Violence, Games & Art - Part 2

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Summer, 2000 by Thom Gillespie

Around 1953 TV appears, and that seems to mark a steady increase in violent behavior. But around the mid-1980s, the violent games start to appear. I'm wondering if anyone has noticed changes beginning at that point, because it is one thing to watch someone get killed on TV, but it is something else to actually be the cause of that media death.

I don't think there is any research of a longitudinal nature that has looked at penetration of violent video games compared to crimes committed by an age group. There have been a number of studies which compare kids who play a lot of violent video games with kids who play fewer violent games. There are some problems with this research, though. For instance, it was done in the mid-1980s, when most games were not very violent compared to today's first-person shooters, such as Doom, Quake, Thrill Kill, etc. But, even those studies found some effects by looking at dependent variables such as delinquency, teacher's assessments of aggression, and parental assessments of aggression.

What would you expect the imitative effect would be today with the ultra-realistic violent games and the player able to do the violence, as opposed to just watching violence happen on a screen?

Theoretically, I don't see how there couldn't be a difference. I don't see how you can have the experience over and over again, playing with a joystick and pushing a button or pulling a trigger, blowing people up and feeling really good about it--how you can do that over and over again without changing your inhibition to do that. Now, sure you are getting all those messages telling you not to do this or that, but these messages aren't nearly as emotional, as arousing, as packed with physical sensation as the experience of playing the game. I think of the computer game experience as a possible powerful disinhibitor effect, which means that if a kid who plays a lot of those games found himself in a situation with a gun in their hand and a bad guy coming for them, they would shoot faster than a kid who didn't play video games. Now, this is a very different thing to say than to conclude that they will therefore go get a gun and shoot all their friends. But on the one hand, you have disinhibited something, which as a society we try to inhibit very, very strenuously--and on the other hand, is it really very different from running around with your spud gun on your bicycle and shooting each other in 1950 in Middle America?

In the research we have done with first-person video games, one of the most interesting things we found is that the emotional state the player enters while playing is extremely positive. They are way out on the positive end of valence and very aroused. Most other media--TV is a great example--are sort of negative. By and large, people never move. If you show them a really happy thing on TV, they will say they feel good, but TV watching itself as a long-term experience is actually not too powerful, and a slightly negative emotional experience. It can be arousing for moments but not for long, sustained periods. Whereas with these video games, the kids get going and their arousal is up, both physiologically and in terms of self-report. The player records feeling very happy, very positive, so you are pairing a positive emotional state with the act of watching and doing blood and guts. Reinforcement--that is how we get people not to be scared of things. Disinhibiting those acts but not necessarily disinhibiting the planning required to commit that act.