If you’re a fan of video games, you’ll have seen the scary headlines. Maybe there’s even an adult in your life who’s worried that playing a violent video game will turn you into a criminal yourself.

Now you can reassure them that there’s no need to panic. Aggression and violence are not a direct result of playing a violent video game - phew!

That’s according to expert Dr Andy Przybylski, an experimental psychologist based at the Oxford Internet Institute, who looks at the effects that gaming can have on people. “We know a lot about where aggression comes from - it’s largely related to drug and alcohol use, a lot of it is crime-related, and a lot of it is instrumental, people want things so they’re willing to use violence,” he says. “It comes from people who are otherwise not good at dealing with their feelings. They don’t let it out and then it just explodes, it’s a self-regulatory problem.”

What’s the story? 

So why do so many people think violent video games cause aggression – and where did that idea actually come from? Przybylski explains that one of the historical traditions of psychological research suggested that humans just needed to see a type of behaviour in order to copy it. He says the idea was that seeing something happen made it easier for a person to think about it, talk about it, and eventually do it. He says it would be like thinking of people as snowballs, rolling down a hill and collecting whatever they roll over. 

Przybylski suggests that it could be the structure of a game that causes frustration, which develops into anger afterwards – and points out that puzzle games can be just as frustrating as games that are seen as ‘violent’.

Two famous studies from the 1960s reflect this ‘social learning tradition’ viewpoint. One is the Bobo doll experiment, in which children watched an adult interact with an inflatable doll. When they saw the adult behave aggressively and violently towards it, they often copied this behaviour. Likewise, in the second study, the Stanford prison experiment, participants were assigned the role of ‘prisoner’ or ‘guard’ in a fake prison scenario. As the days went on,  the ‘guards’ became increasingly cruel to the pretend inmates – which some think proves that people are happy to do as they’re told, regardless of whether or not it’s mean or violent.

What new research tells us

Recent research indicates that there’s something a little more interesting going on – and that games don’t necessarily have to be explicitly violent, like Grand Theft Auto, for players to feel angry or aggressive. 

Instead, Przybylski suggests that it could be the structure of a game that causes frustration, which develops into anger afterwards – and points out that puzzle games can be just as frustrating as games that are seen as ‘violent’. That’s the approach he took in a recent piece of work that he did, asking participants to play violent and non-violent games, some with practice beforehand and some without. Some of the games they played even had the stories and tasks tweaked, to make it more unfair and potentially more frustrating.

So what makes gamers tick? 

“Maybe when a game frustrates you or gets in your way, it prevents you from achieving your goals, and maybe that’s where the anger is coming from,” he says. “Maybe Grand Theft Auto V is just really hard to play because there’s a lot of buttons, a lot of context, a lot of story, so then if you jump in for 20 minutes it’s way more annoying for you than playing Tetris.”

He doesn’t think many of the current studies looking at video games and violence are really measuring ‘the Bobo doll effect’, just frustration. He also points out that asking people to assess how angry or frustrated they feel is not the same as seeing exactly how violent or aggressive they are in real life –  he feels that’s a real problem.“[For example, the studies] don’t ever test aggression, they don’t test violence - hitting another human being or being mean to your partner,” he says.

He makes one last important point – people who already enjoy violence may be drawn to more violent video games. “We’ve done some work that shows if someone is already aggressive a video game can make them more violent,” he says.

Then he adds: “But maybe in the lab what people are really measuring is something more complicated and that we really need to look at more carefully.”

Przybylski is clear that as a general rule, playing violent video games won’t make an ordinarily calm person violent. But can that violent content make a person’s behaviour worse if they already act like that sometimes? The evidence suggests that in some cases it can do – but you can look at the evidence and decide for yourself.
 

The Military-Entertainment-Complex

There has been a long, close relationship between video games and the military. The video game industry often hires military advisors to help produce games while military institutes often use video games to recruit and train potential new soldiers. The U.S. Army has produced and designed their own game called America’s Army. First released in 2002, the game allows players to fight terrorists while learning about correct U.S. Army procedure. As a player, you must complete Basic Combat Training where you learn about official Army weapons, go through military tactics and strategies, and even do some medical training. You must follow the Army’s official rules. If you break them you could find yourself doing time in a virtual military prison! 
 
The game has become a powerful and cost-effective tool for encouraging men and women to join the U.S. military. It is free to download on the internet and has an age rating of 13+ meaning it can be played by young people from around the world. Also, the game has been used to train new recruits. So, what are the positives and negatives of using video games to recruit and train soldiers? What are the effects of making war seem fun to young people? To think carefully about this we might want to consider how military-themed video games show war and violence. 

Representing and Playing War 

Military-themed video games are important because they can offer a particular picture of war and conflict. Think about death in military video games… it’s usually clean and bloodless. Enemies simply drop to the ground and eventually disappear. Out of sight, out of mind! When you are killed the only consequence is that you might have to start from the previous checkpoint. This doesn’t reflect the true realities and horrors that can happen on the battlefield, instead, war can seem clean, and even acceptable. 

Where and who are you fighting in these video games? The stories in military video games often present a simple division of the world into the  ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’. Usually, the ‘good guys’ are the American or the British military, the ‘bad guys’ are from Russia, China and the Middle East. Often the whole of the Middle East comes to be represented as threatening, dangerous, and full of terrorists.  These stereotypes portray a very simplistic view of the world that is about ‘us’ versus ‘them’.  This means that games can affect our imagination of the world and the part military violence plays within it. 

Should military videogames be more socially responsible in how they represent the realities war? What would a socially responsible game look like? Is this even possible?

War has legal codes. There are international organisations that set the rules of war. These can focus on protecting soldiers and non-soldiers, banning particular weapons, and avoiding unnecessary destruction. The Red Cross - a voluntary network that protects people in conflict - has argued that war video games often fail to reflect the international laws of war. Games don’t often give many options to allow players to make decisions about the rules of war. It’s just about shooting without thought. This isn't helped by the fact that you hardly see any civilians (non-soldiers) on the virtual battlefield. The battlefield simply becomes an open shooting range. Players are usually forced to kill enemies rather than take them prisoners. This presents an understanding of what is acceptable in war and conflict which doesn’t reflect the realities of international law. Should military video games be more socially responsible in how they represent the realities war? What would a socially responsible game look like? Is this even possible?

Anti-War Games 

Military-themed video games are all about shooting and killing, right? More recently game developers have begun to question this and produce video games from different perspectives. This War of Mine released in 2014 was inspired by the 1992 -1996 Siege of Sarajevo that took place during the Bosnian War. Rather than from the perspective of a military soldier, you play as civilians (non-soldiers) caught-up in a fictional conflict. The game is about survival. As a player, you must scavenge for food and materials that will help you survive the war zone. The game is about educating people about the realities of war and is an important reminder that not everyone in war is a soldier. 

Another game called September 12th suggests the pointlessness of the ‘War on Terror’. The player controls a missile launcher and has to get rid of the terrorists that live a Middle-Eastern village. However, the bombs you fire in this game not only kill terrorists but also kill near-by civilians. The civilians you unintentionally killed are then mourned by other civilians who then turn into terrorists. There is no way to win the game! The overall moral of the game is that violence produces more violence.  These games present alternative perspectives which force you to both play and think differently about military violence.

So what do you think? Are military games all just a bit of fun? Or should we be concerned about how understandings of war and conflict are presented in military video games? Can video games make war more acceptable in society? And how might games be used to make us think critically about the role of military violence in society? Over to you…!