Concern about the potential impact of violent video games dates back to the mid-1970s when the game Death Race featured the player as an automobile driver whose goal was to run over screaming "gremlins" transforming them into tombstones.
While widespread public protest resulted in Death Race being subsequently recalled, concern was reignited decades later with the release of much more life-like violent video games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter.
It was developments such as these, and contemporaneous developments in cinema and television resulting from computer graphic facilities, which led no lesser authority than the doyen of violence treatment programmes, Arnold Goldstein, to routinely parody Huxley's Brave New World.
Goldstein described a future media innovation "haemovision" in which holographic blood and gore would spurt from the TV screen into the living rooms and nurseries across the nation.
Notwithstanding the often made assumption that increased violence in the media, and particularly the increased opportunity for participatory violence by way of video game activity, comparatively little objective research has been carried out evaluating the effects of video games on downstream aggression and violent behaviour.
A just published study by Ferguson and colleagues 1 addresses this subject.
In reviewing available research on this subject, Ferguson et al note that previous meta analyses have, at best, only shown a modest connection between video game playing and violent behaviour, and they further comment that the available research fails to adequately control for the influence of other factors, such as genetic propensities for violence, exposure to family violence, and gender.
The authors report on two investigations, the first of which examined the relationship between volunteers who were assigned to violent and non-violent video game playing, followed immediately by another game which allowed for the measurement of hostility in the players.
This exercise failed to support the notion that exposure to a violent video game resulted in short-term aggression in a laboratory task.
Those individuals who played the violent video game were no more aggressive than those who played a non-violent game, and at least in the experimental environment it was clear that behaviour and emotions mobilised in the context of video game activity did not spill over into another context.
In a second study the same authors surveyed students in relation to their video game behaviour and also sought information on social and demographic factors and their disclosing of violent acts using a standardised questionnaire.
While simple correlational analysis found some relationship between video games and self-reported violent crime, once the subjects' exposure to family violence was controlled for, that relationship disappeared.
Most importantly, however, their sophisticated statistical analysis did suggest that there was some interaction between an existing aggressive personality trait and violent video games and self-reported violent crime.
In other words, the research was suggestive that some aggressive individuals may be actively seeking out examples of violence by way of videogame-playing.
The authors conclude that some aggressive individuals may be influenced to commit violent acts through a combination of biological and family violence exposure factors, and may also choose to play violent video games, perhaps using these as a stylistic catalyst.
1: Ferguson C. J., Rueda S., Cruz A., Ferguson D., Fritz S., and Smith S. (2008) Violent Video Games and Aggression: Causal Relationship or Biproduct of Family Violence and Intrinsic Violence Motivation, Criminal Justice and Behavior, 35, pp 311-332.
Got a story for Corrections News or want to request the print edition?
Email commdesk@corrections.govt.nz or phone (04) 460 3365.
ISSN 1178-8453