We’ve all heard people blame mass shootings on violent video games- but is there validity to that claim? A study published in Collabra: Psychology refutes the claims and finds that playing shooter video games does not lead to an increase in aggression.
With increasing mass violence comes a desire to understand what could be driving this behavior. Whether or not violent video games could be a contributing factor has been a heavily debated and highly contentious conversation in the field for several decades. While earlier research seems to support that violent video games cause aggression, these studies have been criticized for poor quality of data and analyses.
“A central shortcoming of evidence so far is poor data quality: Most studies investigate the effects of playing violent video games without actually measuring such play,” wrote study authors Niklas Johannes and colleagues. “If we don’t measure the behavior in question, we cannot advice policymakers on its effects”
These issues can make for inaccurate meta-analyses. This study seeks to provide a methodologically sound insight into the link between aggression and playing violent video games.
Johannes and colleagues utilized 1,092 players of Apex Legends and 1,488 players of Outriders to serve as their sample. All participants had to be active players of the game in the previous 2 weeks, speak English, and live in the US, UK, or Canada. Participants were asked to partake in 3 waves of the study, which were around 2 weeks apart. Researchers measured time spent playing the game and aggressive affect.
Results showed that for both shooter games, there was no significant effect of playing the violent video game on aggressive affect. Additionally, there was no significant effect of aggressive affect on playing the violent video games, meaning that in weeks where players were feeling angrier about other factors, they did not turn to playing video games significantly more.
This study found that to see a half-point increase on the aggressive affect scale, each player would need to play for 25-50 hours more per day, which is not possible. These results are consistent with more recent meta-analyses and studies that show no significant link between violent video game playing and aggression.
This study took steps into better addressing the highly debated question of if video games cause aggression and violence. Despite this, it has some limitations. One such limitation is that players self-selected to participate, making it possible that people who decided to participate find the game more relaxing than other players do. Additionally, only two video games were utilized, and they are both shooter games; future research could test video games showing other types of violence.
“Research on games featuring violence has long been a field of low credibility that suffered from poor research practices as well as poor data quality,” the researchers concluded. “Like few other fields, it can benefit from open collaborations with industry partners within a framework of open data. We demonstrate how such open data enable the field to test research questions in a cumulative manner. Playing two online shooters didn’t cause meaningful changes in aggression; we’re certain future work can use the same data to answer more questions about the psychology of play.”
The study, “Time Spent Playing Two Online Shooters Has No Measurable Effect on Aggressive Affect“, was authored by Niklas Johannes, Matti Vuorre, Kristoffer Magnusson, and Andrew K. Przybylski.
