Study reveals violent video games don’t cause violent behavior in players

It has always been said that there is a connection between players’ behavior and violent video games, however, a new study has proved that this is not the case and there is no link between both of them.

Researchers from University of York conducted a series of experiments on over 3,000 participants, in which they found no evidence related to support the theory of violent video games leading to aggressive behavior in the players.

The main idea behind games is to expose players to various concepts such as violence which will enable them to use it practically in real life, a concept called ‘priming’. To prove this statement, one of the experiments required participants to play a game where they either had to avoid car collisions with trucks or avoid a mouse from a cat. The players were also shown different images and were asked to label them, reported Science Daily.

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Dr. David Zendle from the University’s department of Computer Science explained, “If players are ‘primed’ through immersing themselves in the concepts of the game, they should be able to categorize the objects associated with this game more quickly in the real world once the game had concluded.

“Across the two games we didn't find this to be the case. Participants who played a car-themed game were no quicker at categorizing vehicle images, and indeed in some cases their reaction time was significantly slower.”

University of York explained another part of experiment that compared player reactions to two combat games. One of the games included ‘ragdoll physics’ to initiate realistic character behavior and the other game did not and was in an animated world that didn’t look real. Another game was to complete word puzzles that expected violent words to be chosen by the players that played ‘ragdoll physics’. The results were compared to two war games where realistic and unrealistic soldier behaviors by enemy characters were used respectively.

“There was no difference in priming between the game that employed 'ragdoll physics' and the game that didn't, as well as no significant difference between the games that used 'real' and 'unreal' solider tactics.

“The findings suggest that there is no link between these kinds of realism in games and the kind of effects that video games are commonly thought to have on their players,” concluded Dr. Zendle.

However, these findings have only been tested on adults and according to Dr. Zendle, more work is required to understand if there is any other impact on young children players.