also report on how they perceive their friends. In the following, and in line with Greitemeyer ( 2018 ), the friends were treated as the players and the participant was treated as their friends’ social network. Please note that ties between the participant's friends (i.e., whether friends also know each other) were not assessed (Greitemeyer, 2018 ; Mötteli & Dohle, 2019 ), because this information was not needed for testing the hypothesis that participants become more aggressive if their friends play violent video games. It was expected that friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 would predict the participant's aggression at Time 2 even when controlling for the impact of the participant's aggression and amount of violent video game play at Time 1. It was further examined whether friends’ aggression at Time 1 would account for the impact of friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 on the participant's aggression at Time 2. Such findings would provide suggestive evidence that violent video game play may instigate an aggression cycle. The study received ethical approval from the Internal Review Board for Ethical Questions by the Scientific Ethical Committee of the University of Innsbruck. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/jp8ew/ .

2.1. Participants

Participants were citizens of the U.S. who took part on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Because it was unknown how many of the participants will complete both questionnaires, no power analyses were conducted a priori but a large number of participants was run. At Time 1, there were 2,502 participants (1,376 females, 1,126 males; mean age = 35.7 years, SD = 11.8). Of these, 980 participants (522 females, 458 males; mean age = 38.9 years, SD = 12.5) completed the questionnaire at Time 2. Time 1 and Time 2 were 6 months apart. There were no data exclusions, and all participants were run before any analyses were performed. The questionnaire included some further questions (e.g., participant's perceived deprivation) that are not relevant for the present purpose and are reported elsewhere (Greitemeyer & Sagioglou, 2018 ). 1 Given that the questionnaire was relatively short, no attention checks were employed.

2.2. Procedure and measures

Procedure and measures were very similar to Greitemeyer ( 2018 ), with the main difference that individuals participated at two time points (instead of one). After providing demographics, self‐reported aggressive behavior was assessed. As in previous research (e.g., Krahé & Möller, 2010 ), participants indicated for 10 items how often they had shown the respective behavior in the past 6 months. Sample items are: “I have pushed another person” and “I have spread gossip about people I don't like” (5 items each address physical aggression and relational aggression, respectively). All items were rated on a scale from 1 ( never ) to 5 ( very often ), and scores were averaged. Participants were then asked about their amount of violent video game play, employing one item: “How often do you play violent video games (where the goal is to harm other game characters)?” (1 = never to 7 = very often ).

Afterwards, participants learned that they will be asked questions about people they feel closest to. These may be friends, coworkers, neighbors, relatives. They should answer questions for three contacts with whom they talked about important matters in the last few months. For each friend, they reported the level of aggression (αs between = 0.90 and 0.91) and the amount of violent video game play, employing the same questions as for themselves. Responses to the three friends were then averaged. Finally, participants were thanked and asked what they thought this experiment was trying to study, but none noted the hypothesis that their friend's amount of violent video game play would affect their own level of aggression. At Time 2, the same questions were employed. Reliabilities for how participants perceived the level of aggression for each friend were between 0.89 and 0.90.

Descriptive statistics, intercorrelations, and internal consistencies of all measures are shown in Table Table1 1 .

Means, standard deviations, and bivariate correlations

			1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
1. Participant's amount of violent video game play (T1)	2.74	2.09	—
2. Participant's aggression (T1)	1.38	0.52	.15	.89
3. Friends’ amount of violent video game play (T1)	2.28	1.31	.59	.18	.44
4. Friends’ aggression (T1)	1.39	0.49	.14	.69	.25	.76
5. Participant's amount of violent video game play (T2)	2.50	1.93	.83	.12	.55	.12	—
6. Participant's aggression (T2)	1.30	0.45	.13	.50	.18	.43	.14	.88
7. Friends’ amount of violent video game play (T2)	2.18	1.27	.55	.18	.69	.22	.61	.22	.51
8. Friends’ aggression (T2)	1.33	0.44	.13	.40	.19	.51	.13	.74	.25	.79

Note : For Time 1, N = 2,502; for Time 2, N = 980. All correlation coefficients: p < .001. Where applicable, α reliabilities are presented along the diagonal.

3.1. Time 1 ( N = 2,502)

The relationship between the amount of violent video game play and reported aggression was significant, both for the participant and the friends. That is, violent video game play was associated with increased aggression in the player and participants perceived their friends who play more violent video games to be more aggressive than their less‐playing friends. Participant's and friends’ amount of violent video game play as well as their level of reported aggression, respectively, were also positively associated, indicating that participants perceived their friends to be similar to them. Most importantly, participant's aggression was significantly associated with friends’ amount of violent video game play. 2

It was then examined whether friends’ amount of violent video game play is still associated with the participant's aggression when controlling for the participant's amount of violent video game play. Participant sex (coded 1 = male, 2 = female) and age were included as covariates. In fact, a bootstrapping analysis showed that the impact of friends’ amount of violent video game play remained significant (point estimate = 0.08, SE = 0.02, t = 4.72, p < .001, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [0.05, 0.11]). Participant's amount of violent video game play (point estimate = 0.03, SE = 0.01, t = 2.18, p = .029, 95% CI = [0.00, 0.05]) and the interaction were also significant (point estimate = −0.01, SE = 0.00, t = 2.41, p = .016, 95% CI = [−0.02, −0.00]). At low levels of the participant's amount of violent video game play (− 1 SD, equals that the participant does not play violent video games in the present data set), friends’ amount of violent video game play was associated with the participant's aggression (point estimate = 0.07, SE = 0.01, t = 5.06, p < .001, 95% CI = [0.04, 0.10]). At high levels of the participant's amount of violent video game play ( + 1 SD), friends’ amount of violent video game play was also associated with the participant's aggression (point estimate = 0.03, SE = 0.01, t = 3.14, p = .002, 95% CI = [0.01, 0.06]), but the effect was less pronounced. Participants were thus most strongly affected by whether their social network plays violent video games when they do not play violent video games themselves (Figure (Figure1). 1 ). Participant sex was not significantly associated with the participant's aggression (point estimate = −0.04, SE = 0.02, t = 1.95, p = .052, 95% CI = [−0.09, 0.00]), whereas age was (point estimate = −0.01, SE = 0.00, t = 7.84, p < .001, 95% CI = [−0.009, −0.005]).

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Object name is AB-45-635-g001.jpg

Simple slopes of the interactive effect of friends’ amount of violent video game play and the participant's amount of violent video game play on the participant's aggression, controlling for participant sex and age (Time 1, N = 2,502)

3.2. Time 1 and Time 2 ( N = 980)

To examine the impact of friends’ amount of violent video game play on the participant's aggression over time, a cross‐lagged regression analysis was performed on the data. Participant's amount of violent video game play, friends’ amount of violent video game play, participant's aggression at Time 1, as well as participant sex and age were used as predictors for participant's aggression at Time 2. The overall regression was significant, F (5,974) = 68.92, R 2 = 0.26, p < .001. Most importantly, friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 significantly predicted participant's aggression at Time 2, t = 2.60, β = .09, 95% CI = (0.02, 0.16), p = .009. Participant's aggression showed high stability, t = 16.77, β = .48, 95% CI = (0.42, 0.53), p < .001, whereas the participant's amount of violent video game play at Time 1 did not significantly predict the participant's aggression at Time 2, t = 1.77, β = −.07, 95% CI = (− 0.14, 0.01), p = .077 (Figure (Figure2 2 ). 3 , 4 Participant sex also received a significant regression weight, t = 2.08, β = −.06, 95% CI = (−0.12, −0.00), p = .038, whereas age did not, t = 1.93, β = −.06, 95% CI = (−0.12, 0.00), p = .054. The reverse effect that the participant's aggression at Time 1 predicts their friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 2 when controlling for the participant's amount of violent video game play and friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1, as well as participant sex and age, was not significant, t = 0.67, β = .02, 95% CI = (−0.03, 0.06), p = .504.

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Object name is AB-45-635-g002.jpg

Participant's aggression at Time 2 simultaneously predicted by friends’ amount of violent video game play, participant's aggression, and participant's amount of violent video game play at Time 1. Participant sex and age were controlled for, but were not included in the figure (see the main text for the impact of participant sex and age). * p < .01, ** p < .001 ( N = 980)

Finally, it was examined whether the impact of friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 on the participant's aggression at Time 2 would be mediated by friends’ level of aggression at Time 1 (while controlling for the participant's aggression and amount of violent video game play at Time 1 as well as participant sex and age). A bootstrapping analysis (with 5.000 iterations) showed that the impact of friends’ level of aggression at Time 1 on the participant's aggression at Time 2 was significant (point estimate = 0.16, SE = 0.04, t = 4.28, p < .001, 95% CI = [0.09, 0.23]). Participant's aggression at Time 1 was also a significant predictor (point estimate = 0.34, SE = 0.03, t = 10.19, p < .001, 95% CI = [0.27, 0.40]). Friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 (point estimate = 0.03, SE = 0.01, t = 1.82, p = .069, 95% CI = [−0.00, 0.05]) and participant's amount of violent video game play at Time 1 (point estimate = −0.01, SE = 0.01, t = 1.65, p = .099, 95% CI = [−0.03, 0.00]) were not significant predictors. Participant sex significantly predicted the participant's aggression at Time 2 (point estimate = −0.06, SE = 0.03, t = 2.31, p = .021, 95% CI = [−0.11, −0.01]), whereas age did not (point estimate = −0.00, SE = 0.00, t = 1.90, p = .058, 95% CI = [−0.00, 0.00]). The indirect effect was significantly different from zero (point estimate = 0.01, 95% CI = [.00, 0.02]), suggesting that participants are more aggressive if their friends play violent video games for the reason that these friends are more aggressive. Figure Figure3 3 displays a simplified version of this mediation effect, based on regression coefficients and without controlling for the participant's aggression at Time 1, the participant's amount of violent video game play at Time 1, participant sex, and age.

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Mediation of the impact of friends’ violent video game exposure (VVE) at Time 1 on the participant's aggression at Time 2 by friends’ aggression at Time 1. All paths are significant. β * = the coefficient from friends’ VVE at Time 1 to the participant's aggression at Time 2 when controlling for friends’ aggression at Time 1 ( N = 980)

4. DISCUSSION

Violent video games have an impact on the player's aggression (Anderson et al., 2010 ; Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014 ), but—as the present study shows—they also increase aggression in the player's social network. In particular, participants who do not play violent video games reported to be more aggressive the more their friends play violent video games. Mediation analyses showed that the increased aggression in the friends accounted for the relationship between friends’ amount of violent video game play and the participant's aggression. Because changes in aggression over time were assessed, the present study provides evidence for the hypothesized effect that violent video game play is associated with increased aggression in the player, which then instigates aggression in their social network. Importantly, the impact of the participant's amount of violent video game play was controlled for, indicating that the relationship between friends’ amount of violent video game play and the participant's aggression is not due to the friends being similar to the participants. Moreover, the reverse effect that aggressive people will become attracted to others who play violent video games was not reliable. The present research thus documents the directional effects that violent video games is associated with increased aggression in the player and that this increased aggression then has an impact on people with whom the player is connected.

Overall, the present study provides comprehensive support for key hypotheses derived from the GAM and its extension (Anderson & Bushman, 2018 ). It shows that violent video game play is associated with increased aggression in the player and it documents that others who are connected to players might be also affected even when controlling for their own amount of violent video game play. To the best of my knowledge, this study is the first that shows that because violent video game players are more aggressive their friends will become aggressive, too. Previous research either employed a cross‐sectional design and thus could not address the direction of the effect (Greitemeyer, 2018 ) or did not examine whether the effect of violent video game play (i.e., increased aggression) indeed spreads (Verheijen et al., 2018 ). As proposed by the GAM and its extension (Anderson & Bushman, 2018 ), increased aggression in violent video game players appears to instigate an aggression escalation cycle (cf. Anderson et al., 2008 ).

It is noteworthy, however, that the longitudinal effect of the participant's amount of violent video game play at Time 1 on the participant's aggression at Time 2 was not reliable. Hence, although there were significant correlations between participants’ aggression and their violent video game use at both time points, the present study does not show that repeatedly playing violent video games leads to long‐term changes in aggression. However, a recent meta‐analysis of the long‐term effects of playing violent video games confirmed that violent video game play does increase physical aggression over time (Prescott, Sargent, & Hull, 2018 ), although the effect size was relatively small ( β = 0.11) and thus single studies that produce nonsignificant results are to be expected. Importantly, in the present study, a single‐item measure of violent video game play was employed. In contrast, previous research on the relationship between violent video game play and the player's aggression has often employed multi‐item measurement scales that are typically more reliable and precise (for an overview, Busching et al., 2015 ). Hence, it may well be that due to the limitations of the single‐item measure of the participant's amount of violent video game play the relationship between participants’ violent game play and their aggressive behavior was artificially reduced.

Even though the longitudinal design allows ruling out a host of alternative explanations for the impact of violent video games on the player's social network, causality can only inferred by using an experimental design. Future research may thus randomly assign participants to play a violent or nonviolent video game (players) and assesses their aggression against new participants (partners). It can be expected that the partners suffer more aggression when the player had played a violent, compared to a nonviolent, video game. Afterwards, it could be tested whether the partner of a violent video game player is more aggressive than a partner of a nonviolent video game player. Given that the partner is not exposed to any video games, firm causal conclusions could be drawn that violent video game play affects aggression in people who are connected to violent video game players. It could be also tested whether the partner of a violent video game player would not only be more likely to retaliate against the player, but also against a third party. In fact, previous research into displaced aggression has shown that people may react aggressively against a target that is innocent of any wrongdoing after they have been provoked by another person (Marcus‐Newhall, Pedersen, Carlson, & Miller, 2000 ). It may thus well be that the effect of playing violent video games spreads in social networks and that even people who are only indirectly linked to violent video game players are affected.

An important limitation of the present egocentric network data is the reliance on the participant's perception of their social network, leaving the possibility that participants did not accurately perceive their friends. It is noteworthy that participants perceived their friends to be highly similar to them. In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that participants always provided self‐ratings first, followed by perceptions of their friends. It is thus conceivable that participants used their self‐ratings as anchors for the perceptions of their friends. Such a tendency, however, would reduce the unique effect of friends’ amount of violent video game play on the participant's aggression when controlling for the participant's amount of violent video game play. The finding that participants in particular who do not play violent video games reported to be more aggressive if their friends play violent video games also suggests that the impact of violent video games on the player's social network is not due to participants providing both self‐reports and how they perceive their friends. Finally, rather than by their friends’ objective qualities, people's behavior should be more likely to be affected by their subjective perceptions of their friends.

As noted in the introduction, participants may not be aware of the extent to which their friends play violent video games and hence used the perception of how aggressive their friends are as an anchor for estimating their friends’ amount of violent video game play. Importantly, however, the participant's aggression at Time 2 was significantly predicted by friends’ amount of violent video game play at Time 1 even when controlling for friends’ level of aggression at Time 1 (see Figure Figure3). 3 ). Moreover, whereas aggression might be used for estimating violent video game exposure of the friends, participants should be well aware of the extent to which they play violent video games so that anchoring effects for participant's self‐reports are unlikely. However, given that it cannot be completely ruled out that the correlation between violent game play of friends at Time 1 and aggressive behavior of participants at Time 2 reflects a pseudocorrelation that is determined by the correlation between aggressive behavior of friends at Time 1 and aggressive behavior of the participant at Time 2, future research that employs sociocentric network analyses where information about the friends is provided by the friends themselves would be informative.

Another limitation is the employment of self‐report measures to assess aggressive behavior. Self‐report measures are quite transparent, so participants may have rated themselves more favorably than is actually warranted. In fact, mean scores of reported aggressive behavior were quite low. This reduced variance, however, typically diminishes associations with other constructs. In any case, observing how actual aggressive behavior is influenced by the social network's violent video game play would be an important endeavor for future work. It also has to be acknowledged that some participants may have reported on different friends at Time 1 and Time 2. Future research would be welcome that ensures that participants consider the same friends at different time points.

Future research may also shed some further light on the psychological processes. In the present study, the violent video game players’ higher levels of aggression accounted for the relationship between their amount of violent video game play and the participants’ reported aggression. It would be interesting to examine why the players’ aggression influences the aggression level of their social network. One possibility is that witnessing increased aggression by others (who play violent video games) leads to greater acceptance of norms condoning aggression, which are known to be an antecedent of aggressive behavior (Huesmann & Guerra, 1997 ). After all, if others behave aggressively, why should one refrain from engaging in the same behavior.

Another limitation of the present work is that it was not assessed how participants and their friends play violent video games. A recent survey (Lenhart, Smith, Anderson, Duggan, & Perrin, 2015 ) showed that many video game users play video games together with their friends, either cooperatively or competitively. This is insofar noteworthy as there might be some overlap between participants’ and their friends’ violent video game play. Moreover, cooperative video games have been shown to increase prosocial tendencies (Greitemeyer, 2013 ; Greitemeyer & Cox, 2013 ; but see Verheijen, Stoltz, van den Berg, & Cillessen, 2019 ) and decrease aggression (Velez, Greitemeyer, Whitaker, Ewoldsen, & Bushman, 2016 ). In contrast, competitive video game play increases aggressive affect and behavior (e.g., Adachi & Willoughby, 2016 ). Hence, future research should examine more closely whether participants play violent video games on their own, competitively, or cooperatively. The latter may show some positive effects of video game play, both on the player and the player's friends, whereas opposing effects should be found for competitive video games.

To obtain high statistical power and thus to increase the probability to detect significant effects, data were collected via an online survey. The current sample was drawn from the MTurk population (for a review of the trend to rely on MTurk samples in social and personality psychology, see Anderson et al., 2019 ). Samples drawn from MTurk are not demographically representative of the U.S. population as a whole. For example, MTurk samples are disproportionally young and female and they are better educated but tend to be unemployed (for a review, Keith, Tay, & Harms, 2017 ). On the other hand, MTurk samples are more representative of the U.S. population than are college student samples (Paolacci & Chandler, 2014 ) and the pool of participants is geographically diverse. Moreover, MTurk participants appear to be more attentive to survey instructions than are undergraduate students (Hauser & Schwarz, 2016 ). Nevertheless, future research on the impact of violent video game play on the player's social network that employs other samples would improve the generalizability of the present findings.

In conclusion, violent video game play is not only associated with increased aggression in the player but also in the player's social network. In fact, increased aggression due to violent video game play appears to instigate further aggression in the player's social network. This study thus provides suggestive evidence that not only players of violent video games are more aggressive, but also individuals become more aggressive who do not play violent video games themselves but are connected to others who do play.

Greitemeyer T. The contagious impact of playing violent video games on aggression: Longitudinal evidence . Aggressive Behavior . 2019; 45 :635–642. 10.1002/ab.21857 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

1 Participant's perceived deprivation was positively related to both violent video game exposure, r (2,502) = 0.08, p < .001, and reported aggression, r (2,502) = 0.14, p < .001. However, the relationship between violent video game exposure and reported aggression, r (2,502) = 0.15, p < .001, was relatively unaffected when controlling for perceived deprivation, r (2,499) = 0.14, p < .001.

2 Given that the measures of violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior violated the normal distribution, Spearman's ρ coefficients were also calculated. However, the pattern of finding was very similar (e.g., the crucial relationship between the participant's aggression and friends’ amount of violent video game play was 0.18 [Pearson] and 0.17 [Spearman]). All these analyses can be obtained from the author upon request.

3 When dropping friends’ amount of violent video game play from the analysis, the participant's amount of violent video game play at Time 1 still did not predict participant's aggression at Time 2, t = 0.44, β = −.01, 95% CI = (− 0.02, 0.01), p = .657 (when controlling for participant's aggression at Time 1, participant sex, and age).

4 Given that violent video games primarily model physical aggression, violent video games should have a stronger effect on the player's physical aggression than on other types of aggression. In fact, the impact of the participant's amount of violent video game play at Time 1 on the participant's physical aggression at Time 2, t = 1.49, β = .04, 95% CI = (− 0.00, 0.02), p = .136 (when controlling for the participant's physical aggression at Time 1), was more pronounced than the impact on the participant's relational aggression at Time 2, t = 0.52, β = .02, 95% CI = (− 0.01, 0.02), p = .603 (when controlling for the participant's relational aggression at Time 1), but both effects were not significant.

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Video Games — The Effects of Video Games

The Effects of Video Games

Categories: Video Games Violence in Video Games

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Words: 1134 |

Published: Aug 14, 2018

Words: 1134 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Work Cited:

Szycik, Gregor R.. "Lack of Evidence That Neural Empathic Responses Are Blunted in Excessive Users of Violent Video Games: An fMRI Study." Frontiers. 8 Mar. 2017. Web. 11 Dec. 2017.
ScienceDaily. "Violent video games found not to affect empathy: Study finds no link between long-term playing of violent video games and changes in empathetic neural responses." ScienceDaily. 17 Mar. 2017. Web. 11 Dec. 2017.
Leonard, Andrew. "Video Game Culture Does Not Promote Antisocial Behaviors." Violent Video Games, edited by Roman Espejo, Greenhaven Press, 2015.

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Introduction

School performance, effects on social relationships.

The society has been immensely influenced by the technological changes, which are reshaping some of the activities. The emerging technologies in one way or another have affected every member of society, irrespective of age.

Video Games have had the greatest influence on the lives of children. Children no longer appreciate the outdoor games as was before, as most of their time is spend indoors playing video games.

Although this trend may have a positive impact on the lives of the concerned children as far as their knowledge of computer is concerned, there are various negative impacts.

Various educationists have confirmed that outdoor plays are very important to the development and growth of children.

It helps them develop socially as they meet with their friends and learn to share discussions, get involved in physical activities and develop physically through such games. The paper talks about some of the negative effects of computer games (Finkel, 1995).

It is established through research that computer games do not help children grow academically. In fact, computer games contribute to inactivity of body cells, which might lead to oversight hence causing diseases such as hypertension and diabetes.

Moreover, indoor games contribute to poor academic performance among students because most of the time is spend on useless games that do not offer any academic lessons.

Lastly, computer games lead to the development of antisocial behavior whereby a student is not interested in interacting with his or her peers.

Available literature shows that more children are growing obese owing to the fact that they spend little time exercising and engage frequently with the computer.

Research shows that children who take part in physical exercises are more healthy, intelligent, and active in class. The study conducted by American Heart Association proved that children are contracting heart diseases mainly because of lack of physical activity.

The research indicated that the number of obese children increased by four percent in 1974. Those affected were children aged six to eleven years.

However, the percentage increase could not be compared with the study conducted in 2006 whereby the increase rate was seventeen percent. As from 1971 to 2006, the number of adolescents thought to be obese increased from 6.1 percent to 17.6 percent.

The percentage increase was shocking. Furthermore, the increase was attributed to lack of physical activity and video games (Wiegman, & van Schie, 1998).

Overweight is a costly condition that leads to a number of illnesses among school going children. According to experts at the University of Michigan, obese children have higher risks of contracting diseases such as diabetes, heart diseases, and high blood pressure.

Other illnesses associated with overweight include high cholesterol levels in the body, hyperlipidemia, sleep apnea, respiratory problems, gastrointestinal malfunctions, early adolescence, and finally mental problems.

Studies show that obese children tend to have a low sense of worth and despair.

As AHA records show, obese children are likely to be obese when they attain the adulthood age. This would even cause more problems because they would be exposed to a number of diseases.

A study conducted by Media Literacy Clearinghouse indicated that children had developed a habit towards computer games. Video games had gained relevance among children aged eight and eighteen years to an extent that the rate at which children played computer games rose from an average of 26 minutes in 1999 to 73 minutes in 2009.

Generally, the rate at which children interacted with the computer daily rose from six hours in 1999 to seven hours in 2009. A report compiled in 2004 at the University Hospital of Zurich revealed that a strong link between obesity and video games exist.

It can be concluded that video games do not help children in any way but instead it affects their health. Video games interfere with the children’s eating habits because such children would tend to consume food with high calories.

In this regard, parents need to monitor the behavior of their children as regards to physical fitness.

In the United States, a study conducted to ascertain the effects of computer games on the performance of students proved that PlayStations and other video games such as Xbox Video affects the concentration of children in class.

Furthermore, the study revealed that children who are like using playing video games could not compete favorably with those who prefer physical games. One of the researchers was quoted saying that the performance of students who engage in physical exercises will always improve with time.

Boys are affected more by the new trend since they would rarely improve in class. Their performance would always remain stagnant for a period.

Moreover, boys cannot develop skills that would help them to read and write well in case they are allowed to interact with the computer frequently (Sakurai, 1984).

It should be noted that video games might not necessarily cause poor performance among school going children but the time spent in watching the games or playing them would consume the time that a student would be expected to read, do some homework, and write a good composition.

Definitely, a student would register a poor grade in case he or she does not engage in a serious research. Video games have a tendency of instilling negative reading attitudes to students. This is because a student would find reading a storybook or solving a mathematics problem boring.

Video games are very fast and demand a higher concentration unlike other academic activities that need time for conceptualization. In a joint study conducted in Australia, researchers concluded that video games affect the performance of students in many ways.

Students who spend time playing video games would always perform dismally in class. In fact, the study revealed that computer games do not help children perform well in any of the subjects. This is because students who spend time watching and playing computer games would always score low in each subject.

This research contradicts some of the assumptions that computer games help children to perform well in some subjects. The Australian study revealed that there is no single positive correlation between academic performance and computer games.

Video games are known to influence the cognitive and educational dexterities of children. Moreover, the games can as well as define the children’s social relationships. In a traditional setting, the relationship between the child and the parent or other senior members of society is clearly defined.

The video games have changed meaning that social relations are no longer the same. Studies indicate that video games, especially those that are violent, reshape the behavior of children. Moreover, video games could contain some sort of competition and aggression, which affect the reasoning of children.

In the current society, the rate at which conflicts occur in society has increased. Youths are currently violent because of the new games. The main objective of video games, according to Nintendo and Sega Genesis Center, is violence.

Any game played by children via the computer does not have anything new other than violent content. The companies specializing in selling computer games would convince parents that the games are non-violent but in the real sense, they are not.

A study conducted in 1998 confirmed that many children, over 80%, were familiar to a violent game referred to as Duke Nukem. Unfortunately, only 5% of parents were aware of the game meaning that children are access even those games that are supposed to be accessed by only the adults.

This trend affects the social life of children. In 1999, students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado engaged in a destructive demonstration mainly because of the influence of computer games.

Students shot at their fellow teens and other people because they experienced it through video games. Such kind of behavior is destructive because it could lead to social anomy (Griffith, 1999).

Studies across the world indicate that violent video games increase an individual’s hostility and aggression. Aggressive games would lead to a habit whereby students prefer to play the games rather than engage in physical exercises.

This is even related to overweight. Children who are used to video games tend to be indifferent and unresponsive to the sufferings of other children. They would easily bully their fellow students without mercy.

Finkel, S. (1995). Causal analysis with panel data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Griffith, M. (1999). Violent video games and aggression: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior , 4(2), 203-212.

Sakurai, S. (1984). Construction of the Social Desirability Scale for Children. Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology , 32(2), 310-314.

Wiegman, O., & van Schie, E. (1998). Video game playing and its relations with aggressive and pro-social behavior. British Journal of Social Psychology , 37(2), 367- 378.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Introduction

Normative Beliefs About Aggression, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

Family Environment, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

The Current Study

Materials and Methods

Video Game Questionnaire (VGQ)

Aggression Questionnaire (AQ)

Family Environment Scale (FES)

Normative Beliefs About Aggression Scale (NOBAGS)

Data Analysis

Correlation Analysis Among Study Variables

Mediating Effect Analysis

Moderated Mediation Effect Analysis

Main Findings and Implications

Limitations

Author Contributions

Conflict of Interest Statement

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Analysis: Why it’s time to stop blaming video games for real-world violence

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The contagious impact of playing violent video games on aggression: Longitudinal evidence

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. Theoretical perspective

1.2. Effects of violent video game play on aggression

1.3. The contagious effects of aggression

1.4. The present research

2.1. Participants

2.2. Procedure and measures

3.1. Time 1 ( N = 2,502)

3.2. Time 1 and Time 2 ( N = 980)

4. DISCUSSION

The Effects of Video Games

Work Cited: