Question: As a gamer, do you believe that playing 'violent' games can cause violent tendencys later in life? Alternatively do you believe problem solving and exploration games encourge similar behaviour?

Ben Kenward answered on 10 Jun 2017:

A national task force of American psychologists have fairly confidently concluded that violent games cause aggression (http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/violent-video-games.aspx). There is quite a lot of research so the the conclusions are quite strong. Still, everything isn’t necessarily so clear as you might think. Most studies do one of two things: (1) measure whether people who play violent games are more aggressive – yes they are, but that could be because aggressive people are drawn to violent games; (2) measure in an experiment whether playing a violent game causes aggression in the short term – yes it does, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are long term effects.

I actually have a student who is doing a study on this right now, and we analysed her results yesterday. She did a study with both methods (1) and (2) and found no effect of game violent on aggression at all. Personally I suspect that although we know these effects exist, they are not very strong effects so you won’t always find them.

You have to remember that all these analyses are done on groups of people together. Even if you know that a group of people will become on average a little bit more aggressive from a game, then there are probably some people who wouldn’t be affected at all, and some people who might be affected quite a lot.

As for whether there are effects on things other than violence, the answer is again yes. There’s no doubt you can learn things from playing games. Games can have other positive effects as well. There is one study where people played a game as a helpful superhero, and it made these people a bit more helpful even outside the game (probably just a short-term effect).

Cheers,

Ben