@Shoehorn O'Plenty

I know; I never said it had to be harmful :P But what I was pointing out is that that...whoever it was (let's say hotdevil666), is very wrong; games may not influence necessarily VIOLENT aggression, but they do influence non-violent aggression, such as competitive. He makes it sound like there cannot be an influence of aggression of ANY kind.

“violent games cause aggression”. Is that the name of the study, because if so then...

"It is important to remember that the data presented here are correlational, and we cannot conclude that playing violent video games caused the changes in aggressive cognition and behavior."

Is a load of bullpucky (swearing sensor activated, actual respose truncated).

These guys are out to push an agenda and make a fast buck on the TV circuit with the hope they won't look like a huge (moron) like the other (zealots) out there.

My two biggest questions are:

Why was a second aggression sample only done with the elementary school kids?

How significant was the aggression increase? I look at the table in the study and I have to wonder what the difference between a .33 and .44 overall physical aggression index is.


Andrew Eisen

In before JT says this is a study that proves a causal link in a court filing and/or interview.

uumm......

taken from
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/aggressive
"synonyms aggressive, militant, assertive, self-assertive mean obtrusively energetic especially in pursuing particular goals. aggressive implies a disposition to dominate often in disregard of others' rights or in determined and energetic pursuit of one's ends . militant also implies a fighting disposition but suggests not self-seeking but devotion to a cause, movement, or principle . assertive suggests bold self-confidence in expression of opinion . self-assertive connotes forwardness or brash self-confidence ."

aggressive/aggressivestion is a nautal partof being human f you are nottaught howto do with it(and other feelings/emotions)and how to channel them and eccsivie energy then anything in life will make you aggressive........

seems the tags are stable its just acting odd.

Aren't elementary school kids not supposed to play violent games anyways...?

@(i think its HotDevil666)

Yeah, I agree
lol to the gay song part

I'm gonna play devil's advocate for a moment here...

"No. Aggressive people love aggressive video games. You are aggressive not because the game teaches you to be aggressive, that’s stupid!"

It may seem like common sense to you, but that doesn't mean it's true. Loads of things that seem obvious to anybody turn out to be false when you look at them in a systematic way. And the guy actually preempted your argument: it's (partly) a longitudinal study (something a lot of people around here have criticized previous studies for NOT being) that shows that kids who played violent games became more aggressive over time than those who didn't. Mind you, it still didn't show causation, but then it doesn't claim to. It's right there in the study:

"It is important to remember that the data presented here are correlational, and we cannot conclude that playing violent video games caused the changes in aggressive cognition and behavior."

This is, as far as I can tell, a legitimate attempt to contribute to our knowledge about these issues. You're welcome to dislike the results, but you need to come up with better arguments against them...

Apart from that, one thing I really liked was the idea that if games can teach aggression, they can teach any number of other things as well. In fact, haven't we been saying all along that gaming can have all sorts of positive effects? It seems to me that, like in medicine, if something has an effect, it can also have side effects.

This is very interesting. Definitely more followup research is needed.

Interesting, really. As long as people don't assume Aggressive = violent, I agree with this - violent games CAN bring out a bit of aggression. They also help burn it off, in my experience.

Age appropriate games FTW!

Yes... because puberty never makes young men more aggressive. I know that I was exactly the same in 9th grade as I was in 3rd, and that my taste for more mature content didn't increase at all.

I haven't read the study yet but looking at the works cited sees lots of Craig Anderson papers being cited. Therefore the whole study is questionable in my mind. In none of the Anderson papers that I have read has he actually defined what he means by "aggression." In fact, the closest I've seen him get to defining it is offering examples of aggression in a diagram. In that diagram he listed "raising one's voice" as an example of aggression. I'm no expert but I would put yelling in a whole different category than killing multiple people.

aggression is such a soft word though. it's right there on the precipice of being "bad" but just enough that scientists and researchers (not always the same) feel safe enough to use it.

aggression is a natural animal instinct, not just human. aggression is why you have an Alpha male in a wolf pack. aggression is why the human social hierarchy is as wonky as it is. when young, physical aggression means more than when an adult, and then the role is reversed to allow intellectual aggression to take over.

while their study is interesting, it once again misses the true mark of why people are violent by ignoring the human factor.

[...] Violent video games studied as a teaching tool (Gentile & Gentile, 2007) Now Andrew Eisen asked some questions about the study in gamepolitics.com and I can’t help but to try to answer them. The best practice of getting the right answers is to e-mail the authors themselves, the contact info should be on the first page. [...]

@ WalkerT

It's self-assessment of their hostility, not aggression. There's a difference. Unless GP can clarify which assessment is he referring to.

I would like to note, teach it does not, but, influence, yes. Furthermore, I think there are kinds of aggressions, or rather, levels for it. For example, when I'm playing multiplayer with a friend, I want to win, that is an aggression right there; though non-violent. Same with, say, a boss fight.

@Neko:

There are different kinds of aggression. Some can be harmful, like the drunk guy in the bar who starts itching for a fight asking "Are you looking at me?", or people who drive aggressively, speeding and taking risks on the roads.

However, there are many examples of aggression that are completely harmless. You could take an aggressive strategy and attack early in an RTS game, or in chess. You could put your players forward in attacking positions as a soccer manager. You could ring up employers asking about your application instead of sitting back and waiting for feedback. I would call a certain lawyers constant filings and motions and the language contained therein EXTREMELY aggressive, yet it does not harm anyone (physically, professionally is another question!). Aggressive marketing strategies, aggressive lines of inquiry, aggressive medical treatments, where is the violence in any of these things?

I think that a lot of these studies contain a massive flaw which is: confusing aggression with excitement. If you are being tested and they give you a game to play, you aren't going to slack at the game, you are going to try your best at it. If it is a challenging game, then this makes the effort higher and it's exciting to try and beat this challenge.

I would love to see the results if this exact test were done on people who watched their favourite sports team play in the finals of a competition. Or with a sample group of people who just watched their favourite band play live. Maybe even on people before and after taking part in a debate.

At least the guy came out and said that it was correlational, not causal.

Who cares if games 'teach' aggression? How much different is that from a son playing in a football game, and the father comes out and tells him to "kick some ass?" Games present challenges to the player. The enemies in the games aren't going to just lie down and let you walk all over them, you have to approach the situation in an aggressive manner.

Aggressive =/= violent. Aggression is a perfectly natural human response to a situation.

How significant was the aggression increase? I look at the table in the study and I have to wonder what the difference between a .33 and .44 overall physical aggression index is.

My question is how does this compare to their control group. Did they have one?

We know the kids who played more violent games more often were more aggressive than the kids who played less. But that's merely a correlation, not causation.

But it's not clear how much the physical aggression index increased over the course of the study for those who played less... Was it a similar increase? IE do grade 3-5 students just get more aggressive over the course of the year anyway?

@ Jabrwock

In this study, you don't need a control group, that's for an experiment study. But according to the correlations, it seems that kids who play less violent video games are less aggressive according to peers and teachers' report. If that's what you're trying to find for a control group.

for your last question, Figure 1 of the paper is what it is trying to answer on how much the physical index is increased and what are the factors involved.

Strangely, if I took some time to look at, it seems that physical aggression at time 1 seem to have a higher number to time 2 physical aggression than multiple violent video games play at time 1. Wish they'd give the effect size.
Although, I wish I knew how to read logistic regression more clearly.

Self-assessment?? With Elementary school kids?

Instant Fail.

I'm late on this, but hey no-one else has picked up on it....

All this study has proved (assuming the date is right) is that 490 kids (I'd love someone to let me know how old 3-5 grade is btw) rated themselves as getting more aggressive as they got older.

Big woop! Growing up is a pretty hectic time with a large number of hormonal changes and other stresses in your life that (in my considered opinion) would be far more likely to account for any change in aggression levels.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not convinced either way about whether games cause agression in kids, but this study is BS!

EvilJez and others:

Please, for the love of Truth, reread (or read!) the study. It does not attempt to show a causal link between video games and violence. It simply shows - and clearly states - a correlation between the two. It makes no claims one way or the other on which is responsible for the other - it doesn't even claim that there's an actual link, just that these two things show a similar rise. It's a starting point.

Note that the "video games = violence" isn't even the focus of the study - the ability of video games to teach is!

Personally I think that the aggression comes from the difficulty of the game. You are less likely to get upset if you understand the controls fully.

Or..................
Maybe just maybe people get angry it happens.

@Nekojin

I had read the article... and you're quite right the people who did the study were at least inteligent enough to see that there was only a corrolation between the two pieces of information.

That doesn't mean that such a bloody aweful piece of research (if you can call it that) won't be missreprisentent at a later date.

My beef was with the quality of the research itself, not the conclusions that were drawn from it!

Haven't we had aggression even before games were made, and there are others studies that show games not creating aggression.

P.S. Jack would you kindly answer my question from the Hot Coffee suit article?

-DarthCylon

Someone might have already said this (I'm not going to check 50+ comments), but this study inthe first line said that the data are CORRELATIONAL. However, politicians like Senator Yee will spin this into saying that games cause school shootings.

@ Austin Lewis

If your moral code was "unrealistically high", chances are you're one of the least common personality types, so who knows--you might throw off sample averages. And of course any study would drop your data--a person with a truly admirable moral code and the personality/nature to adhere to it is hardly going to provide a nice example of potential aggression increased by a simple violent game.

All of which is said tongue-in-cheek, yet at the same time, it's a very real possibility that the test administrators (obviously less moral than you if they don't even believe in the possibility of such integrity) are ignorant of or intending to manipulate tests to reflect only specific categories amongst the wide variety of human personalities.

Obviously limiting test subjects to certain extreme ADHD or personality disorder subjects would be too obvious a bias toward those easily sparked into aggression or violence, but there are less blatant--if no less egregious--manners of skewing results.

@ Matt

That's an excellent breakdown of why these tests are so maddeningly useless. Children don't learn appropriate social behavior only by observing good examples of such, but also by observing social or legal reactions to inappropiate behavior. As it is a vital skill in so sociable a species as humans for all of us to be adept at differentiating appropriate or inappriate behavior in one situation versus another. Children also learn this early on--is there anyone who doesn't remember being constantly told "Inside voices!" or otherwise being reminded to suit behavior to situation?

Given this, even if we accept--for the sake of argument--that playing violent video games contributes to increased feelings of aggression or hostility in children within certain age ranges, it would seem foolish at best--disingenuous more likely--to presume children are incapable of realizing that the characters' behavior in a fictional world and situations unlike any in real life would be acceptable real-world behavior or attitudes.

While I do believe video games teach or at least hone problem-solving capabilities, I'm at a loss to see how running a known imaginary character though even the most violent actions would teach children to use violence as a problem-solving outlet in the real world. They DO know the difference between game enemies versus real people, game cultures versus real society, game graphics versus real scenery, and button presses to drive a character to violence in situations requiring it versus harming a real person; or if they don't, that is a fault in their own mentality or the parenting of their guardians

But because it would be immoral to put children into a situation where they might use actual violence if violent game-playing encouaged such behavior in real-life situations, the testers use measures of aggression that are most likely greeted by participants (especially those who know they're participating in some form of study) as another "play" situation, thus guaranteeing that any aggression displayed isn't a valid measure of real-world aggression anyway.

On a less serious note, I thought the newer studies suggest that right about at 18 months, the child's awareness of fantasy or play versus real activities pops up, but I suppose it hardly matters the precise age since either way that awareness is present in 5-17 year olds ;-)

You know what teaches aggression? Studies that claim video games cause aggression. Yes. That is what really causes it.

Video Games do not cause violence!! They teach it but they do teach violence. Game like GTA are very voilent and should not be allowed to be sold to little kids or kids with mental issues. It should still be sold just not to them. And parents should not be able to buy it for their kids.