Violent Video Games May Favor Cooperation, Researchers Say

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Jaime Menchén

Violent Video Games May Favor Cooperation, Researchers Say

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Two recent studies refute the idea that violent video games make players more aggressive and antisocial. Actually, researchers argue, playing cooperatively may result on just the opposite.

‘Clearly, research has established there are links between playing violent video games and aggression, but that’s an incomplete picture,’ said Professor David Ewoldsen, who collaborates on both studies. ‘Most of the studies finding links between violent games and aggression were done with people playing alone. The social aspect of today’s video games can change things quite a bit.’

The video games chosen for the experiments were Halo 2 and Unreal Tournament 3. In the first case, 119 participants were distributed in four groups, according to different levels of cooperation or competiveness. Then they would play a game in real life, and researchers would measure their cooperative tendencies.

In the second case, 80 participants would play the game (Unreal Tournament 3) in pairs. They would be coupled with another person, an experimenter who would pretend to be a member of a rival university. Then, researchers measured their levels of aggressiveness and cooperativeness, finding that playing the game helped participants to overcome their differences.

These studies might be too limited in scope to draw any definitive conclusions, but they accurately show the need of approaching (violent) video games in a different way.

Source: The Ohio State University

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

David R. Ewoldsen, Cassie A. Eno, Bradley M. Okdie, John A. Velez, Rosanna E. Guadagno, & Jamie DeCoster (2012). Effect of Playing Violent Video Games Cooperatively or Competitively on Subsequent Cooperative Behavior CYBERPSYCHOLOGY, BEHAVIOR, AND SOCIAL NETWORKING DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0308

John A. Velez, Chad Mahood, David R. Ewoldsen, & Emily Moyer-Gusé (2012). Ingroup Versus Outgroup Conflict in the Context of Violent Video Game Play: The Effect of Cooperation on Increased Helping and Decreased Aggression Communication Research DOI: 10.1177/0093650212456202

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TAGS: cooperation, Halo 2, research, Unreal Tournament, Video games, violence

Anna

I feel as if there is not a lot of research done on gaming. A lot of people assume that people who play violent video games, get bad ideas, and go out and demonstrate them. As a person who plays video games, i would never go out and try to do what I’m doing in a game. The part of knowing what is right and wrong should be there, and if it’s not, i think thats where a lot of times things go wrong. If video games are so violent why haven’t TV shows, and movies been looked into? Most of our life we consume violent stuff, even the news shows it, so what’s the difference of playing a game, or watching it be done in a movie or in real life on the news? Behaving is as if the game is really life is a bad thing, there has got to be a line where people know what’s real, and what isn’t.
Paige

I dont think that violent video games are whats making kids more aggresive these days. I feel that conformity is taking a huge part in this. Nothing with video games. Other kids that are normative social influence will do anything to get whoever they desire to like them and be accepted in their group tend to sometimes go towards the kids that do act aggresive by whatever means. So then those kids start to be informational social influence and look to those aggresive kids for guidence and conform and become just as aggresive as that same kid he hangs around with.