Effects of a violent video game depend on whether you're Superman or the Joker

After Aaron Alexis shot dead 12 people at the Navy Yard in Washington DC in September, media outlets were quick to highlight his reported enjoyment of violent video games. To many, this was just the latest example of how violent games can foster real-life aggression. There is research supporting such a link, although experts are far from reaching a consensus view on the matter. Take, for example, the letter written in September by a group of 230 scholars, calling for the American Psychological Association to adopt a more nuanced position on the nature of the evidence. A refrain from many sceptical researchers in this field is that the situation is complex. To claim baldly that violent video games cause real-life aggression is an oversimplification, they say. Now a brief but elegant new study has done a useful job highlighting some of these intricacies. Christian Happ and his colleagues recruited 60 students (20 men) with varied video gaming experience and had them spend 15 minutes playing the violent and bloody beat-em-up game Mortal Combat vs. DC Universe on the Playstation 3. Some of the participants played the morally good character Superman, while the others played the Joker, the baddie from Batman. Apart from that, the game experience was the same for all participants - their time was spent in hand-to-hand combat against a variety of other computer-controlled game characters. Another twist to the experiment was that before the game began half the participants read a b...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs