Researchers Say Ultraviolent Video Games Aren't Actually Bad For You

It may not matter whether you're on a cartoon race-track or slaughtering the entire population of an ancient village—video games probably won't make you a violent person or decrease prosocial behavior. That's according to a new study by researchers at the University of Queensland, who had participants play a series of increasingly violent games.

The study, done by Morgan J. Tear and Mark Nielsen, goes against a recent survey of parents, researchers, and doctors that found a majority still believe violent media—including video games—promote violent and antisocial behaviour in young people.

The comparison shows a chasm in research and popular perception: Despite there being a fair bit of disagreement in scientific literature over whether violent video games make users more violent, one thing violent games have never been able to fully shake is the perception that they're not particularly good for the people that play them.

Video games can be a particularly difficult medium to study because of their diverse nature. Motherboard recently reported on a study that found playing Mario Kart could make people happier after experiencing stress—of course, the researchers noted that was probably due to it being "such a light, funny game." What about something more intense?

Game choices certainly affect the outcomes of such studies, so to mitigate potentially inaccurate research the Australian researchers chose a diverse set of relatively modern games to address the issue of whether specific characters could influence results. They also chose two games for each category to "avoid the possibility of an effect being tied to the idiosyncrasies of one particular game," they write in Computers in Human Behavior.

For the nonviolent category, they chose Portal 2 and Modnation Racers, while God of War 3 and Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, an action adventure and a tournament fighting game respectively, were chosen as examples of violent games.

Gods of War 3, one of the "violent" test games for the researchers. Image: Youtube

The final category, dubbed "ultraviolent," featured more extreme games in the same franchise as those from the violent category. Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition is missing the element of levity provided by DC Superheroes, and God of War: Ascension is a prequel to the God of War series featuring a younger, and apparently more violent, version of the series hero. Both games until very recently were illegal to possess in Australia, where the study was conducted.

The people assigned to play the games were a group of 120 college aged youth, 87 percent male. Despite increasing diversity in some areas such as mobile games, this is still an accurate representation of the core console gaming market.

Of course, if the participants knew they were in a study about the social effects of video games it would skew the results. Players were told that they were testing the suitability of certain games for future studies. This included a "suspicion test" that asked players what they thought the purpose of the study was, and whether there was anything strange about it—which sounds a bit suspicious, but the researchers found no detrimental amount of results-skewing suspicion among their subjects. Game on.

After playing either a non-violent, violent, or ultraviolent game, participants were tested by two different measures of prosocial behaviour.

Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition was classified an "ultraviolent" game. Image: Youtube

First they were asked to complete a series of tangrams, geometric puzzles of varying difficulty, then asked to choose a few that they felt were suitable for another study involving a cash reward. The researchers expected that players exhibiting less prosocial tendency would assign harder puzzles.

The second measure involved a more complex ruse. Participants were paid five dollars for completing the video game study, then asked if they wanted to complete a short survey for a local children's hospital. The experimenter left the player alone in a room with a survey and a donation box for the hospital. The amount of money donated was used as a measure of prosocial behaviour.

At the outset of the study Tear and Nielsen expected that playing violent games would result in less prosocial behaviour, moreover they predicted that extreme violence would have an even greater effect. Instead, they found that all the participants assigned about the same difficulty of puzzle, and donated between two and three dollars to the charity.

Okay, yeah, pretty violent.

"Previous research failed to find a negative effect of playing violent video games on prosocial behavior," the authors write.

"In the current study we sought an effect using two new measures of prosocial behavior and games so

extreme in their violence that it is illegal to sell them to minors," they continued. "Yet we too failed."

In other words, it didn't matter whether their time was spent cleverly solving puzzles with a intradimensional hole-maker in Portal 2 or climbing and viciously excavating the skull of a two-tonne humanoid elephant-monster in God of War: Ascension, the players were equally nice afterwards.

The major flaw in past studies, to Tear and Nielsen, was that they failed to prove that violent games decreased prosocial behavior at all.

"It stands to reason that if playing violent video games leads to increases in antisocial behavior," the researchers write in their paper, "it should similarly lead to decreases in prosocial behavior. The current experiment adds weight to the argument that it does not."

The researchers were careful to note that their study, like others in the past that found no negative effects on prosociality, focused on adults.

"It is notable that each of the studies failing to find an effect of playing violent video games on prosocial behavior has been conducted with adults," they write. "It is possible that by the onset of early adulthood the factors contributing to prosocial inclinations have been well-established and are not easily shifted by playing a video game for half an hour. Indeed, Griffiths (1999) found that young children are more aggressive after a violent game than young adults."

Despite having their expectations refuted, the group was very positive about their results. They note that previous results in the field relied on very simple measures of exposure to show effects of video games on social behaviour. For Tear and Nielsen, by using more and more robust samples of games and outcomes they were able to finitely "challenge the belief that these exposure effects exist at all."

They did concede that the study and previous work done by similar research exploring short-term exposure to video games "and do not account for the possible effect of sustained playing." That being said, according to Tear and Nielsen, it still "remains to be established whether or not playing for long hours over an extended period of time will have detrimental effects."

If that's the case, then the word is still out on whether or not playing 20 hours of God of War will skew your worldview. One thing is for sure, though: cutting the heads off of skeleton warriors for a little while probably won't stop you from donating to a children's hospital.