Verbal Aggression in Video Games
Introduction
Video games today have been the subject of many studies on aggression. In Craig Anderson’s and Karen Dill’s article "Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behavior." They hypothesized that even brief exposure to violent games can temporarily increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants. From this I formed my hypothesis that those who frequently portray themselves as violent characters in video games may lose their sensitivity towards violence and may automatically find themselves acting more aggressive in game settings than they do in reality.
I first defined verbal aggression as threatening behavior with intent to psychologically hurt or damage such as teasing, taunting, threatening, and name-calling.
To find verbal aggression I began by looking at in-game chat and the verbal aggression used there. I decided to remain impartial and act merely as an observer; therefore I didn’t interact at all with those involved in messaging. I first began with a game that has received heavy criticism for its violent content: Grand Theft Auto. I found that although this game’s chat was littered with verbal aggression, it was not necessarily directed towards other players as often as it was used to describe the actions carried out in the game. There was however, more profanity, name-calling and teasing from one player to another. After more consideration, I decided that this wasn’t a legitimate example to determine if violent games truly cause aggression among the players. This is because those who choose to play violent video games are probably more inclined towards violence initially. Those who chose to play non-violent games most likely make that choice based on a dislike for violence. Therefore, a violent and graphic game like Grand Theft Auto wouldn’t make a good sample for the purpose of this experiment.
Methods
Instead I chose to go with World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has about 11.5 million players currently. With participation that vast, I think that the average player is more likely to be more of an average citizen without either extremely violent or non-violent tendencies. Although the violent events are not as graphic or realistic as other games, they still served as a better indicator than games that may appeal to just aggressive personalities.
I looked at in-game chat for an hour for both violent and non-violent game events. I had absolutely no participation in the dialogue, I was only a spectator. Out of these messages, I took note of every time teasing, name-calling and threats occurred and calculated a percentage out of the total number of comments. As an interesting side note I also noted profanity use, which isn’t necessarily related to aggression but seems to show up much more in violent and stressful situations. I took the total percentage of comments that were aggressive and dissected them to show the percentage of certain types of aggressive comments made during messaging.
Results
I took a violent game event and watched as the players completed the quest. I don’t play video games so I couldn’t honestly give much of an account of the quest, but I do know that as the fight escalated and the situation became more frustrating and stressful, the instances of name-calling and swearing increased. Teasing was more present during the earlier stages of the quest when things were moving slowly and it was just beginning.
Introduction
Video games today have been the subject of many studies on aggression. In Craig Anderson’s and Karen Dill’s article "Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behavior." They hypothesized that even brief exposure to violent games can temporarily increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants. From this I formed my hypothesis that those who frequently portray themselves as violent characters in video games may lose their sensitivity towards violence and may automatically find themselves acting more aggressive in game settings than they do in reality.
I first defined verbal aggression as threatening behavior with intent to psychologically hurt or damage such as teasing, taunting, threatening, and name-calling.
To find verbal aggression I began by looking at in-game chat and the verbal aggression used there. I decided to remain impartial and act merely as an observer; therefore I didn’t interact at all with those involved in messaging. I first began with a game that has received heavy criticism for its violent content: Grand Theft Auto. I found that although this game’s chat was littered with verbal aggression, it was not necessarily directed towards other players as often as it was used to describe the actions carried out in the game. There was however, more profanity, name-calling and teasing from one player to another. After more consideration, I decided that this wasn’t a legitimate example to determine if violent games truly cause aggression among the players. This is because those who choose to play violent video games are probably more inclined towards violence initially. Those who chose to play non-violent games most likely make that choice based on a dislike for violence. Therefore, a violent and graphic game like Grand Theft Auto wouldn’t make a good sample for the purpose of this experiment.
Methods
Instead I chose to go with World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has about 11.5 million players currently. With participation that vast, I think that the average player is more likely to be more of an average citizen without either extremely violent or non-violent tendencies. Although the violent events are not as graphic or realistic as other games, they still served as a better indicator than games that may appeal to just aggressive personalities.
I looked at in-game chat for an hour for both violent and non-violent game events. I had absolutely no participation in the dialogue, I was only a spectator. Out of these messages, I took note of every time teasing, name-calling and threats occurred and calculated a percentage out of the total number of comments. As an interesting side note I also noted profanity use, which isn’t necessarily related to aggression but seems to show up much more in violent and stressful situations. I took the total percentage of comments that were aggressive and dissected them to show the percentage of certain types of aggressive comments made during messaging.
Results
I took a violent game event and watched as the players completed the quest. I don’t play video games so I couldn’t honestly give much of an account of the quest, but I do know that as the fight escalated and the situation became more frustrating and stressful, the instances of name-calling and swearing increased. Teasing was more present during the earlier stages of the quest when things were moving slowly and it was just beginning.
The non-violent quest I used to study verbal aggression was a get-together among player’s characters. Here, there were equal incidents of teasing, less name-calling and no verbal threats.
This shows that verbal aggression is more present in games where violence is used versus where it is not used.
Discussion
Although the results did match my hypothesis, there are several points I would like you to consider. The events weren’t as violent as other games, therefore, I doubt if gamers are influenced as much by a fantasy game that they can’t connect with reality as they would be by a game that is made to imitate modern life in real-life settings. The samples of in-game messaging I used were limited to an hour of time worth of messaging. This is a very small sample; therefore it might not be a good representation of W.O.W. in-game chat in its entirety. Also, as I found the stress in the situation increased, so did the verbal aggression, so verbal aggression could be attributed more to stressful situations than violence in the game.
For the future, I think it might be interesting to have random groups play a more violent game and a non-violent game and determine the presence of verbal aggression in that setting so that I could ensure it was not merely the players with violent tendencies playing violent games and acting aggressive.
For the purposes of this quiz, I think the results supported the hypothesis, but a sample of participants taken at random and given two separate games to try might be a better way to test the hypothesis.
No comments:
Post a Comment