Models for Aggressive Behavior: The Attributes of Violent Characters in Popular Video Games

Communication Studies, Dec 2005 by Lachlan, Kenneth A, Smith, Stacy L, Tamborini, Ron

The first research question asked about the nature of characters presented as violent perpetrators in popular video games. For this analysis, the statistical reporting will be kept to simple descriptive statistics. The remaining two questions addressed differences in the context of violence in accordance with these figures. The significance of these findings was determined in two steps. First, a chi-square analysis was executed to examine the distribution of violence in video game segments. Only those analyses that are significant at the p

Results

Demographics of Violent Characters

The first research question asked what demographic characteristics were common among violent actors in popular video games. This was done in order to get an idea of what types of characters are present that children may readily emulate due to perceived similarity with the perpetrator. Across 1389 violent acts in 60 popular video games, 988 of the acts (71%) were committed by human characters. The only other perpetrator types worthy of note are that of animal (89,6.4%) and anthropomorphized animal (57, 4.1%). Clearly, the majority of characters being presented as violent actors are human.

Given that most of these characters are human, and that video games are popular among teenagers and children, the next analysis moved to examining the age of these violent actors. Once again, a there was a high presence of violent perpetrators that are children or teenagers would give game players aggressive models that they could very easily identify with and be more likely to imitate. However, adults accounted for 56% of the violent acts committed in the sample, while children (103, 7.4%) and teens (35, 2.5%) accounted for substantially smaller proportions.

The next analyses concerned perpetrator sex. Since we know that on average boys spend more time playing video games than girls do (Federal Trade Commission, 2000; Sherry et al, in press), it was proposed that an abundance of male perpetrators may at least provide gender-specific aggressive role models to the young boys playing violent video games. Across all violent interactions, males overwhelmingly committed the most acts (848, 61%), as compared to females (227, 16.3%). When excluding non-human cases in which the sex of the perpetrator is unknown, this difference becomes even more apparent. When considering only human characters, 79% of all violent acts were committed by males, compared to only 21% by females.

The ethnicity of violent characters was also considered. Most violent perpetrators in the sample were Caucasian (563,40.5%), with Asian/Pacific Islander (112,8%) coming in a distant second. For these reasons, ethnicity was collapsed into Caucasian/Asian/ Other for later analyses.

Finally, perpetrator likeability was evaluated, based on whether or not the characters engaged in behaviors that were good or bad. The findings here were a little surprising, but nonetheless worthy of note. Overwhelmingly, violent and aggressive acts were not committed by characters that were portrayed as good, as good characters accounted for only 10% of the violent acts in the sample. It should be pointed out, however, that this was in keeping with the N.T.V.S. definition of a "good" character as being one who put the needs of others ahead of his/her own. More often than not, there was insufficient information to make this determination, and the majority of the perpetrators in the sample fell into the category of "neutral."