essay on violence in video games

October 2, 2018

Do Violent Video Games Trigger Aggression?

A study tries to find whether slaughtering zombies with a virtual assault weapon translates into misbehavior when a teenager returns to reality

By Melinda Wenner Moyer

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Intuitively, it makes sense Splatterhouse and Postal 2 would serve as virtual training sessions for teens, encouraging them to act out in ways that mimic game-related violence. But many studies have failed to find a clear connection between violent game play and belligerent behavior, and the controversy over whether the shoot-‘em-up world transfers to real life has persisted for years. A new study published on October 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to resolve the controversy by weighing the findings of two dozen studies on the topic.

The meta-analysis does tie violent video games to a small increase in physical aggression among adolescents and preteens. Yet debate is by no means over. Whereas the analysis was undertaken to help settle the science on the issue, researchers still disagree on the real-world significance of the findings.

This new analysis attempted to navigate through the minefield of conflicting research. Many studies find gaming associated with increases in aggression, but others identify no such link. A small but vocal cadre of researchers have argued much of the work implicating video games has serious flaws in that, among other things, it measures the frequency of aggressive thoughts or language rather than physically aggressive behaviors like hitting or pushing, which have more real-world relevance.

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Jay Hull, a social psychologist at Dartmouth College and a co-author on the new paper, has never been convinced by the critiques that have disparaged purported ties between gaming and aggression. “I just kept reading, over and over again, [these] criticisms of the literature and going, ‘that’s just not true,’” he says. So he and his colleagues designed the new meta-analysis to address these criticisms head-on and determine if they had merit.

Hull and colleagues pooled data from 24 studies that had been selected to avoid some of the criticisms leveled at earlier work. They only included research that measured the relationship between violent video game use and overt physical aggression. They also limited their analysis to studies that statistically controlled for several factors that could influence the relationship between gaming and subsequent behavior, such as age and baseline aggressive behavior.

Even with these constraints, their analysis found kids who played violent video games did become more aggressive over time. But the changes in behavior were not big. “According to traditional ways of looking at these numbers, it’s not a large effect—I would say it’s relatively small,” he says. But it’s “statistically reliable—it’s not by chance and not inconsequential.”

Their findings mesh with a 2015 literature review conducted by the American Psychological Association, which concluded violent video games worsen aggressive behavior in older children, adolescents and young adults. Together, Hull’s meta-analysis and the APA report help give clarity to the existing body of research, says Douglas Gentile, a developmental psychologist at Iowa State University who was not involved in conducting the meta-analysis. “Media violence is one risk factor for aggression,” he says. “It's not the biggest, it’s also not the smallest, but it’s worth paying attention to.”

Yet researchers who have been critical of links between games and violence contend Hull’s meta-analysis does not settle the issue. “They don’t find much. They just try to make it sound like they do,” says Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University in Florida, who has published papers questioning the link between violent video games and aggression.

Ferguson argues the degree to which video game use increases aggression in Hull’s analysis—what is known in psychology as the estimated “effect size”—is so small as to be essentially meaningless. After statistically controlling for several other factors, the meta-analysis reported an effect size of 0.08, which suggests that violent video games account for less than one percent of the variation in aggressive behavior among U.S. teens and pre-teens—if, in fact, there is a cause-and effect relationship between game play and hostile actions. It may instead be that the relationship between gaming and aggression is a statistical artifact caused by lingering flaws in study design, Ferguson says.  

Johannes Breuer, a psychologist at GESIS–Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany, agrees, noting that according to “a common rule of thumb in psychological research,” effect sizes below 0.1 are “considered trivial.” He adds meta-analyses are only as valid as the studies included in them, and that work on the issue has been plagued by methodological problems. For one thing, studies vary in terms of the criteria they use to determine if a video game is violent or not. By some measures, the Super Mario Bros. games would be considered violent, but by others not. Studies, too, often rely on subjects self-reporting their own aggressive acts, and they may not do so accurately. “All of this is not to say that the results of this meta-analysis are not valid,” he says. “But things like this need to be kept in mind when interpreting the findings and discussing their meaning.”

Hull says, however, that the effect size his team found still has real-world significance. An analysis of one of his earlier studies, which reported a similar estimated effect size of 0.083, found playing violent video games was linked with almost double the risk that kids would be sent to the school principal’s office for fighting. The study began by taking a group of children who hadn’t been dispatched to the principal in the previous month and then tracked them for a subsequent eight months. It found 4.8 percent of kids who reported only rarely playing violent video games were sent to the principal’s office at least once during that period compared with 9 percent who reported playing violent video games frequently. Hull theorizes violent games help kids become more comfortable with taking risks and engaging in abnormal behavior. “Their sense of right and wrong is being warped,” he notes.

Hull and his colleagues also found evidence ethnicity shapes the relationship between violent video games and aggression. White players seem more susceptible to the games' putative effects on behavior than do Hispanic and Asian players. Hull isn’t sure why, but he suspects the games' varying impact relates to how much kids are influenced by the norms of American culture, which, he says, are rooted in rugged individualism and a warriorlike mentality that may incite video game players to identify with aggressors rather than victims. It might “dampen sympathy toward their virtual victims,” he and his co-authors wrote, “with consequences for their values and behavior outside the game.”

Social scientists will, no doubt, continue to debate the psychological impacts of killing within the confines of interactive games. In a follow-up paper Hull says he plans to tackle the issue of the real-world significance of violent game play, and hopes it adds additional clarity. “It’s a knotty issue,” he notes—and it’s an open question whether research will ever quell the controversy.

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• Published: 13 March 2018

Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study

• Simone Kühn 1 , 2 ,
• Dimitrij Tycho Kugler 2 ,
• Katharina Schmalen 1 ,
• Markus Weichenberger 1 ,
• Charlotte Witt 1 &
• Jürgen Gallinat 2  

Molecular Psychiatry volume  24 ,  pages 1220–1234 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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It is a widespread concern that violent video games promote aggression, reduce pro-social behaviour, increase impulsivity and interfere with cognition as well as mood in its players. Previous experimental studies have focussed on short-term effects of violent video gameplay on aggression, yet there are reasons to believe that these effects are mostly the result of priming. In contrast, the present study is the first to investigate the effects of long-term violent video gameplay using a large battery of tests spanning questionnaires, behavioural measures of aggression, sexist attitudes, empathy and interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs (such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness, risk taking, delay discounting), mental health (depressivity, anxiety) as well as executive control functions, before and after 2 months of gameplay. Our participants played the violent video game Grand Theft Auto V, the non-violent video game The Sims 3 or no game at all for 2 months on a daily basis. No significant changes were observed, neither when comparing the group playing a violent video game to a group playing a non-violent game, nor to a passive control group. Also, no effects were observed between baseline and posttest directly after the intervention, nor between baseline and a follow-up assessment 2 months after the intervention period had ended. The present results thus provide strong evidence against the frequently debated negative effects of playing violent video games in adults and will therefore help to communicate a more realistic scientific perspective on the effects of violent video gaming.

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The concern that violent video games may promote aggression or reduce empathy in its players is pervasive and given the popularity of these games their psychological impact is an urgent issue for society at large. Contrary to the custom, this topic has also been passionately debated in the scientific literature. One research camp has strongly argued that violent video games increase aggression in its players [ 1 , 2 ], whereas the other camp [ 3 , 4 ] repeatedly concluded that the effects are minimal at best, if not absent. Importantly, it appears that these fundamental inconsistencies cannot be attributed to differences in research methodology since even meta-analyses, with the goal to integrate the results of all prior studies on the topic of aggression caused by video games led to disparate conclusions [ 2 , 3 ]. These meta-analyses had a strong focus on children, and one of them [ 2 ] reported a marginal age effect suggesting that children might be even more susceptible to violent video game effects.

To unravel this topic of research, we designed a randomised controlled trial on adults to draw causal conclusions on the influence of video games on aggression. At present, almost all experimental studies targeting the effects of violent video games on aggression and/or empathy focussed on the effects of short-term video gameplay. In these studies the duration for which participants were instructed to play the games ranged from 4 min to maximally 2 h (mean = 22 min, median = 15 min, when considering all experimental studies reviewed in two of the recent major meta-analyses in the field [ 3 , 5 ]) and most frequently the effects of video gaming have been tested directly after gameplay.

It has been suggested that the effects of studies focussing on consequences of short-term video gameplay (mostly conducted on college student populations) are mainly the result of priming effects, meaning that exposure to violent content increases the accessibility of aggressive thoughts and affect when participants are in the immediate situation [ 6 ]. However, above and beyond this the General Aggression Model (GAM, [ 7 ]) assumes that repeatedly primed thoughts and feelings influence the perception of ongoing events and therewith elicits aggressive behaviour as a long-term effect. We think that priming effects are interesting and worthwhile exploring, but in contrast to the notion of the GAM our reading of the literature is that priming effects are short-lived (suggested to only last for <5 min and may potentially reverse after that time [ 8 ]). Priming effects should therefore only play a role in very close temporal proximity to gameplay. Moreover, there are a multitude of studies on college students that have failed to replicate priming effects [ 9 , 10 , 11 ] and associated predictions of the so-called GAM such as a desensitisation against violent content [ 12 , 13 , 14 ] in adolescents and college students or a decrease of empathy [ 15 ] and pro-social behaviour [ 16 , 17 ] as a result of playing violent video games.

However, in our view the question that society is actually interested in is not: “Are people more aggressive after having played violent video games for a few minutes? And are these people more aggressive minutes after gameplay ended?”, but rather “What are the effects of frequent, habitual violent video game playing? And for how long do these effects persist (not in the range of minutes but rather weeks and months)?” For this reason studies are needed in which participants are trained over longer periods of time, tested after a longer delay after acute playing and tested with broader batteries assessing aggression but also other relevant domains such as empathy as well as mood and cognition. Moreover, long-term follow-up assessments are needed to demonstrate long-term effects of frequent violent video gameplay. To fill this gap, we set out to expose adult participants to two different types of video games for a period of 2 months and investigate changes in measures of various constructs of interest at least one day after the last gaming session and test them once more 2 months after the end of the gameplay intervention. In contrast to the GAM, we hypothesised no increases of aggression or decreases in pro-social behaviour even after long-term exposure to a violent video game due to our reasoning that priming effects of violent video games are short-lived and should therefore not influence measures of aggression if they are not measured directly after acute gaming. In the present study, we assessed potential changes in the following domains: behavioural as well as questionnaire measures of aggression, empathy and interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs (such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness, risk taking, delay discounting), and depressivity and anxiety as well as executive control functions. As the effects on aggression and pro-social behaviour were the core targets of the present study, we implemented multiple tests for these domains. This broad range of domains with its wide coverage and the longitudinal nature of the study design enabled us to draw more general conclusions regarding the causal effects of violent video games.

Materials and methods

Participants.

Ninety healthy participants (mean age = 28 years, SD = 7.3, range: 18–45, 48 females) were recruited by means of flyers and internet advertisements. The sample consisted of college students as well as of participants from the general community. The advertisement mentioned that we were recruiting for a longitudinal study on video gaming, but did not mention that we would offer an intervention or that we were expecting training effects. Participants were randomly assigned to the three groups ruling out self-selection effects. The sample size was based on estimates from a previous study with a similar design [ 18 ]. After complete description of the study, the participants’ informed written consent was obtained. The local ethics committee of the Charité University Clinic, Germany, approved of the study. We included participants that reported little, preferably no video game usage in the past 6 months (none of the participants ever played the game Grand Theft Auto V (GTA) or Sims 3 in any of its versions before). We excluded participants with psychological or neurological problems. The participants received financial compensation for the testing sessions (200 Euros) and performance-dependent additional payment for two behavioural tasks detailed below, but received no money for the training itself.

Training procedure

The violent video game group (5 participants dropped out between pre- and posttest, resulting in a group of n  = 25, mean age = 26.6 years, SD = 6.0, 14 females) played the game Grand Theft Auto V on a Playstation 3 console over a period of 8 weeks. The active control group played the non-violent video game Sims 3 on the same console (6 participants dropped out, resulting in a group of n  = 24, mean age = 25.8 years, SD = 6.8, 12 females). The passive control group (2 participants dropped out, resulting in a group of n  = 28, mean age = 30.9 years, SD = 8.4, 12 females) was not given a gaming console and had no task but underwent the same testing procedure as the two other groups. The passive control group was not aware of the fact that they were part of a control group to prevent self-training attempts. The experimenters testing the participants were blind to group membership, but we were unable to prevent participants from talking about the game during testing, which in some cases lead to an unblinding of experimental condition. Both training groups were instructed to play the game for at least 30 min a day. Participants were only reimbursed for the sessions in which they came to the lab. Our previous research suggests that the perceived fun in gaming was positively associated with training outcome [ 18 ] and we speculated that enforcing training sessions through payment would impair motivation and thus diminish the potential effect of the intervention. Participants underwent a testing session before (baseline) and after the training period of 2 months (posttest 1) as well as a follow-up testing sessions 2 months after the training period (posttest 2).

Grand Theft Auto V (GTA)

GTA is an action-adventure video game situated in a fictional highly violent game world in which players are rewarded for their use of violence as a means to advance in the game. The single-player story follows three criminals and their efforts to commit heists while under pressure from a government agency. The gameplay focuses on an open world (sandbox game) where the player can choose between different behaviours. The game also allows the player to engage in various side activities, such as action-adventure, driving, third-person shooting, occasional role-playing, stealth and racing elements. The open world design lets players freely roam around the fictional world so that gamers could in principle decide not to commit violent acts.

The Sims 3 (Sims)

Sims is a life simulation game and also classified as a sandbox game because it lacks clearly defined goals. The player creates virtual individuals called “Sims”, and customises their appearance, their personalities and places them in a home, directs their moods, satisfies their desires and accompanies them in their daily activities and by becoming part of a social network. It offers opportunities, which the player may choose to pursue or to refuse, similar as GTA but is generally considered as a pro-social and clearly non-violent game.

Assessment battery

To assess aggression and associated constructs we used the following questionnaires: Buss–Perry Aggression Questionnaire [ 19 ], State Hostility Scale [ 20 ], Updated Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale [ 21 , 22 ], Moral Disengagement Scale [ 23 , 24 ], the Rosenzweig Picture Frustration Test [ 25 , 26 ] and a so-called World View Measure [ 27 ]. All of these measures have previously been used in research investigating the effects of violent video gameplay, however, the first two most prominently. Additionally, behavioural measures of aggression were used: a Word Completion Task, a Lexical Decision Task [ 28 ] and the Delay frustration task [ 29 ] (an inter-correlation matrix is depicted in Supplementary Figure 1 1). From these behavioural measures, the first two were previously used in research on the effects of violent video gameplay. To assess variables that have been related to the construct of impulsivity, we used the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale [ 30 ] and the Boredom Propensity Scale [ 31 ] as well as tasks assessing risk taking and delay discounting behaviourally, namely the Balloon Analogue Risk Task [ 32 ] and a Delay-Discounting Task [ 33 ]. To quantify pro-social behaviour, we employed: Interpersonal Reactivity Index [ 34 ] (frequently used in research on the effects of violent video gameplay), Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale [ 35 ], Reading the Mind in the Eyes test [ 36 ], Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire [ 37 ] and Richardson Conflict Response Questionnaire [ 38 ]. To assess depressivity and anxiety, which has previously been associated with intense video game playing [ 39 ], we used Beck Depression Inventory [ 40 ] and State Trait Anxiety Inventory [ 41 ]. To characterise executive control function, we used a Stop Signal Task [ 42 ], a Multi-Source Interference Task [ 43 ] and a Task Switching Task [ 44 ] which have all been previously used to assess effects of video gameplay. More details on all instruments used can be found in the Supplementary Material.

Data analysis

On the basis of the research question whether violent video game playing enhances aggression and reduces empathy, the focus of the present analysis was on time by group interactions. We conducted these interaction analyses separately, comparing the violent video game group against the active control group (GTA vs. Sims) and separately against the passive control group (GTA vs. Controls) that did not receive any intervention and separately for the potential changes during the intervention period (baseline vs. posttest 1) and to test for potential long-term changes (baseline vs. posttest 2). We employed classical frequentist statistics running a repeated-measures ANOVA controlling for the covariates sex and age.

Since we collected 52 separate outcome variables and conduced four different tests with each (GTA vs. Sims, GTA vs. Controls, crossed with baseline vs. posttest 1, baseline vs. posttest 2), we had to conduct 52 × 4 = 208 frequentist statistical tests. Setting the alpha value to 0.05 means that by pure chance about 10.4 analyses should become significant. To account for this multiple testing problem and the associated alpha inflation, we conducted a Bonferroni correction. According to Bonferroni, the critical value for the entire set of n tests is set to an alpha value of 0.05 by taking alpha/ n  = 0.00024.

Since the Bonferroni correction has sometimes been criticised as overly conservative, we conducted false discovery rate (FDR) correction [ 45 ]. FDR correction also determines adjusted p -values for each test, however, it controls only for the number of false discoveries in those tests that result in a discovery (namely a significant result).

Moreover, we tested for group differences at the baseline assessment using independent t -tests, since those may hamper the interpretation of significant interactions between group and time that we were primarily interested in.

Since the frequentist framework does not enable to evaluate whether the observed null effect of the hypothesised interaction is indicative of the absence of a relation between violent video gaming and our dependent variables, the amount of evidence in favour of the null hypothesis has been tested using a Bayesian framework. Within the Bayesian framework both the evidence in favour of the null and the alternative hypothesis are directly computed based on the observed data, giving rise to the possibility of comparing the two. We conducted Bayesian repeated-measures ANOVAs comparing the model in favour of the null and the model in favour of the alternative hypothesis resulting in a Bayes factor (BF) using Bayesian Information criteria [ 46 ]. The BF 01 suggests how much more likely the data is to occur under the null hypothesis. All analyses were performed using the JASP software package ( https://jasp-stats.org ).

Sex distribution in the present study did not differ across the groups ( χ 2 p -value > 0.414). However, due to the fact that differences between males and females have been observed in terms of aggression and empathy [ 47 ], we present analyses controlling for sex. Since our random assignment to the three groups did result in significant age differences between groups, with the passive control group being significantly older than the GTA ( t (51) = −2.10, p  = 0.041) and the Sims group ( t (50) = −2.38, p  = 0.021), we also controlled for age.

The participants in the violent video game group played on average 35 h and the non-violent video game group 32 h spread out across the 8 weeks interval (with no significant group difference p  = 0.48).

To test whether participants assigned to the violent GTA game show emotional, cognitive and behavioural changes, we present the results of repeated-measure ANOVA time x group interaction analyses separately for GTA vs. Sims and GTA vs. Controls (Tables  1 – 3 ). Moreover, we split the analyses according to the time domain into effects from baseline assessment to posttest 1 (Table  2 ) and effects from baseline assessment to posttest 2 (Table  3 ) to capture more long-lasting or evolving effects. In addition to the statistical test values, we report partial omega squared ( ω 2 ) as an effect size measure. Next to the classical frequentist statistics, we report the results of a Bayesian statistical approach, namely BF 01 , the likelihood with which the data is to occur under the null hypothesis that there is no significant time × group interaction. In Table  2 , we report the presence of significant group differences at baseline in the right most column.

Since we conducted 208 separate frequentist tests we expected 10.4 significant effects simply by chance when setting the alpha value to 0.05. In fact we found only eight significant time × group interactions (these are marked with an asterisk in Tables  2 and 3 ).

When applying a conservative Bonferroni correction, none of those tests survive the corrected threshold of p  < 0.00024. Neither does any test survive the more lenient FDR correction. The arithmetic mean of the frequentist test statistics likewise shows that on average no significant effect was found (bottom rows in Tables  2 and 3 ).

In line with the findings from a frequentist approach, the harmonic mean of the Bayesian factor BF 01 is consistently above one but not very far from one. This likewise suggests that there is very likely no interaction between group × time and therewith no detrimental effects of the violent video game GTA in the domains tested. The evidence in favour of the null hypothesis based on the Bayes factor is not massive, but clearly above 1. Some of the harmonic means are above 1.6 and constitute substantial evidence [ 48 ]. However, the harmonic mean has been criticised as unstable. Owing to the fact that the sum is dominated by occasional small terms in the likelihood, one may underestimate the actual evidence in favour of the null hypothesis [ 49 ].

To test the sensitivity of the present study to detect relevant effects we computed the effect size that we would have been able to detect. The information we used consisted of alpha error probability = 0.05, power = 0.95, our sample size, number of groups and of measurement occasions and correlation between the repeated measures at posttest 1 and posttest 2 (average r  = 0.68). According to G*Power [ 50 ], we could detect small effect sizes of f  = 0.16 (equals η 2  = 0.025 and r  = 0.16) in each separate test. When accounting for the conservative Bonferroni-corrected p -value of 0.00024, still a medium effect size of f  = 0.23 (equals η 2  = 0.05 and r  = 0.22) would have been detectable. A meta-analysis by Anderson [ 2 ] reported an average effects size of r  = 0.18 for experimental studies testing for aggressive behaviour and another by Greitmeyer [ 5 ] reported average effect sizes of r  = 0.19, 0.25 and 0.17 for effects of violent games on aggressive behaviour, cognition and affect, all of which should have been detectable at least before multiple test correction.

Within the scope of the present study we tested the potential effects of playing the violent video game GTA V for 2 months against an active control group that played the non-violent, rather pro-social life simulation game The Sims 3 and a passive control group. Participants were tested before and after the long-term intervention and at a follow-up appointment 2 months later. Although we used a comprehensive test battery consisting of questionnaires and computerised behavioural tests assessing aggression, impulsivity-related constructs, mood, anxiety, empathy, interpersonal competencies and executive control functions, we did not find relevant negative effects in response to violent video game playing. In fact, only three tests of the 208 statistical tests performed showed a significant interaction pattern that would be in line with this hypothesis. Since at least ten significant effects would be expected purely by chance, we conclude that there were no detrimental effects of violent video gameplay.

This finding stands in contrast to some experimental studies, in which short-term effects of violent video game exposure have been investigated and where increases in aggressive thoughts and affect as well as decreases in helping behaviour have been observed [ 1 ]. However, these effects of violent video gaming on aggressiveness—if present at all (see above)—seem to be rather short-lived, potentially lasting <15 min [ 8 , 51 ]. In addition, these short-term effects of video gaming are far from consistent as multiple studies fail to demonstrate or replicate them [ 16 , 17 ]. This may in part be due to problems, that are very prominent in this field of research, namely that the outcome measures of aggression and pro-social behaviour, are poorly standardised, do not easily generalise to real-life behaviour and may have lead to selective reporting of the results [ 3 ]. We tried to address these concerns by including a large set of outcome measures that were mostly inspired by previous studies demonstrating effects of short-term violent video gameplay on aggressive behaviour and thoughts, that we report exhaustively.

Since effects observed only for a few minutes after short sessions of video gaming are not representative of what society at large is actually interested in, namely how habitual violent video gameplay affects behaviour on a more long-term basis, studies employing longer training intervals are highly relevant. Two previous studies have employed longer training intervals. In an online study, participants with a broad age range (14–68 years) have been trained in a violent video game for 4 weeks [ 52 ]. In comparison to a passive control group no changes were observed, neither in aggression-related beliefs, nor in aggressive social interactions assessed by means of two questions. In a more recent study, participants played a previous version of GTA for 12 h spread across 3 weeks [ 53 ]. Participants were compared to a passive control group using the Buss–Perry aggression questionnaire, a questionnaire assessing impulsive or reactive aggression, attitude towards violence, and empathy. The authors only report a limited increase in pro-violent attitude. Unfortunately, this study only assessed posttest measures, which precludes the assessment of actual changes caused by the game intervention.

The present study goes beyond these studies by showing that 2 months of violent video gameplay does neither lead to any significant negative effects in a broad assessment battery administered directly after the intervention nor at a follow-up assessment 2 months after the intervention. The fact that we assessed multiple domains, not finding an effect in any of them, makes the present study the most comprehensive in the field. Our battery included self-report instruments on aggression (Buss–Perry aggression questionnaire, State Hostility scale, Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance scale, Moral Disengagement scale, World View Measure and Rosenzweig Picture Frustration test) as well as computer-based tests measuring aggressive behaviour such as the delay frustration task and measuring the availability of aggressive words using the word completion test and a lexical decision task. Moreover, we assessed impulse-related concepts such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness and associated behavioural measures such as the computerised Balloon analogue risk task, and delay discounting. Four scales assessing empathy and interpersonal competence scales, including the reading the mind in the eyes test revealed no effects of violent video gameplay. Neither did we find any effects on depressivity (Becks depression inventory) nor anxiety measured as a state as well as a trait. This is an important point, since several studies reported higher rates of depressivity and anxiety in populations of habitual video gamers [ 54 , 55 ]. Last but not least, our results revealed also no substantial changes in executive control tasks performance, neither in the Stop signal task, the Multi-source interference task or a Task switching task. Previous studies have shown higher performance of habitual action video gamers in executive tasks such as task switching [ 56 , 57 , 58 ] and another study suggests that training with action video games improves task performance that relates to executive functions [ 59 ], however, these associations were not confirmed by a meta-analysis in the field [ 60 ]. The absence of changes in the stop signal task fits well with previous studies that likewise revealed no difference between in habitual action video gamers and controls in terms of action inhibition [ 61 , 62 ]. Although GTA does not qualify as a classical first-person shooter as most of the previously tested action video games, it is classified as an action-adventure game and shares multiple features with those action video games previously related to increases in executive function, including the need for hand–eye coordination and fast reaction times.

Taken together, the findings of the present study show that an extensive game intervention over the course of 2 months did not reveal any specific changes in aggression, empathy, interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs, depressivity, anxiety or executive control functions; neither in comparison to an active control group that played a non-violent video game nor to a passive control group. We observed no effects when comparing a baseline and a post-training assessment, nor when focussing on more long-term effects between baseline and a follow-up interval 2 months after the participants stopped training. To our knowledge, the present study employed the most comprehensive test battery spanning a multitude of domains in which changes due to violent video games may have been expected. Therefore the present results provide strong evidence against the frequently debated negative effects of playing violent video games. This debate has mostly been informed by studies showing short-term effects of violent video games when tests were administered immediately after a short playtime of a few minutes; effects that may in large be caused by short-lived priming effects that vanish after minutes. The presented results will therefore help to communicate a more realistic scientific perspective of the real-life effects of violent video gaming. However, future research is needed to demonstrate the absence of effects of violent video gameplay in children.

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SK has been funded by a Heisenberg grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG KU 3322/1-1, SFB 936/C7), the European Union (ERC-2016-StG-Self-Control-677804) and a Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation (JRF 2016–2018).

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Kühn, S., Kugler, D., Schmalen, K. et al. Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study. Mol Psychiatry 24 , 1220–1234 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-018-0031-7

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What Research Says About Video Games And Violence In Children

President Trump held a roundtable at the White House Thursday to discuss violent video games and how they relate to school shootings. NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with Douglas Gentile, psychology professor at Iowa State University, about what research tells us about video games and violence in children.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

President Trump has held a series of White House meetings on gun violence, and the focus of today's was video games. Lawmakers, parent advocates and people from video game companies were invited to talk with the president. The press was not allowed in. Trump has been focused on this subject for a while now. Here's what he said a couple weeks ago.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts.

SHAPIRO: The central question at the heart of this White House meeting is, does playing violent video games turn people into real-life shooters? Douglas Gentile has researched this issue. He's a psychology professor at Iowa State University. Thanks for joining us.

DOUGLAS GENTILE: My pleasure.

SHAPIRO: If you could just begin with the conclusion of your research - if every violent video game disappeared tomorrow, would there be fewer mass shootings?

GENTILE: We don't know the answer to that, but that's because aggression is actually very complicated. It's multi-causal. No one single thing causes it. And when we've had a school shooting, we usually ask the wrong question. We ask, what was the cause? And then we point around at different things such as mental health or violent video games or poverty or whatever. And none of them is it. What is it is when you put them all together. And so would it reduce the risk - yes. How much - we don't know.

SHAPIRO: So if we take a step back from mass shootings and say how much does playing violent video games increase real-life violence and aggression, do we have a clear answer to that?

GENTILE: We have a clear answer when we're talking about aggression. So aggression is any behavior - that could be a verbal behavior, a physical behavior or a relational behavior - that is intended to harm someone else. So if you give someone the cold shoulder, that is aggressive. But that's different from violence, which is only physical and extreme such that if successful, it would cause severe bodily damage or death. And the research on media violence and aggression seems pretty clear - that the more children consume media violence, whether that's in video games, TV or movies, they do become more willing to behave aggressively when provoked.

SHAPIRO: You sort of conflated video games, TV, movies there. In a video game, you're pretending to be the shooter. You're interacting with a virtual world. TV or movies is much more passive. Is there an important distinction there, or is violence violence in media no matter whether it's interactive or passive?

GENTILE: We used to think that video games would have a much larger effect than passive media like TV or movies. But the research has not seemed to bear that out. It seems to be about the same size effect, which is somewhat surprising because they are active, and you are being rewarded for it. But basically what we're coming down to is learning. We can learn from all of these different ways. And it seems we don't learn particularly differently from video games than from TV or movies.

SHAPIRO: Some people have offered a theory that videogames can be catharsis, and expressing violent impulses in a virtual world helps people not express those in the real world. Has that been disproven?

GENTILE: That has been disproven. So how do you memorize a phone number? You repeat it. Does seeing it one more time take it out of your brain? That would be the catharsis idea, right?

SHAPIRO: (Laughter) Right.

GENTILE: But, no, each new time you see it burns it in a little deeper. So in fact, there's no possible way that catharsis can happen, at least not nearly the way people like to talk about it.

SHAPIRO: Do you think the premise of this White House meeting is flawed? I mean, should video games be one focus of this debate over gun violence in America?

GENTILE: I do think it's flawed. I think the problem is that we're seeking a simple solution to a complex problem. And I noticed there are no real aggression researchers at this White House meeting. So we're not even getting the real picture. What we're getting is just a very one-sided and very limited look into only one of the risk factors for aggression.

SHAPIRO: Professor Gentile, thanks very much.

GENTILE: My pleasure.

SHAPIRO: Psychology professor Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University.

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The evidence that video game violence leads to real-world aggression

A 2018 meta-analysis found that there is a small increase in real-world physical aggression among adolescents and pre-teens who play violent video games. Led by Jay Hull, a social psychologist at Dartmouth College, the study team pooled data from 24 previous studies in an attempt to avoid some of the problems that have made the question of a connection between gaming and aggression controversial.

Many previous studies, according to a story in Scientific American, have been criticized by “a small but vocal cadre of researchers [who] have argued much of the work implicating video games has serious flaws in that, among other things, it measures the frequency of aggressive thoughts or language rather than physically aggressive behaviors like hitting or pushing, which have more real-world relevance.”

Hull and team limited their analysis to studies that “measured the relationship between violent video game use and overt physical aggression,” according to the Scientific American article .

The Dartmouth analysis drew on 24 studies involving more than 17,000 participants and found that “playing violent video games is associated with increases in physical aggression over time in children and teens,” according to a Dartmouth press release describing the study , which was published Oct. 1, 2018, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

The studies the Dartmouth team analyzed “tracked physical aggression among users of violent video games for periods ranging from three months to four years. Examples of physical aggression included incidents such as hitting someone or being sent to the school principal’s office for fighting, and were based on reports from children, parents, teachers, and peers,” according to the press release.

The study was almost immediately called in to question. In an editorial in Psychology Today , a pair of professors claim the results of the meta-analysis are not statistically significant. Hull and team wrote in the PNAS paper that, while small, the results are indeed significant. The Psychology Today editorial makes an appeal to a 2017 statement by the American Psychological Association’s media psychology and technology division “cautioning policy makers and news media to stop linking violent games to serious real-world aggression as the data is just not there to support such beliefs.”

It should be noted, however, that the 2017 statement questions the connection between “serious” aggression while the APA Resolution of 2015 , based on a review of its 2005 resolution by its own experts, found that “the link between violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior is one of the most studied and best established. Since the earlier meta-analyses, this link continues to be a reliable finding and shows good multi-method consistency across various representations of both violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior.”

While the effect sizes are small, they’ve been similar across many studies, according to the APA resolution. The problem has been the interpretation of aggression, with some writers claiming an unfounded connection between homicides, mass shootings, and other extremes of violence. The violence the APA resolution documents is more mundane and involves the kind of bullying that, while often having dire long-term consequences, is less immediately dangerous: “insults, threats, hitting, pushing, hair pulling, biting and other forms of verbal and physical aggression.”

Minor and micro-aggressions, though, do have significant health risks, especially for mental health. People of color, LGBTQ people , and women everywhere experience higher levels of depression and anger, as well as stress-related disorders, including heart disease, asthma, obesity, accelerated aging, and premature death. The costs of even minor aggression are laid at the feet of the individuals who suffer, their friends and families, and society at large as the cost of healthcare skyrockets.

Finally, it should be noted that studies looking for a connection between game violence and physical aggression are not looking at the wider context of the way we enculturate children, especially boys. As WSU’s Stacey Hust and Kathleen Rodgers have shown, you don’t have to prove a causative effect to know that immersing kids in games filled with violence and sexist tropes leads to undesirable consequences, particularly the perpetuation of interpersonal violence in intimate relationships.

No wonder, then, that when feminist media critic Anita Saarkesian launched her YouTube series, “ Tropes vs. Women in Video Games ,” she was the target of vitriol and violence. Years later she’d joke about “her first bomb threat,” but that was only after her life had been upended by the boys club that didn’t like “this woman” showing them the “grim evidence of industry-wide sexism.”

Read more about WSU research and study on video games in “ What’s missing in video games .”

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The relation of violent video games to adolescent aggression: an examination of moderated mediation effect.

• 1 Research Institute of Moral Education, College of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
• 2 The Lab of Mental Health and Social Adaptation, Faculty of Psychology, Research Center for Mental Health Education, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

To assess the moderated mediation effect of normative beliefs about aggression and family environment on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, the subjects self-reported their exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggressive behavior. The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression had a mediation effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while family environment moderated the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with a good family environment, exposure to violent video games had only a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, it had both direct and indirect effects mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. This moderated mediation model includes some notions of General Aggression Model (GAM) and Catalyst Model (CM), which helps shed light on the complex mechanism of violent video games influencing adolescent aggression.

Introduction

Violent video games and aggression.

The relationship between violent video games and adolescent aggression has become a hot issue in psychological research ( Wiegman and Schie, 1998 ; Anderson and Bushman, 2001 ; Anderson et al., 2010 ; Ferguson et al., 2012 ; Greitemeyer, 2014 ; Yang et al., 2014 ; Boxer et al., 2015 ). Based on the General Aggression Model (GAM), Anderson et al. suggested that violent video games constitute an antecedent variable of aggressive behavior, i.e., the degree of exposure to violent video games directly leads to an increase of aggression ( Anderson and Bushman, 2001 ; Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson, 2004 ; Anderson et al., 2004 ). Related longitudinal studies ( Anderson et al., 2008 ), meta-analyses ( Anderson et al., 2010 ; Greitemeyer and Mugge, 2014 ), event-related potential studies ( Bailey et al., 2011 ; Liu et al., 2015 ), and trials about juvenile delinquents ( DeLisi et al., 2013 ) showed that exposure to violent video games significantly predicts adolescent aggression.

Although Anderson et al. insisted on using the GAM to explain the effect of violent video games on aggression, other researchers have proposed alternative points of view. For example, a meta-analysis by Sherry (2001) suggested that violent video games have minor influence on adolescent aggression. Meanwhile, Ferguson (2007) proposed that publication bias (or file drawer effect) may have implications in the effect of violent video games on adolescent aggression. Publication bias means that compared with articles with negative results, those presenting positive results (such as statistical significance) are more likely to be published ( Rosenthal and Rosnow, 1991 ). A meta-analysis by Ferguson (2007) found that after publication bias adjustment, the related studies cannot support the hypothesis that violent video games are highly correlated with aggression. Then, Ferguson et al. proposed a Catalyst Model (CM), which is opposite to the GAM. According to this model, genetic predisposition can lead to an aggressive child temperament and aggressive adult personality. Individuals who have an aggressive temperament or an aggressive personality are more likely to produce violent behavior during times of environmental strain. Environmental factors act as catalysts for violent acts for an individual who have a violence-prone personality. This means that although the environment does not cause violent behavior, but it can moderate the causal influence of biology on violence. The CM model suggested that exposure to violent video games is not an antecedent variable of aggressive behavior, but only acts as a catalyst influencing its form ( Ferguson et al., 2008 ). Much of studies ( Ferguson et al., 2009 , 2012 ; Ferguson, 2013 , 2015 ; Furuya-Kanamori and Doi, 2016 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ) found that adolescent aggression cannot be predicted by the exposure to violent video games, but it is closely related to antisocial personality traits, peer influence, and family violence.

Anderson and his collaborators ( Groves et al., 2014 ; Kepes et al., 2017 ) suggested there were major methodological shortcomings in the studies of Ferguson et al. and redeclared the validity of their own researches. Some researchers supported Anderson et al. and criticized Ferguson’s view ( Gentile, 2015 ; Rothstein and Bushman, 2015 ). However, Markey (2015) held a neutral position that extreme views should not be taken in the relationship between violent video games and aggression.

In fact, the relation of violent video games to aggression is complicated. Besides the controversy between the above two models about whether there is an influence, other studies explored the role of internal factors such as normative belief about aggression and external factors such as family environment in the relationship between violent video games and aggression.

Normative Beliefs About Aggression, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

Normative beliefs about aggression are one of the most important cognitive factors influencing adolescent aggression; they refer to an assessment of aggression acceptability by an individual ( Huesmann and Guerra, 1997 ). They can be divided into two types: general beliefs and retaliatory beliefs. The former means a general view about aggression, while the latter reflects aggressive beliefs in provocative situations. Normative beliefs about aggression reflect the degree acceptance of aggression, which affects the choice of aggressive behavior.

Studies found that normative beliefs about aggression are directly related to aggression. First, self-reported aggression is significantly correlated to normative beliefs about aggression ( Bailey and Ostrov, 2008 ; Li et al., 2015 ). General normative beliefs about aggression can predict young people’s physical, verbal, and indirect aggression ( Lim and Ang, 2009 ); retaliatory normative beliefs about aggression can anticipate adolescent retaliation behavior after 1 year ( Werner and Hill, 2010 ; Krahe and Busching, 2014 ). There is a longitudinal temporal association of normative beliefs about aggression with aggression ( Krahe and Busching, 2014 ). Normative beliefs about aggression are significantly positively related to online aggressive behavior ( Wright and Li, 2013 ), which is the most important determining factor of adolescent cyberbullying ( Kowalski et al., 2014 ). Teenagers with high normative beliefs about aggression are more likely to become bullies and victims of traditional bullying and cyberbullying ( Burton et al., 2013 ). Finally, normative beliefs about aggression can significantly predict the support and reinforcement of bystanders in offline bullying and cyberbullying ( Machackova and Pfetsch, 2016 ).

According to Bandura’s social cognitive theory ( Bandura, 1989 ), violent video games can initiate adolescents’ observational learning. In this situation, not only can they imitate the aggressive behavior of the model but also their understanding and acceptability about aggression may change. Therefore, normative beliefs about aggression can also be a mediator between violent video games and adolescent aggression ( Duan et al., 2014 ; Anderson et al., 2017 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ). Studies have shown that the mediating role of normative beliefs about aggression is not influenced by factors such as gender, prior aggression, and parental monitoring ( Gentile et al., 2014 ).

Family Environment, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

Family violence, parenting style, and other family factors have major effects on adolescent aggression. On the one hand, family environment can influence directly on aggression by shaping adolescents’ cognition and setting up behavioral models. Many studies have found that family violence and other negative factors are positively related to adolescent aggression ( Ferguson et al., 2009 , 2012 ; Ferguson, 2013 ), while active family environment can reduce the aggressive behavior ( Batanova and Loukas, 2014 ).

On the other hand, family environment can act on adolescent aggression together with other factors, such as exposure to violent video games. Analysis of the interaction between family conflict and media violence (including violence on TV and in video games) to adolescent aggression showed that teenagers living in higher conflict families with more media violence exposure show more aggressive behavior ( Fikkers et al., 2013 ). Parental monitoring is significantly correlated with reduced media violence exposure and a reduction in aggressive behavior 6 months later ( Gentile et al., 2014 ). Parental mediation can moderate the relationship between media violence exposure and normative beliefs about aggression, i.e., for children with less parental mediation, predictability of violent media exposure on normative beliefs about aggression is stronger ( Linder and Werner, 2012 ). Parental mediation is closely linked to decreased aggression caused by violent media ( Nathanson, 1999 ; Rasmussen, 2014 ; Padilla-Walker et al., 2016 ). Further studies have shown that the autonomy-supportive restrictive mediation of parents is related to a reduction in current aggressive behavior by decreasing media violence exposure; conversely, inconsistent restrictive mediation is associated with an increase of current aggressive behavior by enhancing media violence exposure ( Fikkers et al., 2017 ).

The Current Study

Despite GAM and CM hold opposite views on the relationship between violent video games and aggression, both of the two models imply the same idea that aggression cannot be separated from internal and external factors. While emphasizing on negative effects of violent video games on adolescents’ behavior, the GAM uses internal factors to explain the influencing mechanism, including aggressive beliefs, aggressive behavior scripts, and aggressive personality ( Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson and Carnagey, 2014 ). Although the CM considers that there is no significant relation between violent video games and aggression, it also acknowledges the role of external factors such as violent video games and family violence. Thus, these two models seem to be contradictory, but in fact, they reveal the mechanism of aggression from different points of view. It will be more helpful to explore the effect of violent video games on aggression from the perspective of combination of internal and external factors.

Although previous studies have investigated the roles of normative beliefs about aggression and family factors in the relationship between violent video games and adolescent aggression separately, the combined effect of these two factors remains unstudied. The purpose of this study was to analyze the combined effect of normative beliefs about aggression and family environment. This can not only confirm the effects of violent video games on adolescent aggression further but also can clarify the influencing mechanism from the integration of GAM and CM to a certain extent. Based on the above, the following three hypotheses were proposed:

Hypothesis 1: There is a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression.

Hypothesis 2: Normative beliefs about aggression are the mediator of exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression.

Hypothesis 3: The family environment can moderate the mediation effects of normative beliefs about aggression in exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression constitute a moderated mediation model.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

All subjects gave informed written consent for participation in this investigation, and their parents signed parental written informed consent. The study was reviewed and approved by the Professor Committee of School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, which is the committee responsible for providing ethics approvals. A total of 648 Chinese middle school students participated in this study, including 339 boys and 309 girls; 419 students were from cities and towns, and 229 from the countryside. There were 277 and 371 junior and high school students, respectively. Ages ranged from 12 to 19 years, averaging 14.73 ( SD  = 1.60).

Video Game Questionnaire (VGQ)

The Video Game Questionnaire ( Anderson and Dill, 2000) required participants to list their favorite five video games and assess their use frequencies, the degree of violent content, and the degree of violent images on a 7-point scale (1, participants seldom play video games, with no violent content or image; 7, participants often play video games with many violent contents and images). Methods for calculating the score of exposure to violent video games: (score of violent content in the game + score of violent images in the game) × use frequency/5. Chen et al. (2012) found that the Chinese version of this questionnaire had high internal consistency reliability and good content validity. The Chinese version was used in this study, and the Cronbach’s α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.88.

Aggression Questionnaire (AQ)

There were 29 items in AQ ( Buss and Perry, 1992 ), including four dimensions: physical aggression, verbal aggression, anger, and hostility. The scale used 5-point scoring criteria (1, very incongruent with my features; 5, very congruent with my features). Scores for each item were added to obtain the dimension score, and dimension scores were summed to obtain the total score. The Chinese version of AQ had good internal consistency reliability and construct validity ( Ying and Dai, 2008 ). In this study, the Chinese version was used and its Cronbach’s α coefficient was 0.83.

Family Environment Scale (FES)

The FES ( Moos, 1990 ) includes 90 true-false questions and is divided into 10 subscales, including cohesion, expressiveness, conflict, independence, achievement-orientation, intellectual-cultural orientation, active-recreational orientation, moral-religious emphasis, organization, and control. The Chinese version of FES was revised by Fei et al. (1991) and used in this study. Three subscales closely related to aggression were selected, including cohesion, conflict, and moral-religious emphasis, with 27 items in total. The family environment score was the sum of scores of these three subscales (the conflict subscale was first inverted). The Cronbach’s α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.75.

Normative Beliefs About Aggression Scale (NOBAGS)

There are 20 items in the NOBAGS ( Huesmann and Guerra, 1997 ), which includes retaliation (12 items) and general (8 items) aggression belief. A 4-point Likert scale is used (1, absolutely wrong; 4, absolutely right). The subjects were asked to assess the accuracy of the behavior described in each item. High score means high level of normative beliefs about aggression. The revised Chinese version of NOBAGS consists of two factors: retaliation (nine items) and general (six items) aggression belief. Its internal consistency coefficient and test-retest reliability are 0.81 and 0.79. Confirmative factor analysis showed that this version has good construct validity: χ 2  = 280.09, df  = 89, χ 2 / df  = 3.15, RMSEA = 0.07, SRMR = 0.04, NFI = 0.95, NNFI = 0.96, and CFI = 0.96 ( Shao and Wang, 2017 ). In this study, the Cronbach’s α coefficient of the Chinese version was 0.88.

Group testing was performed in randomly selected classes of six middle schools. All subjects completed the above four questionnaires.

Data Analysis

IBM SPSS Statistics 22 was used to analysis the correlations among study variables, the mediating effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression, and the moderating role of family environment in the relationship between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression. In order to validate the moderated mediation model, Mplus 7 was also used.

Correlation Analysis Among Study Variables

In this study, self-reported questionnaires were used to collect data, and results might be influenced by common method bias. Therefore, the Harman’s single-factor test was used to assess common method bias before data analysis. The results showed that eigenvalues of 34 unrotated factors were greater than 1, and the amount of variation explained by the first factor was 10.01%, which is much less than 40% of the critical value. Accordingly, common method bias was not significant in this study.

As described in Table 1 , the degree of exposure to violent video games showed significant positive correlations to normative beliefs about aggression and aggression; family environment was negatively correlated to normative beliefs about aggression and aggression; normative beliefs about aggression were significantly and positively related to aggression. The gender difference of exposure to violent video games ( t  = 7.93, p  < 0.001) and normative beliefs about aggression ( t  = 2.74, p  < 0.01) were significant, which boys scored significantly higher than girls.

Table 1 . Means, standard deviations, and Pearson correlations among study variables.

Mediating Effect Analysis

To examine the mediation effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression, gender factor was controlled firstly. Stepwise regression analysis showed that the regression of aggression to violent video games ( c  = 0.28, t  = 6.96, p  < 0.001), the regression of normative beliefs about aggression to violent video games ( a  = 0.19, t  = 4.69, p  < 0.001), and the regression of aggression to violent video games ( c ′ = 0.22, t  = 5.69, p  < 0.001) and normative beliefs about aggression ( b  = 0.31, t  = 8.25, p  < 0.001) were all significant. Thus, normative beliefs about aggression played a partial mediating role in exposure to violent video games and aggression. The mediation effect value was 0.06, accounting for 21.43% (0.06/0.28) of the total effect.

Moderated Mediation Effect Analysis

After standardizing scores of exposure to violent videogames, normative beliefs about aggression, family environment, and aggression, two interaction terms were calculated, including family environment × exposure to violent video games and family environment × normative beliefs about aggression. Regression analysis was carried out after controlling gender factor ( Table 2 ).

Table 2 . Moderated mediation effect analysis of the relationship between violent video exposure and aggression.

In the first step, a simple moderated model (Model 1) between exposure to violent video games and aggression was established. The result showed that exposure to violent video games had a significant effect on aggression ( c 1  = 0.24, t  = 6.13, p  < 0.001), while the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on aggression was not significant ( c 3  = 0.05, t  = −1.31, p  = 0.19), indicating that the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression was not moderated by family environment.

Next, a moderated model (Model 2) between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression was established. The results showed that exposure to violent video games had a significant effect on normative beliefs about aggression ( a 1  = 0.13, t  = 3.42, p  < 0.001), and the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression was significant ( a 3  = −0.13, t  = −3.63, p  < 0.01).

In the third step, a moderated mediation model (Model 3) between exposure to violent video games and aggression was established. As shown in Table 2 , the effect of normative beliefs about aggression on aggression was significant ( b 1  = 0.24, t  = 6.15, p  < 0.001), and the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression was not significant ( b 2  = 0.02, t  = 0.40, p  = 0.69). Because both a 3 and b 1 were significant, exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression constituted a moderated mediation model. Normative beliefs about aggression played a mediating role between exposure to violent video games and aggression, while family environment was a moderator between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression. Mplus analysis proved that the moderated mediation model had good model fitting (χ 2 / df  = 1.54, CFI = 0.99, TLI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.03, and SRMR = 0.01).

To further analyze the moderating effect of the family environment and exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression, the family environment was divided into the high and low groups, according to the principle of standard deviation, and a simple slope test was performed ( Figure 1 ). The results found that for individuals with high score of family environment, prediction of exposure to violent video games to normative beliefs about aggression was not significant ( b  = 0.08, SE  = 0.08, p  = 0.37). For individuals with low score of family environment, exposure to violent video games could significantly predict normative beliefs about aggression ( b  = 0.34, SE  = 0.09, p  < 0.001). Based on the overall findings, individuals with high scores of family environment showed a nonsignificant mediating effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relation of exposure to violent video games and aggression; however, for individuals with low scores of family environment, normative beliefs about aggression played a partial mediating role in the effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression.

Figure 1 . The moderating effect of the family environment on the relationship between violent video game exposure and normative beliefs about aggression.

Main Findings and Implications

This study found a significantly positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, corroborating existing studies ( Anderson, 2004 ; Anderson et al., 2010 ; DeLisi et al., 2013 ; Greitemeyer and Mugge, 2014 ). Anderson et al. (2017) assessed teenagers in Australia, China, Germany, the United States, and other three countries and found that exposure to violent media, including television, movies, and video games, is positively related to adolescent aggression, demonstrating cross-cultural consistency; 8% of variance in aggression could be independently explained by exposure to violent media. In this study, after controlling for gender and family environment, R 2 for exposure to violent video games in predicting adolescent aggression was 0.05, indicating that 5% of variation in adolescent aggression could be explained by exposure to violent media. These consistent findings confirm the effect of exposure to violent video games on adolescent aggression and can be explained by the GAM. According to the GAM ( Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson and Carnagey, 2014 ), violent video games can make teenagers acquire, repeat, and reinforce aggression-related knowledge structures, including aggressive beliefs and attitude, aggressive perceptual schemata, aggressive expectation schemata, aggressive behavior scripts, and aggression desensitization. Therefore, aggressive personality is promoted, increasing the possibility of aggressive behavior. The Hypothesis 1 of this study was validated and provided evidence for the GAM.

As shown above, normative beliefs about aggression had a partial mediation effect on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression. Exposure to violent video games, on the one hand, can predict adolescent aggression directly; on the other hand, it had an indirect effect on adolescent aggression via normative beliefs about aggression. According to the above results, when exposure to violent video games changes by 1 standard deviation, adolescent aggression varies by 0.28 standard deviation, with 0.22 standard deviation being a direct effect of exposure to violent video games on adolescent aggression and 0.06 standard deviation representing the effect through normative beliefs about aggression. Too much violence in video games makes it easy for individuals to become accustomed to violence and emotionally apathetic towards the harmful consequences of violence. Moreover, it can make individuals accept the idea that violence is a good way of problem solving, leading to an increase in normative beliefs about aggression; under certain situational cues, it is more likely to become violent or aggressive. This conclusion is supported by other studies ( Gentile et al., 2014 ; Anderson et al., 2017 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ). Like Hypothesis 1, Hypothesis 2 was validated the GAM.

One of the main findings of this study was the validation of Hypothesis 3: a moderated mediation model was constructed involving exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression. Family environment moderated the first half of the mediation process of violent video games, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression. In this study, family environment encompassed three factors, including (1) cohesion reflecting the degree of mutual commitment, assistance, and support among family members; (2) conflict reflecting the extent of anger, aggression, and conflict among family members; and (3) moral-religious emphasis reflecting the degree of emphasis on ethics, religion, and values. Individuals with high scores of family environment often help each other; seldom show anger, attack, and contradiction openly; and pay more attention to morality and values. These positive aspects would help them understand violence in video games from the right perspective, reduce recognition and acceptance of violence or aggression, and diminish the effect of violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression. Hence, exposure to violent video games could not predict normative beliefs about aggression of these individuals. By contrast, individuals with low scores of family environment are less likely to help each other; they often openly show anger, attack, and contradiction and do not pay much attention to morality and values. These negative aspects would not decrease but increase their acceptance of violence and aggression. For these individuals, because of the lack of mitigation mechanisms, exposure to violent video games could predict normative beliefs about aggression significantly.

The moderated mediation model of the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression could not only help reveal that exposure to violent video games can affect aggression but also provide an elaboration of the influencing mechanism. According to this model, for individuals with high scores of family environment, exposure to violent video games had only direct effect on aggression. However, for those with low scores of family environment, there was not only a direct effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression but also an indirect effect mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. In short, exposure to violence video games affecting aggression through normative beliefs about aggression is more likely to happen to adolescents with poor family environment than those with good family environment. That is, generation of adolescent aggression is not only related to internal cognitive factors but also to external situations. As Piotrowski and Valkenburg ( Piotrowski and Valkenburg, 2015 ; Valkenburg, 2015 ) pointed out, the effect of violent video games/media on adolescents is a complex interaction of dispositional, developmental, and social factors, and individual differences in susceptibility to these three factors determine the nature and the extent of this influence. The proposed model incorporated some perspectives of GAM and CM: while confirming the effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression occurrence, the combined effect of individual and environmental factors was verified.

Compared with the simple mediation or moderation model, the present moderated mediation model provided deeper insights into the internal mechanism of the effect of violent video games on aggression, providing inspirations for preventing adolescent aggression. First, in view of the close relationship between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, relevant government departments should continue to improve the grading system of video games; meanwhile, parents should appropriately monitor the types of video games used by teenagers as well as the time spent and reduce the degree of exposure to violent video games. Second, by allowing teenagers to objectively distinguish between violence in games and reality, the mediating role of normative beliefs about aggression could inspire people to identify rational ways to solve violence problems and to experience the hurtful consequences of aggression. This would help adolescents change normative beliefs about aggression, establish a correct view of right and wrong, and reduce the occurrence of aggression. Finally, the moderating effect of family environment on the mediation process suggests that more attention should be paid to the important role of family environment. On the one hand, family education is closely related to adolescent aggression. Then, parents should create a good family atmosphere, publicly show anger and aggression as little as possible, and advocate and practice positive moral values. Parents should adopt authoritative styles, abandoning autocratic and indulgent parenting styles ( Casas et al., 2006 ; Sandstrom, 2007 ; Underwood et al., 2009 ; Kawabata et al., 2011 ) to minimize the negative effect of exposure to violent video games. On the other hand, for teenagers with poor family environment, while reducing exposure to violent video games, it is particularly important to change their normative beliefs about aggression, no longer viewing aggression as an alternative way to solve problems.

Limitations

Limitations of the current study should be mentioned. First, only Chinese school students were assessed, in a relatively small number, which could affect sample representativeness. A large sample of teenagers from different countries and in different ages, also including juvenile offenders, would be more accurate in revealing the effect of violent video games on adolescent aggression. Second, this study only focused on violent video games, not involving violent media such as internet and television, daily life events, wars, and other major social events. Indeed, these factors also have important effects on adolescent aggression, and their influencing mechanisms and combined effect are worth investigating further. Third, this study mainly adopted the self-report method. Use of peer, parent, or teacher reports to assess exposure to violent video games and aggression would help improve the effectiveness of the study. Fourth, there might be other mediators, moderating variables and relational models. In addition to normative beliefs about aggression and family environment, individual emotions, personality characteristics, school climate, and companions may play mediating or moderating roles in the relationship between violent video games and aggression. This study developed a moderated mediation model between family environment and normative beliefs about aggression, but the possibility of multiple mediation and mediated moderation models cannot be ruled out.

The current study showed that exposure to violent video games is positively related to adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression have a mediating effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while the family environment regulates the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with good family environment, exposure to violent video games only has a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, there is an indirect effect mediated by normative beliefs about aggression alongside a direct effect. This moderated mediation model incorporates some perspectives of GAM and CM, enriching studies of generative mechanism of adolescent aggression.

Author Contributions

YW and RS conceived the idea of the study. RS analyzed the data. YW and RS interpreted the results and wrote the paper. YW discussed the results and revised the manuscript.

This study was supported by a grant from the National Social Science Foundation of China (14CSH017) to YW.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: violence video games, aggression, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, moderated mediation effect

Citation: Shao R and Wang Y (2019) The Relation of Violent Video Games to Adolescent Aggression: An Examination of Moderated Mediation Effect. Front. Psychol . 10:384. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00384

Received: 25 September 2017; Accepted: 07 February 2019; Published: 21 February 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Shao and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Yunqiang Wang, [email protected] ; [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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The frustrating, enduring debate over video games, violence, and guns

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In the wake of two mass shootings earlier this month in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, the societal role of video games grabbed a familiar media spotlight. The El Paso shooter briefly referenced Call of Duty , a wildly popular game in which players assume the roles of soldiers during historical and fictional wartime, in his “manifesto.” And just this small mention of the video game seemed to have prompted President Donald Trump to return to a theme he’s emphasized before when looking to assign greater blame for violent incidents.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society,” he said in an August 5 press conference. “This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence.”

Trump’s statement suggesting a link between video games and real-world violence echoed sentiments shared by other lawmakers following the back-to-back mass shootings. It’s a response that major media outlets and retailers have also adopted of late; ESPN recently chose to delay broadcasting an esports tournament because of the shootings — a decision that seems to imply the network believes in a link between gaming and real-world violence. And Walmart made a controversial decision to temporarily remove all video game displays from its stores, even as it continues to openly sell guns.

But many members of the public, as well as researchers and some politicians, have counterargued that blaming video games sidesteps the real issue at the root of America’s mass shooting problem: a need for stronger gun control . The frenzied debate over video games within the larger conversation around gun violence underscores both how intense the fight over gun control has become and how easily games can become mired in political rhetoric.

But this isn’t a new development; blaming video games for real-world violence — any kind of real-world violence — is a longstanding cultural and political habit whose origins date back to the 1970s. It’s also arguably part of a larger recurring wave of concern over any pop culture that’s been perceived as morally deviant, from rock ’n’ roll to the occult , depending on the era. But as mass shootings continue to occur nationwide and attempts to stop them by enacting gun control legislature remain divisive, video games have again become an easy target.

The most recent clamor arose from a clash among several familiar foes. In one corner: politicians like Trump who cite video games as evidence of immoral and violent media’s negative societal impact. In another: people who play video games and resist this reading, while also trying to lodge separate critiques of violence within gaming. In another: scientists at odds over whether there are factual and causal links between video games and real-world violence. And in still another: members of the general public who, upon receiving alarmist messages about games from politicians and the news media, react with yet more alarm.

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What is new, however, is that recent criticism of the narrative that video games lead to real-world violence seems particularly intensified, and it’s coming not just from gamers but also from scientists , some media outlets , even mass shooting survivors: David Hogg, who became a gun control advocate after surviving the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, unveiled a new March for Our Lives gun control initiative in August, pointedly stating in his announcement on Twitter, “We know video games aren’t to blame.”

And on all sides is a sense that frustration is growing because so little has changed since the last time we had this debate — and since the time before that and the time before that.

There’s no science proving a link between video games and real-world violence. But that hasn’t quelled a debate that’s raged for decades.

Historically, video games have played a verifiable role in a handful of mass shootings, but the science linking video games to gun violence is murky . A vast body of psychology research, most of it conducted before 2015, argues strenuously that video games can contribute to increases in aggression . Yet much of this research has been contested by newer, contradictory findings from both psychologists and scholars in different academic fields. For example, Nickie Phillips , a criminologist whose research deals with violence in popular media, told me that “most criminologists are dismissive of a causal link between media and crime,” and that they’re instead interested in questions of violence as a social construct and how that contributes to political discourse.

That type of research, she stressed, is likely to be less flashy and headline-grabbing than psychology studies, which are more focused on pointing to direct behaviors and their causes. “Social meanings of crime are in transition,” Phillips said. “There’s not a single variable. As a public, we want a single concrete explanation as to why people commit atrocities, when the answers can be very complex.”

The debate over the science is easy to wade into, but it obscures just how preoccupied America is with dangerous media. The oldest moral panic over a video game may be the controversy over a 1976 game called Death Race , which awarded players points for driving over fleeing pedestrians dubbed “gremlins.” The game became mired in controversy, even sparking a segment on 60 Minutes . Interestingly, other games of the era that framed their mechanics through wartime violence, like the 1974 military game Tank , failed to cause as much public concern.

In his 2017 book Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong , psychologist Patrick Markey points out that before concerned citizens fixated on video games, many of them were worried about arcades — not because of the games they contained, but because they were licentious hangouts for teens. (Insert “ Ya Got Trouble ” here.) By the 1980s, “Arcades were being shut down across the nation by activist parents intent on protecting their children from the dangerous influences lurking within these neon-drenched dungeons,” Markey writes.

Then came the franchise that evolved arcade panic into gameplay panic: Midway Games’ Mortal Kombat , infamous for its gory “fatality” moves . With its 1992 arcade debut, Mortal Kombat sparked hysteria among concerned adults that led to a 1993 congressional hearing and the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB . The fighting game franchise still incites debate with every new release.

“Like people were really going to go out and rip people’s spines out,” Cypheroftyr , a gaming critic who typically goes by her internet handle, told me over the phone regarding the mainstream anxiety around Mortal Kombat in the 1990s. Cypheroftyr is an avid player of shooter games and other action games and the founder of the nonprofit I Need Diverse Games .

“I’m old enough to remember the whole Jack Thompson era of trying to say video games are violent and they should be banned,” she said, referencing the infamous disbarred obscenity lawyer known for a strident crusade against games and other media that has spanned decades .

Cypheroftyr pointed out that after the Columbine shooting in April 1999, politicians “were trying to blame both video games and Marilyn Manson. It just feels like this is too easy a scapegoat.”

Politicians have long seized on the idea that recreational fantasy and fictional media have an influence on real-world evil. In 2007, for example, Sen. Mitt Romney (R–UT) blamed “music and movies and TV and video games” for being full of “pornography and violence,” which he argued had influenced the Columbine shooters and, later, the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter.

Video games seem especially prone to garnering political attention in the wake of a tragedy — especially first-person shooters like Call of Duty. A stereotype of a mass shooter, isolated and perpetually consuming graphic violent content, seems to linger in the public’s consciousness. A neighbor of the 2018 Parkland shooter, for instance, told the Miami Herald that the shooter would play video games for up to 12 to 15 hours a day — and although that anecdotal report was unverified, it was still widely circulated.

A 2015 Pew study of 2,000 US adults found that even though 49 percent of adult Americans play video games, 40 percent of Americans also believe in a link between games and violence — specifically, that “people who play violent video games are more likely to be violent themselves.” Additionally, 32 percent of the people who told Pew they play video games also said they believe gaming contributes to an increase in aggression, even though their own experience as, presumably, nonviolent gamers would offer at least some evidence to the contrary.

One person who sees a correlation between violent games and a propensity for real-world violence is Tim Winter . Winter is the president of the Parents Television Council , a nonpartisan advocacy group that lobbies the entertainment industry against marketing graphic violence to children. He spent several years overseeing MGM’s former video game publishing division, MGM Interactive, and moved into advocacy when he became a parent. Growing up, his children played all kinds of video games, except for those he considered too graphic or violent.

In a phone interview, Winter told me his view aligns with the research supporting links between games and aggression.

“Anyone who uses the term ‘moral panic’ in my view is trying to diminish a bona fide conversation that needs to take place,” Winter said. “It’s a simple PR move to refute something that might actually have some value in the broader conversation.”

During our conversation, he compared the connection between violent media and harmful real-world effects to that between cigarettes and lung cancer. If you consume in moderation, he argues, you’ll probably be fine; but, over time, exposure to violent media can have “a cumulative negative effect.” (In fact, studies of infrequent smokers have shown that their risk of coronary disease is roughly equal to that of frequent smokers, and their risk of cancer is still significantly higher than that of nonsmokers.)

“What I believe to be true is that the media we consume has a very powerful impact on shaping our belief structure, our cognitive development, our values, and our opinions,” he said.

He added that it would be foolish to point to any one act of violence and say it was caused by any one video game — that, he argued, “would be like saying lung cancer was caused by that one specific cigarette I smoked.”

“But if you are likely to smoke packs a day over the course of many years, it has a cumulative negative effect on your health,” he continued. “I believe based on the research on both sides that that’s the prevailing truth.”

The debate endures because gun control isn’t being addressed — and games are an easy target

Like many people I spoke with for this story, Winter believes that the debate about gun violence has remained largely at a standstill since Columbine, while the number of mass shootings nationwide has continued to increase.

“If you look at the broader issue of gun violence in America, you have a number of organizations and constituencies pointing at different causes,” he said. “When you look back at what those arguments are, it’s the same arguments that have been made going back to Columbine. Whether it’s gun control, whether it’s mental illness, whether it’s violence in media culture — whatever the debate is about those three root causes, very little progress has been made on any of them.”

The glorification of violence is so culturally embedded in American media through TV, film, games, books, and practically every other available medium that there seems to be very little impetus to change anything about America’s gun culture. We can define “ gun culture ” here as the addition of an embrace of gun ownership and a nationwide oversupply of guns to what Phillips described as “ a culture of violence ” — one in which violence “becomes our go-to way of solving problems — whether that’s individual violence, police violence, state violence.”

“There’s a commodification of violence,” she said, “and we have to understand what that means.”

Naomi Clark , an independent game developer and co-chair of New York University’s Game Center program, agreed. “I find it more plausible that America’s long-standing culture of gun violence has affected video games, as a form of culture, than the other way around,” she told me in an email. “After all, this nation’s cultural traditions and attachments around guns are far older than video games.”

In light of incidents like Walmart’s removal of video game displays after the recent mass shootings while continuing to advertise guns, the connection between the shootings and America’s continued valorization of guns feels extremely stark. “We could ban video games tomorrow and mass shootings would still happen,” Cypheroftyr told me.

“What’s new about the current debate is that the scapegoat of videogaming has never been more nakedly exposed for what it is,” gaming sociologist Katherine Cross wrote in an email, “with Republicans and conservatives manifestly fearful of blaming systematic white supremacism, Trump’s rhetoric, or our nation’s permissive and freewheeling gun culture for the recent rash of terrorism.”

Because of the sensitivity around the issue of gun control, it’s easy for politicians to score points with constituents by focusing a conversation on games and sidestepping other action. “Politicians often blame video games because they are a safe target,” Moral Combat author Markey told me in an email. “There isn’t a giant video game lobby like other potential causes of mass shootings (like the NRA [National Rifle Association]). So [by targeting games], a politician can make it appear they are doing something without risking losing any votes.”

And the general public is often susceptible to this rhetoric, both because it’s emotional and because it may feed what they think they already know about games — even if that’s not a lot. “The narrative that violence in video games contributes to the gun violence in America is, I think, a good example of a bad idea that seems right to people who don’t look too closely at the facts,” Zak Garriss , a video game writer and designer who’s worked on a wide range of games, told me in an email.

“Video games are a global industry, dwarfing other entertainment industries in revenue in markets comprised of gamers from the UK, Germany, France, Japan, the US, and basically anywhere there’s electricity. Yet the spree shooting phenomenon seems to be seriously and uniquely a US issue right now. It’s also worth noting that the ratings systems across these countries vary, and in the case of Europe, are often more liberal in many regards than the US system,” Garriss said.

He also pointed out that this conversation frequently overshadows the important, innovative work that many games are engaged in. “Games like Stardew Valley , Minecraft , or Journey craft experiences that help people relax, detox after a day, bond with friends,” he said. “Games like Papers, Please , That Dragon Cancer , or Life Is Strange interrogate the harder and the darker elements of the human experience like love, grief, loneliness, and death.”

In other words, a conversation that focuses on games and guns alone dismisses the vital cultural role that video games play as art. “Play video games and you can jump on giant mushrooms, shoot a wizard on the moon, grow a farm, fall in love, experience nearly infinite worlds really,” Garriss told me. “If games have a unifying organizing principle, I’d say it’s to delight. The pursuit of fun.”

He continued: “To me, the tragedy, if there is one, in the current discourse around video games and violence, lies in failing to see the magic happening in the play. As devs, it’s a magic we’re chasing with every game. And as players, I think it’s a magic that has not just the potential but the actual power to bring people together, to aid mental health, to make us think, to help us heal. And to experience delight.”

But for some members of the public, games’ recreational, relaxational, and artistic values might be another thing that make them suspect. “If they don’t play games or ‘aged out of it,’ they might see them as frivolous or a waste of time,” Cypheroftyr says. “It’s easy to go, ‘Oh, you’re still playing video games? Why are you wasting your life?’”

That idea — that video games are a waste of time — is another longstanding element of cultural assumptions around games of all kinds, Clark, the game developer, told me. “Games have been an easy target in every era because there’s something inherently unproductive or even anti-productive about them, and so there’s also a long history of game designers trying to rehabilitate games and make them ‘do work’ or provide instruction.”

All of this makes it incredibly easy to fixate on video games instead of addressing difficult but more relevant targets, like NRA funding and easy access to guns. And that, in turn, makes it a complicated proposition to extricate video games from conversations about gun violence, let alone limit the conversation around violent games to people who might actually be in a position to create change, like the people who make the games in the first place.

Yet what’s striking when you drill down into the community around gaming is how many gamers agree with many of the arguments politicians are making. As a fan of shooter games, Cypheroftyr told me she routinely plays violent games like Call of Duty and the military action role-playing game (RPG) The Division . “I’m not out here trying to murder people,” she stressed. But like the Parents Television Council’s Winter, Cypheroftyr and many of the other people I spoke with agree that the gaming industry needs to do a lot more to examine the at times shocking imagery it perpetuates.

Many members of the gaming community are already discussing game violence

Multiple people I spoke with expressed frustration that the conversation about video games’ role in mass shootings is obscuring another, very important conversation to be had within the gaming community about violent games.

Clark told me that the public’s lack of nuance and an insistence on a binary reading of the issue is part of the problem. “Most people are capable of understanding that causes are complex,” she said, “that you can’t just point to one thing and say, ‘This is mostly or entirely to blame!’”

But she also cautioned that the gaming community’s reactionary defensiveness to this lack of nuance also prevents many video game fans from acknowledging that games do play a role within a violent culture. “That complexity cuts both ways,” she told me. “Even though it’s silly to say that ‘games cause violence,’ it’s also just as silly to say that games have nothing to do with a culture that has a violence problem.”

That culture is endemic to the gaming industry, added Justin Carter, a freelance journalist whose work focuses on video games and culture.

“The industry does have a fetishization of guns and violence,” Carter said. “You look at games like Borderlands or Destiny and one of the selling points is how many guns there are.” The upcoming first-person shooter game Borderlands 3 , he pointed out, boasts “over a billion” different guns from its 12 fictional weapons manufacturers , all of which tout special perks to get players to try their guns. These perks serve as marketing both inside and outside the game; the game’s publisher, 2K Games, invites players to exult in violence using language that speaks for itself :

Deliver devastating critical hits to enemies’ soft-and-sensitives, then joy-puke as your bullets ricochet towards other targets. ... Step 1: Hit your enemies with tracker tags. Step 2: Unleash a hail of Smart Bullets that track towards your targets. Step 3: Loot! Deal guaranteed elemental damage with your finger glued to the trigger ...

“There are very few [action/adventure] games that give you options other than murdering people,” Cypheroftyr said. “Games don’t do enough to show the other side of it. You shoot someone, you die, they die, you reset, you reload, and nothing happens.”

“I know that if I shoot people in a game it’s not real,” she added. “99.9 percent of people don’t need to be told that. I’m not playing out a power fantasy or anything, but I’ve become more aware of how most games [that] use violence [do so] to solve problems.”

An insistence from game developers on blithely ignoring the potential political messages of their games is another frustration for her. “All these game makers are like, there’s no politics in the game. There’s no message. And I’m like ... did you just send me through a war museum and you’re telling me this?!”

The game Cypheroftyr is referencing is The Division 2 , which features a section where players can engage in enemy combat during a walkthrough of a Vietnam War memorial museum. While she loves the game, she told me the fact that players use weapons from the Vietnam War era while in a war museum belies game developers’ frequent arguments that such games are apolitical.

Another game Cypheroftyr has found disturbing in its attempt to background politics without any real self-reflection is the popular adventure game Detroit Become Human , which displays pacifist Martin Luther King Jr. quotes alongside gameplay that allows players to choose extreme violence as an option. “You can take a more pacifistic approach, but you may not get the ending you want,” she explained.

She noted, too, that the military uses video games for training as part of what’s been dubbed the “ military-entertainment complex ,” with tactics involving shooter games that some ex-soldiers have referred to as “more like brainwashing than anything.” The US Army began exploring virtual training in 1999 and began developing its first tactics game a year later. The result, Full Spectrum Command , was a military-only version of 2003’s Full Spectrum Warrior . Since then, the military has used video games to teach soldiers everything from how to deal with combat scenarios to how to interact with Iraqi civilians .

The close connection between games and sanctioned real-world violence, i.e., war, is hard to deny with any plausibility. “When someone insists that these two parts of culture have absolutely nothing to do with each other,” Clark said, “it smacks of denial, and many game developers are asking themselves, ‘Do I want to be part of this landscape?’ even if they have zero belief that video games are causing violence.”

For all the gaming industry’s faults when it comes to frankly addressing gaming’s role in a violent culture, however, many people are quick to point out that critiques of in-game violence can also come from the video games themselves. In Batman: Arkham Asylum , for example, researchers Christina Fawcett and Steven Kohm recently found that the game “directly implicate[s] the player in violence enacted upon the bodies of criminals and patients alike.” Other games shift the focus away from the perpetrators to the victims — for example, This War of Mine is a survival game inspired by the Bosnian War that focuses not on soldiers but on civilians dealing with the costs of wartime violence.

But acknowledging that critiques of violent games are coming from within the gaming community doesn’t play well as part of the gun control debate. “It’s far too easy to scapegoat video games as low-hanging fruit instead of addressing the real issues,” Cypheroftyr said, “like the ease with which we can get weapons in this country, and why we don’t do more to punish the perpetrators [of gun violence].” She also cites the cultural tendency to excuse masculine aggression early on with a “b“boys will be boys” mentality — which can breed the kind of entitlement that leads to more violence later on.

All these factors combine to make the conversation around violent video games inherently political and part of a larger ongoing debate that ultimately centers on which media messages are the most responsible for fueling real-world violence.

The conversation surrounding violent games implicates violent gaming culture itself — which, in turn, implicates politicians who rail against games

Games journalist Carter told me he feels the gaming community needs to, in essence, reject the whole debate entirely because at this point in its life cycle, it’s disingenuous.

“We’ve been through enough shootings that you know the playbook, and it’s annoying that gamers and people in the industry will take this as a position that needs defending,” he told me. “It’s not a conversation worth having anymore solely on post-traumatic terms.”

Discussions about video game violence need to be held mainly within the games community, Carter said, and held “with people who are actually interested in figuring out a solution instead of politicians looking to pass off the blame for their ineptitude and greed.”

But some gamers told me they don’t trust the gaming community to frame the conversation with appropriate nuance. All of them cited Gamergate’ s violent male entitlement and the effect that its subsequent bleed into the larger alt-right movement’s misogyny and white supremacy have had on mainstream culture at large.

“The framing of that rhetoric that began in Gamergate as part of the ‘low’ culture of niche internet forums became part of the mainstream political discourse,” criminologist Phillips pointed out. “The expression of their misogyny and the notion of being pushed out of their white male-dominated space was a microcosm of what was to come. We’re talking about 8chan now, but [the growth of the alt-right] was fueled by gaming culture.” She points to Gamergate as an example of the complicated interplay between gaming culture, online communities full of toxic, violent rhetoric, and the rise of online extremism that’s increasingly moving offline.

Gaming sociologist Cross agreed. “At this moment, there is urgent need to shine a light on video game culture , the fan spaces that have been infiltrated by white supremacists looking to recruit that minority of gamers who rage against ‘political correctness,’” she told me.

“We treat video games as unreal, as unserious play, and that creates a shadow over gaming forums and fan communities that has allowed toxicity to take root. It’s also allowed neo-Nazis to operate mostly unseen. That is what needs to change.”

The resulting shadow over gaming has spread far and wide — and found violent echoes in the rhetoric of Trump himself . “Look at what the person in the very highest office of the US is cultivating,” Cypheroftyr said. “Toxic masculinity, this idea that men, especially white men, have been fed that they’re losing ‘their’ country.”

“While video games do not influence us in a monkey-see-monkey-do manner, they do, like all media, shape how we see the world,” Cross argues. “Republicans, in broaching that possibility, open themselves up to the critique that their leader, who makes frequent use of both old media and social media, might also be influential in a toxic way.”

And this, ultimately, may be why the current debate around video games and violence feels particularly intense: The extremes of toxic gaming culture are fueling the attitudes of toxic alt-right culture , which in turn fuels the rhetoric of President Trump and many other right-wing politicians — the same rhetoric that many white supremacist mass shooters are using to justify their atrocities.

So when Trump rails against violence in video games, as he’s now done multiple times , he’s protesting a fictionalized version of the real-life violence that his own rhetoric seems to tacitly encourage. If we are to accept the argument that media violence as represented by games is capable of bringing about real-world violence, then surely no media influence is more powerful or full of dangerous potential than that wielded by the president of the United States.

In 2018, Vice’s gaming vertical Waypoint devoted a week to “ guns and games ”; in a moving piece outlining the intent of the project, editor Austin Walker observed that unlike real-world violence, “in big-budget action games, and especially games that give the player guns and plentiful ammunition, violence is cheap and endlessly repeatable.”

Yet now, barely a year later, mass shootings and other incidents of real-world violence have also begun to seem endlessly repeatable. Perhaps that is why, at last, the urgency of shifting our cultural focus from fixing violence in games to fixing violence in the real world feels like it is finally outstripping the incessant debate.

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Stress and Violence in Video Games: Their Influence on Aggression

• Original Article
• Published: 21 January 2022
• Volume 30 , pages 497–512, ( 2022 )

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• Genicelle Barrington 1 &
• Christopher J. Ferguson 1  

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This study investigated whether stress or violent content in video games plays a greater role in aggressiveness towards a cooperative partner while playing a video game. It was hypothesized that participants, when exposed to stress, would demonstrate greater aggressiveness toward an incompetent partner than a competent partner. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that participants, when exposed to a violent video game, would demonstrate greater aggression toward an incompetent partner than those exposed to a non-violent video game. Stress was provoked in half of the participants using the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT), while others took a simple math quiz. Participants were then assigned to a video game condition, violent or non-violent with a competent or incompetent confederate and completed a reaction time task to measure aggression. Results indicated that provoked stress and violent content are not linked to aggression in this context.

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Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Under stressful circumstances, individuals tend to resort to aggressiveness. Studies have highlighted that stressful situations which have developed earlier in life and are repeatedly imposed on an individual have underlying effects on aggression. However, many studies have also discussed the perception that immediate stress can also provoke and incite aggression (Verona & Kilmer, 2007 ). Despite this, it is important to understand whether acquired stress plays a role in the expression of human aggression.

Animals, Stress, and Aggression

One means of examining how stress impacts aggression is through the study of animal models. In one study conducted with male adult mice, acute stressors were the primary causes of a marked increase in aggressiveness (Nosjean et al., 2015 ). During this study, the researchers’ aim was to determine the immediate effect acute stress would have on social interaction in adult male mice. In order to conduct their study, the researchers used 70 adult male mice purchased from a laboratory and separated them into isolated host (IH) mice and social visitor (SV) mice. During the study, each isolated host mice either received or did not receive acute stress while the social visitor mice remained unstressed throughout the environment. After being placed under duress, the IH mice were allowed to explore their cage before being exposed to an SV mouse for social interaction. This interaction was videotaped and analyzed by researchers. The researchers concluded that stress depleted the mice’s social repertoire, accelerated their dominance behaviors, and furthered aggressive behaviors. Due to their findings, they concluded that social interactions can be influenced by a single stressful event.

Kohl et al. ( 2013 ) utilized a similar procedure, wherein mice were exposed to a resident intruder to measure and evaluate the resident’s aggressive behaviors. In their study, they primarily focused on whether there was an interaction of conditional neural cell adhesion molecule knockout (NCAM-KO) and the extent to which exposure to repeated stress influenced aggression. Through the utilization of a gene by environment experiment, researchers attempted to determine whether the lack of forebrain in NCAM-KO mice would facilitate the development of an aggressive phenotype following exposure to either subchronic stress and chronic stress or one stressful condition when compared to wild-type variations of the mice. During their procedure, the researchers first measured the animals’ baseline anxiety-like behavior through the use of an elevated plus-maze; they also conducted a bedding preference test to determine social behavior, an open field test to observe exploratory behavior, and the resident-intruder test for aggression. After running statistical analyses on their data, they found that NCAM-KO mice exhibited no differences in aggressive behavior prior to subchronic stress exposure and while under basal conditions. However, following chronic exposure to stress, the NCAM-KO mice showed increased aggressive behavior toward their intruder. These findings led to the conclusion that chronic stress-induced differences in aggressive behavior rather than subchronic stress. Furthermore, the researchers outlined that due to the age of their mice, there could be age differences in the vulnerability to stress and thus a differing impact of stress on aggression.

Studies such as these provide some useful hints as to how stress can influence animals. However, mice are not humans, and it is to human research that we next turn.

Humans, Stress, and Aggression

It has been long suggested as part of the Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis that certain types of stress may provoke aggression. Other scholars have suggested that stress more generally, not merely frustration, could lead to aggression. Hinsberger et al. ( 2016 ) aimed to determine whether individuals were more aggressive when exposed to continuous traumatic stress. Researchers had trained mental health experts and counselors to conduct diagnostic interviews of 290 South African participants. The researchers discovered that there was a significant correlation between self and witnessed traumatic events, PTSD symptom severity, and engagement in violent behavior. Researchers found that attraction to violence was predicted by witnessed traumatic events as well as victimization, and perpetrated acts of violence were directly predicted by the witnessing of violence and that PTSD symptom severity was directly predicted by victimization. They also found that exposure to violence did not directly influence PTSD severity or perpetrated violence by means of appetitive aggression. Instead, they determined that appetitive aggression predicted the severity of PTSD and aggressive behavior. This study primarily focused on the act of resorting to violence when under continually stressful circumstances and concluded that aggression exhibited in stressful environments would aid in survival.

In a study conducted by Verona and Kilmer ( 2007 ), acute stress was examined as a determinant of aggressive behaviors in 120 volunteers. The researchers used the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule before and after a stress manipulation. Participants were exposed to either low- and high-stress conditions after which they interacted with a confederate who they could inflict with shocks during judgment task. In their study, the researchers primarily found gender differences in the influence of acute stressors on aggressive behaviors. They concluded that women displayed less aggression whereas men displayed increased aggression after being exposed to the high-stress condition.

Meta-analyses likewise have examined the relationship between stress and aggression. Evidence suggests that stress and trauma can increase the propensity to engage in aggression in both men and women (Augsburger, & Maercker, 2020 ; Orth, & Wieland, 2006 ). Such effects appear fairly consistent in the literature with moderate to large effects for hostile feelings and small to moderate effects for aggressive behavior.

Violence in Video Games

Prior studies outlined observed aggression in relation to stress; however, in this study, it is important to understand whether the task the participant engaged in also influences aggression, especially under stressful circumstances. Therefore, it is important to also understand the relationship between video games and aggression. The issue of whether violence in video games can impact aggression has been controversial. Despite several decades of research, no consensus has emerged. Though the American Psychological Association (APA) has taken a stance that violent games promote aggression (but not violent crime), reanalysis of their work has suggested that this claim is not supported by the extant literature and the APA may be misinforming the public (Ferguson et al., 2020 ). Below, we consider just a few studies in this realm.

In a unique study designed by Weber et al. ( 2006 ), researchers analyzed brain activity in relation to game play to understand and distinguish between virtual violence and non-virtual violence. The researchers conducted their experiment using 13 volunteers who chose to play a mature-rated first-person shooter game while under fMRI scanning. They recorded brain activity, physiological responses throughout game play, audio data from the game, and video display of the game play. They also included a questionnaire measure meant to control for arousal and subjective experiences throughout the experiment. After analyzing their data, they found that virtual violence produces similar brain activity when compared to the experience of aggressive thoughts and actions.

Despite the previous findings, several studies have found no relationship between violent video games and aggression (e.g., Przybylski et al., 2014 ; Toniutti et al., 2013 ). For example, in a longitudinal experiment, Kuhn and colleagues found no evidence that repeated exposure to a violent video game had any impact on aggressive behavior (Kühn et al., 2019 ). One issue that appears to emerge is that preregistered studies, wherein scholars post their analyses plans in advance so as to reduce questionable researcher practices, are particularly unlikely to find significant results (e.g., Hilgard et al., 2019 ; McCarthy et al., 2016 ). As such, more preregistered studies in this realm would be welcome.

Although individual studies may naturally differ in results , it is possible that meta-analyses may provide some illumination regarding larger trends in the field. However, there are disagreements in the conclusions of meta-analyses here too. For instance, Anderson and colleagues ( 2010 ) concluded that there are meaningful relationships between violent game playing and aggression in players. However, a reanalysis of this data concluded that effects, particularly for experimental studies, were largely driven by publication bias (Hilgard et al., 2017 ). Likewise, Prescott et al. ( 2018 ) found that there are very, very small longitudinal relationships between violent gameplay and later aggression. However, in reanalyzing this data, Drummond et al. ( 2020 ) concluded the effect sizes ( r  = 0.06) were trivial and driven by methodological noise, not true effects. Best practice studies demonstrated effect sizes that were no different from zero.

The Current Study

The purpose of this study was to determine whether violent content or acute stress plays a greater role in aggressiveness towards a cooperative partner while playing a video game. This study not only focused on investigating the role of stress in aggression but also its influence under varying conditions. The hypotheses being tested are as follows:

H1: Participants when exposed to acute stress will demonstrate greater aggressiveness toward an incompetent partner than a competent partner.

H2: Acute stress will play a greater role in causing aggressiveness towards an incompetent partner than chronic stress.

H3: Participants when exposed to stress and a violent video game will depict greater aggression toward an incompetent partner than those exposed to a non-violent video game.

We note that these hypotheses are expressed as main effects. However, it is possible that stress may moderate any relationship between violent game play and aggression (Shao & Wang, 2019 ). As such, we will also be alert for interaction effects between the independent variables.

Data Availability Statement

A preregistration of this study can be found at https://aspredicted.org/37ie4.pdf . Original data files can be found at https://osf.io/8w7mz/ .

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Participants

This study involved 73 participants who were compensated with two extra credit points for psychology courses registered in the undergraduate research portal. About twenty percent of the participants were male (20.5%, n  = 15), while the others were female (79.5%, n  = 58). Participants’ age ranged from 18 to 50 years old ( M  = 20.55, SD  = 4.98). Frequencies were also gathered for participants in each condition. In the stress condition, there were 37 participants (50.7%) in the acute stress condition and 49.3% in the control condition ( n  = 36). For the video game condition, about half of the participants were in the violent condition (52.1%, n  = 38) while 35 were in the nonviolent condition (47.9%). Additionally, the incompetent confederate condition included 38 participants (52.1%) while the competent condition consisted of 47.9% participants ( n  = 35). For a further two participants, a technical glitch resulted in the loss of their aggression data. In our preregistration document, we had planned to reach 100 participants. However, due to COVID-19 shutting down in-person research and the graduation of the lead author, participant recruitment was discontinued. This was done prior to examining any data.

State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)

The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) is a self-report anxiety measure (Spielberger et al., 1983 ). The inventory consists of a form Y-1, which measures current anxiety levels, and Y-2, which measures anxiety levels for the past 6 months. This measure contains 40 items, 20 state anxiety and 20 trait anxiety. For our purposes, we administered the Y2 trait form. Questions range from “I feel upset” to “I feel that difficulties are piling up so that I cannot overcome them.” These questions were rated on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from almost never to almost always. For the trait anxiety form with the current sample, the coefficient alpha was 0.90. The range of scores was from 22 to 70 from a possible range of 20–80. The mean score was 71.49 with a standard deviation of 10.63 indicating good variability in scores.

Crossword Puzzle

Participants took a simple crossword puzzle based on school classes, to act as a distractor task (see Appendix).

Stress Conditions

In this study, participants were randomly assigned to one of two stress conditions: The Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT) or a control math quiz (see Appendix). The PASAT was originally used as a means of assessing short-term memory loss; however, for this study, it was used as a measure of inducing stress in participants . In this study, the computerized version (PASAT-C) of the PASAT was used (Lejuez et al., 2003 ). Participants mentally calculated addition problems during a set time frame. The PASAT requires sustained and specific attention. Participants are given simple math problems, but these are done with intervening numbers that are distractors, thus setting up high frustration. Participants must add each number to the number before it, keying in the response. However, each response serves as a distractor. For instance, a respondent may be given the numbers, in sequence, 3, 9, and 5. For the first two numbers, they key in the correct response “12”; however, then, they are supposed to add 5 to the 9. Yet, having “12” in working memory sets up a distractor and increases frustration, particularly as the task speeds up. Previous evidence has supported that the PASAT is effective in inducing stress, including for college students specifically ( Holdwick, & Wingenfeld, 1999 ; Starcke et al., 2016 ). Participants not assigned to the PASAT took a 10-min math quiz meant to represent the no-stress condition. This quiz was not difficult. Examples of questions are finding the sum of 2 plus 2 and what is 5 multiplied by 5.

Video Game Conditions

For this study, participants played either a “violent” or “non-violent” video game on the XBOX One. Participants assigned to the violent game condition played Battlefront. Battlefront is an action-packed video game wherein the player was in control of a Star Wars character who wields a lightsaber or gun throughout gameplay. Those assigned to the “non-violent” condition played portal 2. Portal 2 is an action-adventure game rated E10 + . This is a strategy video game wherein the player masqueraded as a first-person shooter wielding a portal gun which creates shortcuts throughout the game and does not cause harm to another character. Thus, the games are similar in gameplay and the use of a gun, but without violence of any kind in the portal 2 game.

Aggressive Behavior

This study utilized a modified version of the Taylor competitive reaction time task (TCRTT). This is a newer version utilizing noise blasts instead of the electric shocks, used in the original study (Taylor, 1967 ). In Taylor’s version, the participant had electrodes hooked up to their bodies and to convince the participant that they were playing against an individual they distributed a shock when the participant lost. He also had the wins and losses predetermined wherein the participant lost fifty percent of the trials. In this version, participants were asked to set the level and duration of a white noise blast acting as a punishment for their previous confederate partner. This game lasts for a total of 15 min and has 25 different trials. In the task, the wins and losses are preset as participants are not playing against a human opponent. The blast is not harmful and causes no discomfort; it is just annoying. As per the standardization suggested by Ferguson et al. ( 2008 ), aggressive behavior was measured as the averaged of the 25 intensity scores.

Data collection began following Institutional Review Board approval. Participants who signed up under the undergraduate research portal were told that the researcher was conducting a study on the effect of several tests on an individual’s ability to play games. To participate in this study, participants were asked to sign an informed consent form and to complete the STAI – Y2. Upon completion, they were asked to take a simple crossword puzzle, a distractor task to reduce hypothesis guessing. Participants were then randomly assigned to a stress condition, wherein they either took the PASAT-C or take a simple math quiz, both of which lasted 10 min. After completing the stress condition activity, participants were then randomly assigned to a video game condition, wherein they either played Battlefront, a “violent” video game, or portal 2, a “non-violent” video game. Furthermore, they were randomly assigned to play the game for 30 min with either a competent or incompetent confederate partner. Once they entered the room, they were given instructions on how to operate an XBOX One controller and how to play the game they are assigned. After the game play, participants engaged with the TCRTT task. Participants were asked to play a reaction time game which lasted around 15 min. For this game, they were informed that they were playing against their previous confederate, who is now in a separate room, and was competing against them on a separate computer. They were told that for every trial they can set the intensity and duration of white noise for their confederate as a form of punishment. Participants were also informed that they would hear the noise if they lost, while their partners would hear the noise if they won. They were told that they can set the noise level from 0 to 10 and that they can set the blast from 0 to 5 s. Post gameplay, participants were debriefed, and the true nature of the study was revealed; all hypotheses were discussed, and they were asked if they held any suspicion of the topic’s true hypotheses.

Research Design

To assess the effects of stress and video games on aggression, this study utilized a 2 × 2 × 2 (stress × game condition × competence) factorial analysis of variance. The dependent variable was the noise blast intensity (aggression). To assure that randomization worked, and conditions were not confounded by demographic factors, chi-square analyses were run for gender, and bivariate correlations for age with a group assignment. No outcomes were statistically significant, suggesting randomization was effective. As such, age and gender will not be included as covariates.

Screening, Cleaning, and Descriptive Statistics

Once data collection was completed, data were entered and analyzed using IBM SPSS Version 26. A total of 73 participants partook in the study and received credit for their participation. Demographic data for the participants are presented in Table 1 .

Descriptive statistics data are presented in Table 2 .

Hypotheses Tests

A factorial ANOVA was conducted to evaluate the study hypotheses (Table 3 ). Firstly, there was no significant effect for the stress condition on the intensity setting by participants, F (1,65) = 0.04, p  = 0.85, \({\eta }_{p}^{2}\) = 0.001. Similarly, there was also no significant effect for the video game condition on the intensity level setting, F (1,65 = 0.09, p  = 0.77, \({\eta }_{p}^{2}\) = 0.001. The confederate condition also did not have a significant effect with the intensity setting, F (1,65) = 0.05, p  = 0.828, \({\eta }_{p}^{2}\) = 0.001. Hypothesis one stated that participants when exposed to acute stress will depict greater aggressiveness toward an incompetent partner than a competent partner. There was no significant finding for this hypothesis, as the stress condition and the confederate condition showed no significant interaction with the intensity level settings, F (1,65) = 2.05, p  = 0.16, \({\eta }_{p}^{2}\) = 0.03. Related to hypothesis 3, there was no significant impact of video game condition and stress condition F (1,65) = 0.002, p  = 0.97, \({\eta }_{p}^{2}\) = 0.03. As such, hypothesis 3 was not supported.

Exploratory Analysis (H2)

We also examined the issue of whether acute stress played a greater role in causing aggressiveness towards an incompetent partner than chronic stress. For this, we conducted an OLS regression with pairwise deletion. Gender, STAI score (chronic stress), and stress condition (acute stress) were included as predictors. Although this was our H2 we note, as an oversight, we had not included the specifics of this analysis in our preregistration; thus, it should be considered exploratory. Ultimately, the regression model was non-significant F (3, 69) = 0.017, p  = 0.997.

Given null results can be difficult to interpret all three major contrasts (game condition, stress condition, and confederate competence) were reassessed using Bayesian contrasts. In each case, Bayes factors indicated support for the null for game condition (BF = 5.401), stress condition (BF = 5.550), and confederate competence (BF = 5.502). Thus, we are confident in interpreting results as supportive of the null.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether stress or violent content played a role in aggressiveness towards a cooperative partner who is incompetent when playing a video game. Although there have been several studies on the influence of stress on aggression, there is still a lack of experimental studies discussing the influence of the different types of stress on aggression especially towards another individual, and whether that individual’s actions play a role in increasing aggression. Moreover, this study attempted to examine the role of video games in aggression and whether they also influenced aggression towards another individual as this is important to several current concerns.

After conducting this study, there was no support for any of the study hypotheses. The results showed that the stress condition, whether it be acute (as primed by the PASAT) or chronic (as measured by the STAI), had no effect on the intensity setting participants gave their confederate partner. This finding illustrated that despite the participants’ exposure to stress, there was no significant impact on their aggression, which means that the form of stress the individual is experiencing does not particularly influence their decision at least in this context. Furthermore, the stress condition and confederate competence condition in interaction had no significant impact on the aggression exhibited towards participants.

The video game condition also had no effect on the intensity of the noise burst participants administered to the confederate. The findings of this study were similar to those of previously mentioned studies (e.g., Hilgard et al., 2019 ; McCarthy et al., 2016 ). There was no significant difference in intensity level setting between participants in the violent or nonviolent group, thus illustrating that the type of video game experienced had no real effect on aggression towards another individual. Additionally, the confederate competence condition, interacting with the video game condition also had no significant effect on aggression towards the confederate, thus signifying that confederate competency and an individual’s ability to further frustrate someone may not necessarily impact or increase their aggression towards them in this context. The absence of interaction effects was unable to support that stress may moderate links between violent games and aggressive behavior. Of course, it is possible that other moderators may function in other ways, but that was not evident from the current data.

Participants were also assigned to varying confederate conditions which exhibited two levels of competency, incompetent or competent, and these conditions had no significant effect on aggression. In studies like Hinsberger et al.’s ( 2016 ), it was found that participants administered shocks when individuals did not complete the judgment tasks correctly. This study’s findings differ greatly and exhibit that competency itself does not necessarily impact aggression and other factors could play a role in the intensity level setting. For example, several participants described being competitive and disliked losing, while others exhibited far more passive feelings towards their confederate. As such, many participants may not have worried greatly about the competence of the confederate.

Limitations

As with all studies, ours has limitations. Our use of the STAI, in capturing anxiety, may have only considered a portion of chronic stress. It is possible that this measure may tap into personality characteristics as much as it does chronic stress. However, prior studies have used the STAI as a measure of chronic stress (e.g., al Abdi et al., 2018 ; Valsamakis et al., 2020 ). Our sample size was not as large as we had initially intended which naturally reduces the power of our analyses. Furthermore, generalizations from experiments on aggression that take place in the lab to real-life aggression should be done only with great care.

Conclusions

Future studies should look at other factors that may also influence aggression, especially when playing a game. For instance, competition would be a great variable to observe, especially as the aggression measure was viewed as a form of competitive task. The current study is a small one and, as noted, data collection was interrupted by COVID-19. However, in combination with other studies, it appears that violent content in video games has little impact on aggressive behavior, even in combination with acute stress.

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Barrington, G., Ferguson, C.J. Stress and Violence in Video Games: Their Influence on Aggression. Trends in Psychol. 30 , 497–512 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-022-00141-2

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Accepted : 04 January 2022

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-022-00141-2

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Content warning: detailed descriptions of violence .

I don’t want to be a violent person. I doubt you do either.

Despite this, violence finds its way into our lives in special little ways. My poison of choice is the independently produced first-person shooter video game. In the past five years, there’s been a genre resurgence and, having played similar games as a kid, I’ve spent these years constantly playing countless different games. At some point along the way, I ended up considering how they interface with the theme of violence. They are a blast, of course, but I’m fascinated with the ways individual games approach this as a problem.

There are games with the pretensions of exploring this intelligently, but is it really possible? Can a game be fun, gory and thoughtful about violence all at once? Well, it’s not as simple as yes or no. I’m not here to come down on a side and say that we should ban these games nor unequivocally raise them up, I’m just here to report the following: I have played hundreds of hours of first-person shooters in the past three years, and I cannot stop thinking about who I’m shooting.

In 1993, id Software released Doom , a game about killing demons and closing a portal to hell with your guns. In many ways, it is the video game. An expansion on the previous framework of id’s shareware hit video game Wolfenstein 3D, iconic for its Nazi-killer gameplay, it serves as an understandable starting point for the genre. In the beginning, we were blasting blood and organs out of demons and possessed soldiers — from metal album covers straight to the screen. Doom is rife with satanic imagery, body horror demons, blood and guns. It’s a carefully designed miracle that the game is so inoffensive. Depraved men with red eyes, goat-horned devil men — they are evil, ergo, kill them with your gun. From an outside perspective, the fetishization of guns and violence itself provides the most interesting thread to follow. Doom is a game that takes for granted the joy and excitement of wielding a shotgun and, in doing so, creates the language for the genre. A long time has passed since Doom. Looking specifically at the genre’s recent revival, games have gotten more thoughtful, merging mechanics with the practices of literary criticism expected of film and novels. This draws us back to the inciting question: Who are we pointing our guns at?

Turns out, there are a lot of answers to that question. The game I’d credit with revitalizing the genre in the indie scene is David Szymanski’s 2018 game, Dusk . Who does this game point its guns at? Well, just like in Doom, we have demons, supernatural evil and possessed cultists. The other stylings of Doom are reworked with a different sort of artistry, better or worse in certain places. At the end of the day, it’s the same aesthetic: pentagrams in gore, horned monster men and blood as far as the eye can see. It’s a refusal, an adherence to a counterculture forty years out of date in the modern day. No one thinks black metal album covers are cool anymore. There’s a reason these games are called “ boomer shooters .” In general, the games are responses to Doom and its contemporaries more than to each other. Dusk has little more to say on this front.

Trepang2 , released in 2023, answers the question by pointing the gun all over the place. Your enemies are all types of people: capitalist enforcers, members of a doomsday cult, the military, the police. There are literal monsters as well. The strangest thing about the game on the first go is how little it seems to care to differentiate between the two. The phenomenal brutality of pulling a pin from a man’s grenade and then throwing his entire body as a projectile demands a serious answer. What sort of human person could I do that to and not feel like a terrible person? Trepang2 feels as though it’s leading up to an answer, and then it ends. Many times while playing, I said, “Surely, surely there must be an answer, a confrontation of your brutality as a participant.” But there simply isn’t an obvious answer. At the end of the game, you fight a clone of yourself — a perfect, meaningless action movie finale. Earlier though, there is the makings of a response. The game’s fake-out antagonist is a mysterious, bald billionaire. It’s radical, sure, but as long as we’re trying things out, why not? Let’s kill some capitalists.

If the demons of the modern day are capitalists, why shouldn’t they tag in for each other in Doom? There’s a recipe for it: Take Wolfenstein 3D’s Nazis and just make them capitalists. Imagine a not-too-distant future where companies like Amazon command a paramilitary core in a sort of corporatized authoritarianism. For extra brownie points, give it a neon “cyberpunk” aesthetic. Now give the guy a gun. So go Sprawl , Turbo Overkill , Ghostrunner , aforementioned sections of Trepang2 and many, many more. Authoritarianism bleeds into corporatism as a single image of a “bad guy” materializes downrange. This also nets the bonus of tapping further into radical and counterculture aesthetics. That being said, the coolness of the hero and the individualist cowboy stylings of these protagonists are all less than radical. These aren’t works of art with much to contribute psychologically to real-world resistance. Even suggesting such a high bar of video games is a bit silly. Instead, these games use the violent resistance of lone wolf characters as a shorthand for revolution, be it from capitalism, authoritarianism or whatever else. It’s trendy to give your game a revolutionary backdrop. I’m not saying this is evil, but it is easy. It might even be a little lazy.  

But how weird can we get with it? Let’s put everything in a blender. An amalgamation of buzzwords spews out: meat world terror capitalists. Pieces like Cruelty Squad emerge — games that turn the focus completely to the violence. This game follows your work as a hitman for a private military contractor, being hired by billionaires to kill billionaires. This is blended with the game’s grotesque worldbuilding, capitalistic epistemology and fleshy aesthetic. Ironically for our purposes, the actual targets in Cruelty Squad fade into the background beneath all that noise. This blending together becomes background to the game’s other themes, but at no point — even as deeply eye-catching and grotesque as it is — does it feel particularly relevant who you’re shooting. Even the games that are thoughtful throughout don’t seem to be interested in answering this question.

The last example I’d like to look at is HROT . Developed in a custom engine by a single developer, it’s one of the three games that inspired me to go on this three-part journey. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic Czechoslovak Socialist Republic as you fight through feverish combinations of Soviet science and Czech folk monsters. It is disarmingly playful with its choice of victims. The game’s final boss is real-life Czech politician Gustáv Husák’s floating head. The levels feature a fever dream digression into a pop novel about salamanders taking over the USSR, and multiple of the game’s challenges reward you with recipes for real-life food. You blast both real people and floating robotic heads of Lenin. It has a toy box approach to its worldbuilding, aesthetic and atmosphere. The greatest fun in the game comes from the sense of discovery of what the next bizarre locale will be. That precise playfulness set next to the violence is what set my mind spinning. There’s something perverse about the flippancy of that juxtaposition. 

It is tired to draw comparisons between real gun violence and fictional gun violence. For years, people have tried to create the metaphor that finally distills the unique causal relationship between these two things. I have been subject to this as a fan of these games for years. I can accept in one breath that violent art will always be used as a scapegoat before confronting violent cultural ideals. Conversely, though, I can accept that art does something to our brains and the exaltation of individualist violence is dangerous. The disparity between the disgust for the real thing and the joy and satisfaction that comes from these games is now front and center in my mind whenever I play them. It’s hard to feel, in the face of this, that anything meaningful is happening here at all. These games are flippant as genre convention and often completely thoughtless about the targets of their violence. But in that flippancy, there’s a growing discomfort. Why shouldn’t they ask these questions? The question of victims, or even the broader question of violence, is not what’s being focused on. Instead, they craft an easy target, one no one could object to, and they give you a gun.

What is the possible artistic merit of killing a demon with a gun? If the demon stands in for bad things and the gun stands in for solutions to bad things, we’ve factored all the meaning out. The game becomes flashing images on a screen — violent, but only by association. In aggregate, the genre becomes frustrating. Mindless. Subconscious, in a way. Even interrogating these parts of games feels silly. A bit pointless. You’re not supposed to care. And you know, most of the time, I really don’t. I feel it inside me, though. I like these games. I’ve played a lot of these games. In the same way Tetris players see falling blocks in their dreams, sometimes the itch strikes me and I visualize sight lines, jumping through the air and turning a demon into a pile of meat. I think about how cool it is to use those guns. I don’t know how to feel about that at all.  It makes me feel gross, the way the violence is part of my brain as an unconscious process.

This article is the first of three on this topic. While I can’t necessarily give you anything concrete to walk away with, I would encourage you to think like this and dig into the rationale behind something you really like. Maybe that’s all I can give you. It all leaves me wondering, why play these games at all?

Daily Arts Writer Holly Tsch can be reached at [email protected] .

Related articles

Violence in Video Games Essay

There is a common opinion that violent video games and aggressive behavior are connected. However, some researchers and public authorities challenge this opinion and argue that there is no relationship between violence and cruel video games (Przybylski and Netta 16). The dispute exists as there is evidence that violent video games may cause severe outcomes that are supported by the acts of violence recently committed by children and adolescents after playing video games. The purpose of this paper is to discuss violent behavior associated with video games, measures stakeholders undertake to resolve the issue, and the feasible outcomes of policies and actions done to handle the situation.

There are different views on the connection between violent video games and aggressive behavior. Researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that video games may influence violent behavior; however, “these effects are almost always quite small” (Mathur and VanderWeele 708). Furthermore, Gunter claims that observing violence played out on a screen leads to the loss of empathy for victims of violence, “combining with a greater acceptance of violence” (4). Those arguments are often circulated after violent events such as mass shootings as the media and society focus on what might have caused an individual to act that way. This discussion might mention video games as a factor that triggered violence. Thus, considering the possibility that there is a causal relationship between violence and video games, it is necessary to discuss measures to be undertaken to prevent aggressive behavior that might arise.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has recently published a resolution on violent video games that states the necessity to implement education strategies for young people that raise awareness of the effects video games may cause. Moreover, the APA impels the authorities and producers to decrease the level of violence and reflect on the possible rating to ensure young children will have no access to aggressive entertainment (Calvert et al. 126). Researchers also suggest putting an emphasis on encouraging manufacturers to produce “games for health” for children and adults (Kowert and Quandt 49). Other potential measures also include putting tax obligations on violent video games, restricting Internet usage for children, and other actions that are not analyzed yet.

There might be adverse outcomes if the authorities and the public will not pay attention to the situation and will not adjust policies regarding violent video game regulation. People may observe a rise in the homicide rates across regions, and parents may find the increase in children’s aggressiveness or the appearance of psychopathic traits. Disinhibition, loss of attention, and other adverse effects may also emerge. As mentioned previously, people who play violent video games may lose empathy and accept cruelty as a normal practice (Gunter 4). On the other hand, if proper solutions and policies would be undertaken, the public may observe a decrease in violent acts in the future.

To conclude, it is assumed that the dispute among researchers, the public, and authorities on the question of the relationship between violent video games and aggressive behavior may not have a universal answer. Violent video games may cause various adverse effects on people. However, it is not proved yet that a cruel video game is a major factor affecting the ruthless behavior of people. As the public is not sure whether there might be other triggers of violent behavior or not, the best strategy might be the prevention of violent acts rather than the reaction to them. Thus, society needs to undertake measures such as educating children, introducing a tax on video games, or reviewing the rating system for games to protect people from cruelty and violence they do not deserve.

Works Cited

Calvert, Sandra L., et al. “The American Psychological Association Task Force Assessment of Violent Video Games: Science in the Service of Public Interest.” American Psychologist , vol. 72, no. 2, 2017, pp. 126-143.

Gunter, Barrie. Does Playing Video Games Make Players More Violent? Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Kowert, Rachel, and Quandt Thorsten, editors. The Video Game Debate: Unravelling the Physical, Social, and Psychological Effects of Video Games . Routledge, 2015.

Mathur, Maya B., and Tyler J. VanderWeele. “Finding Common Ground in Meta-Analysis “Wars” on Violent Video Games.” Perspectives on Psychological Science , vol. 14, no. 4, 2019, pp. 705-708.

Przybylski, Andrew K., and Weinstein Netta. “Violent Video Game Engagement Is not Associated with Adolescents’ Aggressive Behaviour: Evidence from a Registered Report.” Royal Society Open Science , vol. 6, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1-16.

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The Relation of Violent Video Games to Adolescent Aggression: An Examination of Moderated Mediation Effect

1 Research Institute of Moral Education, College of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

2 The Lab of Mental Health and Social Adaptation, Faculty of Psychology, Research Center for Mental Health Education, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

Yunqiang Wang

To assess the moderated mediation effect of normative beliefs about aggression and family environment on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, the subjects self-reported their exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggressive behavior. The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression had a mediation effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while family environment moderated the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with a good family environment, exposure to violent video games had only a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, it had both direct and indirect effects mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. This moderated mediation model includes some notions of General Aggression Model (GAM) and Catalyst Model (CM), which helps shed light on the complex mechanism of violent video games influencing adolescent aggression.

Introduction

Violent video games and aggression.

The relationship between violent video games and adolescent aggression has become a hot issue in psychological research ( Wiegman and Schie, 1998 ; Anderson and Bushman, 2001 ; Anderson et al., 2010 ; Ferguson et al., 2012 ; Greitemeyer, 2014 ; Yang et al., 2014 ; Boxer et al., 2015 ). Based on the General Aggression Model (GAM), Anderson et al. suggested that violent video games constitute an antecedent variable of aggressive behavior, i.e., the degree of exposure to violent video games directly leads to an increase of aggression ( Anderson and Bushman, 2001 ; Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson, 2004 ; Anderson et al., 2004 ). Related longitudinal studies ( Anderson et al., 2008 ), meta-analyses ( Anderson et al., 2010 ; Greitemeyer and Mugge, 2014 ), event-related potential studies ( Bailey et al., 2011 ; Liu et al., 2015 ), and trials about juvenile delinquents ( DeLisi et al., 2013 ) showed that exposure to violent video games significantly predicts adolescent aggression.

Although Anderson et al. insisted on using the GAM to explain the effect of violent video games on aggression, other researchers have proposed alternative points of view. For example, a meta-analysis by Sherry (2001) suggested that violent video games have minor influence on adolescent aggression. Meanwhile, Ferguson (2007) proposed that publication bias (or file drawer effect) may have implications in the effect of violent video games on adolescent aggression. Publication bias means that compared with articles with negative results, those presenting positive results (such as statistical significance) are more likely to be published ( Rosenthal and Rosnow, 1991 ). A meta-analysis by Ferguson (2007) found that after publication bias adjustment, the related studies cannot support the hypothesis that violent video games are highly correlated with aggression. Then, Ferguson et al. proposed a Catalyst Model (CM), which is opposite to the GAM. According to this model, genetic predisposition can lead to an aggressive child temperament and aggressive adult personality. Individuals who have an aggressive temperament or an aggressive personality are more likely to produce violent behavior during times of environmental strain. Environmental factors act as catalysts for violent acts for an individual who have a violence-prone personality. This means that although the environment does not cause violent behavior, but it can moderate the causal influence of biology on violence. The CM model suggested that exposure to violent video games is not an antecedent variable of aggressive behavior, but only acts as a catalyst influencing its form ( Ferguson et al., 2008 ). Much of studies ( Ferguson et al., 2009 , 2012 ; Ferguson, 2013 , 2015 ; Furuya-Kanamori and Doi, 2016 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ) found that adolescent aggression cannot be predicted by the exposure to violent video games, but it is closely related to antisocial personality traits, peer influence, and family violence.

Anderson and his collaborators ( Groves et al., 2014 ; Kepes et al., 2017 ) suggested there were major methodological shortcomings in the studies of Ferguson et al. and redeclared the validity of their own researches. Some researchers supported Anderson et al. and criticized Ferguson’s view ( Gentile, 2015 ; Rothstein and Bushman, 2015 ). However, Markey (2015) held a neutral position that extreme views should not be taken in the relationship between violent video games and aggression.

In fact, the relation of violent video games to aggression is complicated. Besides the controversy between the above two models about whether there is an influence, other studies explored the role of internal factors such as normative belief about aggression and external factors such as family environment in the relationship between violent video games and aggression.

Normative Beliefs About Aggression, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

Normative beliefs about aggression are one of the most important cognitive factors influencing adolescent aggression; they refer to an assessment of aggression acceptability by an individual ( Huesmann and Guerra, 1997 ). They can be divided into two types: general beliefs and retaliatory beliefs. The former means a general view about aggression, while the latter reflects aggressive beliefs in provocative situations. Normative beliefs about aggression reflect the degree acceptance of aggression, which affects the choice of aggressive behavior.

Studies found that normative beliefs about aggression are directly related to aggression. First, self-reported aggression is significantly correlated to normative beliefs about aggression ( Bailey and Ostrov, 2008 ; Li et al., 2015 ). General normative beliefs about aggression can predict young people’s physical, verbal, and indirect aggression ( Lim and Ang, 2009 ); retaliatory normative beliefs about aggression can anticipate adolescent retaliation behavior after 1 year ( Werner and Hill, 2010 ; Krahe and Busching, 2014 ). There is a longitudinal temporal association of normative beliefs about aggression with aggression ( Krahe and Busching, 2014 ). Normative beliefs about aggression are significantly positively related to online aggressive behavior ( Wright and Li, 2013 ), which is the most important determining factor of adolescent cyberbullying ( Kowalski et al., 2014 ). Teenagers with high normative beliefs about aggression are more likely to become bullies and victims of traditional bullying and cyberbullying ( Burton et al., 2013 ). Finally, normative beliefs about aggression can significantly predict the support and reinforcement of bystanders in offline bullying and cyberbullying ( Machackova and Pfetsch, 2016 ).

According to Bandura’s social cognitive theory ( Bandura, 1989 ), violent video games can initiate adolescents’ observational learning. In this situation, not only can they imitate the aggressive behavior of the model but also their understanding and acceptability about aggression may change. Therefore, normative beliefs about aggression can also be a mediator between violent video games and adolescent aggression ( Duan et al., 2014 ; Anderson et al., 2017 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ). Studies have shown that the mediating role of normative beliefs about aggression is not influenced by factors such as gender, prior aggression, and parental monitoring ( Gentile et al., 2014 ).

Family Environment, Violence Video Games, and Aggression

Family violence, parenting style, and other family factors have major effects on adolescent aggression. On the one hand, family environment can influence directly on aggression by shaping adolescents’ cognition and setting up behavioral models. Many studies have found that family violence and other negative factors are positively related to adolescent aggression ( Ferguson et al., 2009 , 2012 ; Ferguson, 2013 ), while active family environment can reduce the aggressive behavior ( Batanova and Loukas, 2014 ).

On the other hand, family environment can act on adolescent aggression together with other factors, such as exposure to violent video games. Analysis of the interaction between family conflict and media violence (including violence on TV and in video games) to adolescent aggression showed that teenagers living in higher conflict families with more media violence exposure show more aggressive behavior ( Fikkers et al., 2013 ). Parental monitoring is significantly correlated with reduced media violence exposure and a reduction in aggressive behavior 6 months later ( Gentile et al., 2014 ). Parental mediation can moderate the relationship between media violence exposure and normative beliefs about aggression, i.e., for children with less parental mediation, predictability of violent media exposure on normative beliefs about aggression is stronger ( Linder and Werner, 2012 ). Parental mediation is closely linked to decreased aggression caused by violent media ( Nathanson, 1999 ; Rasmussen, 2014 ; Padilla-Walker et al., 2016 ). Further studies have shown that the autonomy-supportive restrictive mediation of parents is related to a reduction in current aggressive behavior by decreasing media violence exposure; conversely, inconsistent restrictive mediation is associated with an increase of current aggressive behavior by enhancing media violence exposure ( Fikkers et al., 2017 ).

The Current Study

Despite GAM and CM hold opposite views on the relationship between violent video games and aggression, both of the two models imply the same idea that aggression cannot be separated from internal and external factors. While emphasizing on negative effects of violent video games on adolescents’ behavior, the GAM uses internal factors to explain the influencing mechanism, including aggressive beliefs, aggressive behavior scripts, and aggressive personality ( Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson and Carnagey, 2014 ). Although the CM considers that there is no significant relation between violent video games and aggression, it also acknowledges the role of external factors such as violent video games and family violence. Thus, these two models seem to be contradictory, but in fact, they reveal the mechanism of aggression from different points of view. It will be more helpful to explore the effect of violent video games on aggression from the perspective of combination of internal and external factors.

Although previous studies have investigated the roles of normative beliefs about aggression and family factors in the relationship between violent video games and adolescent aggression separately, the combined effect of these two factors remains unstudied. The purpose of this study was to analyze the combined effect of normative beliefs about aggression and family environment. This can not only confirm the effects of violent video games on adolescent aggression further but also can clarify the influencing mechanism from the integration of GAM and CM to a certain extent. Based on the above, the following three hypotheses were proposed:

• Hypothesis 1: There is a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression.
• Hypothesis 2: Normative beliefs about aggression are the mediator of exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression.
• Hypothesis 3: The family environment can moderate the mediation effects of normative beliefs about aggression in exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression constitute a moderated mediation model.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

All subjects gave informed written consent for participation in this investigation, and their parents signed parental written informed consent. The study was reviewed and approved by the Professor Committee of School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, which is the committee responsible for providing ethics approvals. A total of 648 Chinese middle school students participated in this study, including 339 boys and 309 girls; 419 students were from cities and towns, and 229 from the countryside. There were 277 and 371 junior and high school students, respectively. Ages ranged from 12 to 19 years, averaging 14.73 ( SD  = 1.60).

Video Game Questionnaire (VGQ)

The Video Game Questionnaire ( Anderson and Dill, 2000) required participants to list their favorite five video games and assess their use frequencies, the degree of violent content, and the degree of violent images on a 7-point scale (1, participants seldom play video games, with no violent content or image; 7, participants often play video games with many violent contents and images). Methods for calculating the score of exposure to violent video games: (score of violent content in the game + score of violent images in the game) × use frequency/5. Chen et al. (2012) found that the Chinese version of this questionnaire had high internal consistency reliability and good content validity. The Chinese version was used in this study, and the Cronbach’s α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.88.

Aggression Questionnaire (AQ)

There were 29 items in AQ ( Buss and Perry, 1992 ), including four dimensions: physical aggression, verbal aggression, anger, and hostility. The scale used 5-point scoring criteria (1, very incongruent with my features; 5, very congruent with my features). Scores for each item were added to obtain the dimension score, and dimension scores were summed to obtain the total score. The Chinese version of AQ had good internal consistency reliability and construct validity ( Ying and Dai, 2008 ). In this study, the Chinese version was used and its Cronbach’s α coefficient was 0.83.

Family Environment Scale (FES)

The FES ( Moos, 1990 ) includes 90 true-false questions and is divided into 10 subscales, including cohesion, expressiveness, conflict, independence, achievement-orientation, intellectual-cultural orientation, active-recreational orientation, moral-religious emphasis, organization, and control. The Chinese version of FES was revised by Fei et al. (1991) and used in this study. Three subscales closely related to aggression were selected, including cohesion, conflict, and moral-religious emphasis, with 27 items in total. The family environment score was the sum of scores of these three subscales (the conflict subscale was first inverted). The Cronbach’s α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.75.

Normative Beliefs About Aggression Scale (NOBAGS)

There are 20 items in the NOBAGS ( Huesmann and Guerra, 1997 ), which includes retaliation (12 items) and general (8 items) aggression belief. A 4-point Likert scale is used (1, absolutely wrong; 4, absolutely right). The subjects were asked to assess the accuracy of the behavior described in each item. High score means high level of normative beliefs about aggression. The revised Chinese version of NOBAGS consists of two factors: retaliation (nine items) and general (six items) aggression belief. Its internal consistency coefficient and test-retest reliability are 0.81 and 0.79. Confirmative factor analysis showed that this version has good construct validity: χ 2  = 280.09, df  = 89, χ 2 / df  = 3.15, RMSEA = 0.07, SRMR = 0.04, NFI = 0.95, NNFI = 0.96, and CFI = 0.96 ( Shao and Wang, 2017 ). In this study, the Cronbach’s α coefficient of the Chinese version was 0.88.

Group testing was performed in randomly selected classes of six middle schools. All subjects completed the above four questionnaires.

Data Analysis

IBM SPSS Statistics 22 was used to analysis the correlations among study variables, the mediating effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression, and the moderating role of family environment in the relationship between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression. In order to validate the moderated mediation model, Mplus 7 was also used.

Correlation Analysis Among Study Variables

In this study, self-reported questionnaires were used to collect data, and results might be influenced by common method bias. Therefore, the Harman’s single-factor test was used to assess common method bias before data analysis. The results showed that eigenvalues of 34 unrotated factors were greater than 1, and the amount of variation explained by the first factor was 10.01%, which is much less than 40% of the critical value. Accordingly, common method bias was not significant in this study.

As described in Table 1 , the degree of exposure to violent video games showed significant positive correlations to normative beliefs about aggression and aggression; family environment was negatively correlated to normative beliefs about aggression and aggression; normative beliefs about aggression were significantly and positively related to aggression. The gender difference of exposure to violent video games ( t  = 7.93, p  < 0.001) and normative beliefs about aggression ( t  = 2.74, p  < 0.01) were significant, which boys scored significantly higher than girls.

Means, standard deviations, and Pearson correlations among study variables.

Mediating Effect Analysis

To examine the mediation effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression, gender factor was controlled firstly. Stepwise regression analysis showed that the regression of aggression to violent video games ( c  = 0.28, t  = 6.96, p  < 0.001), the regression of normative beliefs about aggression to violent video games ( a  = 0.19, t  = 4.69, p  < 0.001), and the regression of aggression to violent video games ( c ′ = 0.22, t  = 5.69, p  < 0.001) and normative beliefs about aggression ( b  = 0.31, t  = 8.25, p  < 0.001) were all significant. Thus, normative beliefs about aggression played a partial mediating role in exposure to violent video games and aggression. The mediation effect value was 0.06, accounting for 21.43% (0.06/0.28) of the total effect.

Moderated Mediation Effect Analysis

After standardizing scores of exposure to violent videogames, normative beliefs about aggression, family environment, and aggression, two interaction terms were calculated, including family environment × exposure to violent video games and family environment × normative beliefs about aggression. Regression analysis was carried out after controlling gender factor ( Table 2 ).

Moderated mediation effect analysis of the relationship between violent video exposure and aggression.

V VE, violent video exposure; FE, family environment; NBA, normative beliefs about aggression; AG, aggression.

In the first step, a simple moderated model (Model 1) between exposure to violent video games and aggression was established. The result showed that exposure to violent video games had a significant effect on aggression ( c 1  = 0.24, t  = 6.13, p  < 0.001), while the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on aggression was not significant ( c 3  = 0.05, t  = −1.31, p  = 0.19), indicating that the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression was not moderated by family environment.

Next, a moderated model (Model 2) between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression was established. The results showed that exposure to violent video games had a significant effect on normative beliefs about aggression ( a 1  = 0.13, t  = 3.42, p  < 0.001), and the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression was significant ( a 3  = −0.13, t  = −3.63, p  < 0.01).

In the third step, a moderated mediation model (Model 3) between exposure to violent video games and aggression was established. As shown in Table 2 , the effect of normative beliefs about aggression on aggression was significant ( b 1  = 0.24, t  = 6.15, p  < 0.001), and the effect of family environment × exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression was not significant ( b 2  = 0.02, t  = 0.40, p  = 0.69). Because both a 3 and b 1 were significant, exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression constituted a moderated mediation model. Normative beliefs about aggression played a mediating role between exposure to violent video games and aggression, while family environment was a moderator between exposure to violent video games and normative beliefs about aggression. Mplus analysis proved that the moderated mediation model had good model fitting (χ 2 / df  = 1.54, CFI = 0.99, TLI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.03, and SRMR = 0.01).

To further analyze the moderating effect of the family environment and exposure to violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression, the family environment was divided into the high and low groups, according to the principle of standard deviation, and a simple slope test was performed ( Figure 1 ). The results found that for individuals with high score of family environment, prediction of exposure to violent video games to normative beliefs about aggression was not significant ( b  = 0.08, SE  = 0.08, p  = 0.37). For individuals with low score of family environment, exposure to violent video games could significantly predict normative beliefs about aggression ( b  = 0.34, SE  = 0.09, p  < 0.001). Based on the overall findings, individuals with high scores of family environment showed a nonsignificant mediating effect of normative beliefs about aggression on the relation of exposure to violent video games and aggression; however, for individuals with low scores of family environment, normative beliefs about aggression played a partial mediating role in the effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression.

The moderating effect of the family environment on the relationship between violent video game exposure and normative beliefs about aggression.

Main Findings and Implications

This study found a significantly positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, corroborating existing studies ( Anderson, 2004 ; Anderson et al., 2010 ; DeLisi et al., 2013 ; Greitemeyer and Mugge, 2014 ). Anderson et al. (2017) assessed teenagers in Australia, China, Germany, the United States, and other three countries and found that exposure to violent media, including television, movies, and video games, is positively related to adolescent aggression, demonstrating cross-cultural consistency; 8% of variance in aggression could be independently explained by exposure to violent media. In this study, after controlling for gender and family environment, R 2 for exposure to violent video games in predicting adolescent aggression was 0.05, indicating that 5% of variation in adolescent aggression could be explained by exposure to violent media. These consistent findings confirm the effect of exposure to violent video games on adolescent aggression and can be explained by the GAM. According to the GAM ( Bushman and Anderson, 2002 ; Anderson and Carnagey, 2014 ), violent video games can make teenagers acquire, repeat, and reinforce aggression-related knowledge structures, including aggressive beliefs and attitude, aggressive perceptual schemata, aggressive expectation schemata, aggressive behavior scripts, and aggression desensitization. Therefore, aggressive personality is promoted, increasing the possibility of aggressive behavior. The Hypothesis 1 of this study was validated and provided evidence for the GAM.

As shown above, normative beliefs about aggression had a partial mediation effect on the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression. Exposure to violent video games, on the one hand, can predict adolescent aggression directly; on the other hand, it had an indirect effect on adolescent aggression via normative beliefs about aggression. According to the above results, when exposure to violent video games changes by 1 standard deviation, adolescent aggression varies by 0.28 standard deviation, with 0.22 standard deviation being a direct effect of exposure to violent video games on adolescent aggression and 0.06 standard deviation representing the effect through normative beliefs about aggression. Too much violence in video games makes it easy for individuals to become accustomed to violence and emotionally apathetic towards the harmful consequences of violence. Moreover, it can make individuals accept the idea that violence is a good way of problem solving, leading to an increase in normative beliefs about aggression; under certain situational cues, it is more likely to become violent or aggressive. This conclusion is supported by other studies ( Gentile et al., 2014 ; Anderson et al., 2017 ; Huesmann et al., 2017 ). Like Hypothesis 1, Hypothesis 2 was validated the GAM.

One of the main findings of this study was the validation of Hypothesis 3: a moderated mediation model was constructed involving exposure to violent video games, family environment, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression. Family environment moderated the first half of the mediation process of violent video games, normative beliefs about aggression, and aggression. In this study, family environment encompassed three factors, including (1) cohesion reflecting the degree of mutual commitment, assistance, and support among family members; (2) conflict reflecting the extent of anger, aggression, and conflict among family members; and (3) moral-religious emphasis reflecting the degree of emphasis on ethics, religion, and values. Individuals with high scores of family environment often help each other; seldom show anger, attack, and contradiction openly; and pay more attention to morality and values. These positive aspects would help them understand violence in video games from the right perspective, reduce recognition and acceptance of violence or aggression, and diminish the effect of violent video games on normative beliefs about aggression. Hence, exposure to violent video games could not predict normative beliefs about aggression of these individuals. By contrast, individuals with low scores of family environment are less likely to help each other; they often openly show anger, attack, and contradiction and do not pay much attention to morality and values. These negative aspects would not decrease but increase their acceptance of violence and aggression. For these individuals, because of the lack of mitigation mechanisms, exposure to violent video games could predict normative beliefs about aggression significantly.

The moderated mediation model of the relationship between exposure to violent video games and aggression could not only help reveal that exposure to violent video games can affect aggression but also provide an elaboration of the influencing mechanism. According to this model, for individuals with high scores of family environment, exposure to violent video games had only direct effect on aggression. However, for those with low scores of family environment, there was not only a direct effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression but also an indirect effect mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. In short, exposure to violence video games affecting aggression through normative beliefs about aggression is more likely to happen to adolescents with poor family environment than those with good family environment. That is, generation of adolescent aggression is not only related to internal cognitive factors but also to external situations. As Piotrowski and Valkenburg ( Piotrowski and Valkenburg, 2015 ; Valkenburg, 2015 ) pointed out, the effect of violent video games/media on adolescents is a complex interaction of dispositional, developmental, and social factors, and individual differences in susceptibility to these three factors determine the nature and the extent of this influence. The proposed model incorporated some perspectives of GAM and CM: while confirming the effect of exposure to violent video games on aggression occurrence, the combined effect of individual and environmental factors was verified.

Compared with the simple mediation or moderation model, the present moderated mediation model provided deeper insights into the internal mechanism of the effect of violent video games on aggression, providing inspirations for preventing adolescent aggression. First, in view of the close relationship between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, relevant government departments should continue to improve the grading system of video games; meanwhile, parents should appropriately monitor the types of video games used by teenagers as well as the time spent and reduce the degree of exposure to violent video games. Second, by allowing teenagers to objectively distinguish between violence in games and reality, the mediating role of normative beliefs about aggression could inspire people to identify rational ways to solve violence problems and to experience the hurtful consequences of aggression. This would help adolescents change normative beliefs about aggression, establish a correct view of right and wrong, and reduce the occurrence of aggression. Finally, the moderating effect of family environment on the mediation process suggests that more attention should be paid to the important role of family environment. On the one hand, family education is closely related to adolescent aggression. Then, parents should create a good family atmosphere, publicly show anger and aggression as little as possible, and advocate and practice positive moral values. Parents should adopt authoritative styles, abandoning autocratic and indulgent parenting styles ( Casas et al., 2006 ; Sandstrom, 2007 ; Underwood et al., 2009 ; Kawabata et al., 2011 ) to minimize the negative effect of exposure to violent video games. On the other hand, for teenagers with poor family environment, while reducing exposure to violent video games, it is particularly important to change their normative beliefs about aggression, no longer viewing aggression as an alternative way to solve problems.

Limitations

Limitations of the current study should be mentioned. First, only Chinese school students were assessed, in a relatively small number, which could affect sample representativeness. A large sample of teenagers from different countries and in different ages, also including juvenile offenders, would be more accurate in revealing the effect of violent video games on adolescent aggression. Second, this study only focused on violent video games, not involving violent media such as internet and television, daily life events, wars, and other major social events. Indeed, these factors also have important effects on adolescent aggression, and their influencing mechanisms and combined effect are worth investigating further. Third, this study mainly adopted the self-report method. Use of peer, parent, or teacher reports to assess exposure to violent video games and aggression would help improve the effectiveness of the study. Fourth, there might be other mediators, moderating variables and relational models. In addition to normative beliefs about aggression and family environment, individual emotions, personality characteristics, school climate, and companions may play mediating or moderating roles in the relationship between violent video games and aggression. This study developed a moderated mediation model between family environment and normative beliefs about aggression, but the possibility of multiple mediation and mediated moderation models cannot be ruled out.

The current study showed that exposure to violent video games is positively related to adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression have a mediating effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while the family environment regulates the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with good family environment, exposure to violent video games only has a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, there is an indirect effect mediated by normative beliefs about aggression alongside a direct effect. This moderated mediation model incorporates some perspectives of GAM and CM, enriching studies of generative mechanism of adolescent aggression.

Author Contributions

YW and RS conceived the idea of the study. RS analyzed the data. YW and RS interpreted the results and wrote the paper. YW discussed the results and revised the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Funding. This study was supported by a grant from the National Social Science Foundation of China (14CSH017) to YW.

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The Feds Are Coming for “Extremist” Gamers

The Department of Homeland Security and FBI are in dialog with Roblox, Discord, Reddit, and others.

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Gaming companies are coordinating with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to root out so-called domestic violent extremist content, according to a new government report. Noting that mechanisms have been established with social media companies to police extremism, the report recommends that the national security agencies establish new and similar processes with the vast gaming industry.

The exact nature of the cooperation between federal agencies and video game companies, which has not been previously reported, is detailed in a new Government Accountability Office report . The report draws on interviews conducted with five gaming and social media companies including Roblox, an online gaming platform; Discord, a social media app commonly used by gamers; Reddit; as well as a game publisher and social media company that asked the GAO to remain anonymous.

The Intercept reached out to the companies identified in the GAO report for comment, but none responded on the record at time of publication.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have mechanisms to share and receive domestic violent extremism threat-related information with social media and gaming companies,” the GAO says. The report reveals that the DHS intelligence office meets with gaming companies and that the companies can use these meetings to “share information with I&A [DHS’s intelligence office] about online activities promoting domestic violent extremism,” or even simply “activities that violate the companies’ terms of service.” Through its 56 field offices and hundreds of resident agencies subordinate field offices, the FBI receives tips from gaming companies of potential law-breaking and extremist views for further investigation. The FBI also conducts briefings to gaming companies on purported threats.

The GAO warns that FBI and DHS lack an overarching strategy to bring its work with gaming companies in line with broader agency missions. “Without a strategy or goals, the agencies may not be fully aware of how effective their communications are with companies, or how effective their information-sharing mechanisms serve the agencies’ overall missions,” the GAO says. The report ends with a recommendation that both agencies develop such a strategy — a recommendation that DHS concurred with, providing an estimated completion date of June 28 this year. 

“All I can think of is the awful track record of the FBI when it comes to identifying extremism,” Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who often streams while playing video games under the handle HasanAbi, says of the mechanisms. “They’re much better at finding vulnerable teenagers with mental disabilities to take advantage of.”

The GAO’s investigation, which covers September 2022 to January 2024, was undertaken at the request of the House Homeland Security Committee, which asked the government auditor to examine domestic violent extremists’ use of gaming platforms and social media. While there is no federal law that criminalizes domestic violent extremism as a category of crime, since 2019 the U.S. government has employed five domestic terrorism threat categories. These are defined by the FBI and DHS as racial/ethnically motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism, animal rights or environmental violent extremism , abortion-related violent extremism , and all other domestic terror threats. 

The GAO study also follows pressure from Congress to top gaming companies to crack down on extremist content. Last March, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to gaming companies Valve, Activision Blizzard, Epic Games, Riot Games, Roblox Corp, and Take-Two Interactive demanding that they take actions to police gamers. 

“Unlike more traditional social media companies — which in recent years have developed public facing policies addressing extremism, created trust and public safety teams, and released transparency reports — online gaming platforms generally have not utilized these tools,” Durbin wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. In the letter, Durbin requested a briefing from the Justice Department on what channels exist “for DOJ and the online video game industry to communicate and coordinate” on the threat of “online video games by extremists and other malicious actors.”

The federal government’s interest in combating extremism has risen sharply following the January 6 storming of the Capitol. On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden directed his national security team to conduct a comprehensive review of federal efforts to fight domestic terrorism, which the White House has deemed “the most urgent terrorism threat facing the United States” — greater than foreign terrorist groups like the Islamic State group. Biden’s directive resulted in the first ever national strategy for fighting domestic terrorism, released by the White House in June 2021. The strategy mentions “online gaming platforms” as a place where “recruiting and mobilizing individuals to domestic terrorism occurs.” 

According to the national strategy, the intelligence community assessed that extremists emboldened by events like January 6 “pose an elevated threat to the Homeland”; and that “DVE [domestic violent extremist] attackers often radicalize independently by consuming violent extremist material online and mobilize without direction from a violent extremist organization, making detection and disruption difficult.” 

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The federal government says that sharing information with gaming and social media companies is another avenue to identify and combat extremism. The government also recognizes that there are constitutional and legal questions about Americans’ free speech rights. According to the GAO report, both the FBI and DHS indicated that they are proceeding with caution in light of federal litigation on such matters, including one case on its way to the Supreme Court.

In response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana, a federal judge last year prohibited the FBI, DHS, and other federal agencies from communicating with social media companies to fight what they consider misinformation. 

Federal law enforcement and intelligence have long focused on gaming as an avenue for both radicalization and as a backdoor platform for extremists to communicate. A 2019 internal intelligence assessment jointly produced by the FBI, DHS, the Joint Special Operations Command, and the National Counterterrorism Center and obtained by The Intercept warns that “violent extremists could exploit functionality of popular online gaming platforms and applications.” The assessment lists half a dozen U.S.-owned gaming platforms that it identifies as popular, including Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net, Fortnite, Playstation Xbox Live, Steam, and Roblox.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society,” former President Donald Trump said in 2019 after mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “This includes the gruesome video games that are now commonplace.” 

Pentagon List of Extremism Experts Includes Anti-Muslim and Conservative Christian Groups

The GAO report cites over a dozen expert participants in their survey, including three from the Anti-Defamation League as well as the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation, and several academic institutions. 

The Anti-Defamation League has testified to Congress multiple times about extremists’ use of gaming platforms. In 2019, ADL’s then-senior vice president of international affairs, Sharon Nazarian, was asked by Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., if gaming platforms “are monitored” and if there’s “a way AI can be employed to identify those sorts of conversations.” 

Nazarian replied that gaming platforms “need to be better regulated.”

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‘fallout’ showrunners on what kind of violence they ruled out in season 1.

Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner talk about the lessons they learned from Jonathan Nolan making their new Prime Video sci-fi action-comedy.

By James Hibberd

James Hibberd

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Prime Video’s adaption of the Fallout game franchise is looking like a hit.

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The secret to the show’s success seems to be successfully capturing the game franchise’s tricky balance of drama, graphic violence and off-beat humor — something plenty of Western projects have tried and failed to do the in the past (remember Will Smith’s Wild Wild West ?). “I think we’ve seen a lot of big-scoop science fiction television in the last 10 years, and something happened along the way where you can get white-knuckled when you’re spending so much money and it becomes a very serious exercise,” Wagner says. “I feel like this stayed whimsical, stayed fun, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Hopefully that feels like a new swing in this space and becomes the weirdest version of it. ”

Robertson-Dworet adds, “I love that the games make the apocalypse fun and weird, and I hope that’s something that we properly brought to the screen.”

Below the duo, interviewed last week, take a few questions about the show — such as how Fallout evolved over the course of its development, what kind of violence was considered too extreme, and what lessons they learned from their Westworld veteran director Nolan.

So how did the show creatively evolve from what you were originally thinking to where it ended up?

GENEVA ROBERTSON-DWORET What’s crazy to me is how many things actually remained true throughout these five years. A really fundamental idea Graham and I always thought about was that it’s the mix of comedy and drama that makes Fallout so special. We stayed true to that throughout the process and cared enormously about being very faithful to the mythology.

The scene early on where you have a seemingly tough solider in his weapon-heavy power armor turn into total coward when he was attacked by a bear had me laughing out loud. I had never seen a show build up a hulking armored suit only to completely subvert it.

ROBERTSON-DWORET That’s what’s fun about Fallout , we can either lean into the genre conventions or poke fun at them.

What was the toughest writing challenge when cracking this?

ROBERTSON-DWORET Nailing that tone that we were discussing. We locked in on the idea of three central characters very early. We’re really drawn to a vault dweller ( Ella Purnell ), a member of the Brotherhood of Steel (Aaron Clifton Moten) and a Ghoul ( Walton Goggins ). We were very inspired not just by The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , but by a specific interpretation of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that Graham has.

WAGNER It’s my interpretation, and I know it’s wrong. But it’s the idea if the same cowboy has been in the Wild West, then the longer you’re out there, that they start as [Clint Eastwood’s hero] Blondie and you end up as [Eli Wallach’s villain] Tuco. That’s sort of our view of Lucy, Max and the Ghoul. Their worldview and ethical compass gets damaged by the amount of time they’ve spent out [in the wasteland].

WAGNER This is more probably for me than Geneva — she’s most used to used to the idea of “anything’s possible.” I’ve learned to artfully cut corners in the half-hour comedy space. I had to turn off the part of my brain that says “you can’t do that” and listen to Jonah and Geneva and swing big at times. That was a big one for me to adjust to.

ROBERTSON-DWORET I spent 10 years writing big studio feature films and the reality of the feature side is, you’re not that involved. When you you create and run a TV show, you’re involved in every step of the process. I was really grateful to Jonah as a mentor to me. The main thing I learned was how much he loves to do things practically. We built an incredible amount for this show. Graham and I always talked about how the power armor will be a [CGI] effect. But no. We built power armor and had dudes walking around in power armor on set, which was amazing. I love the effect and you can totally tell the difference.

WAGNER It was a humbling moment when I asked if I could put on the power armor and the stunt team just politely told me that I’m not physically strong enough.

ROBERTSON-DWORET I didn’t even ask.

You have a lot of fun with graphic violence in the show. I’m curious, what was something you decided not to do? An example where you said, “Let’s draw a line here.”

Walton Goggins is always such a kick. What surprised you most about working with him?

WAGNER It was such a pie-in-the-sky idea. It’s a game we play in the writers room: How would you make this something that you would watch? We’re as cynical of viewers as anybody. And you’re like, “Well, if Walton Goggins is playing a Ghoul, I’d watch that.” Then we wrote it that way. It was a wild ambition, just scheduling alone. This is a guy people want to work with and for good reason. Like every one of our cast members, we’re just so lucky to have them.

What is your favorite iteration of Fallout and your favorite non – Fallout game?

WAGNER The world of the Fallout fandom is like mirroring the world of the games, they’re broken into factions. I want to keep that to myself, because there are elements of all the games in this show. We’re trying to stick to a world in which they all exist.

ROBERTSON-DWORET Gamers have thousands of hours to enjoy each Fallout game. We have eight hours to bring in viewers, introduce them to this world, and tell a story. My interpretation of the Brotherhood slightly evolves over the course of the games. We lean into one interpretation in this season, but it would be lovely to be able to explore some of the other aspects of it in later seasons.

That game also has a new story and new cast each season. Will the show do the same?

Hmm, let me guess: New Vegas for season two?

ROBERTSON-DWORET Well, that would be a big spoiler. Thank you for the idea, though.

I’m certain you don’t need my help!

Fallout is now streaming on Prime Video. Previous: Jonathan Nolan Is Ready to Unleash ‘Fallout’ and Finish ‘Westworld.”

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Prime Video's Fallout adaptation is a spot-on representation of the beloved game

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Critics and fans seem to agree that, much like a mini nuke launched with a 100 per cent VATS hit chance on a Super Mutant's big head, the television adaptation of Fallout doesn't miss.

For gamers, Fallout is a big deal. They're hugely popular role-playing games set in an alternate retro future where technology and culture locked in on the '50s aesthetic. It's a world where science focused on atoms and nuclear power rather than miniaturised computer electronics. And it's a world that blew itself up in The Great War in the year 2077.

The games are set decades, or even centuries later, in the aftermath of this worldwide nuclear war, where Earth has become an irradiated wasteland. A select "lucky" (read: rich) few got to ride out the disaster in highly protected Vaults, where they were promised apple pie, verandahs, and the American Dream. Think Mad-Max meets I Love Lucy and you'll kind of get an idea of the Fallout vibe.

The show now brings all that the games had onto the screen for a whole new audience, and makes for some damn fine TV that fans, and even those who can't tell a Pip-Boy from a Radroach, can enjoy.

Here's why it's S.P.E.C.I.A.L! (that's a Fallout reference in case you didn't know).

There's nothing worse than an adaptation that doesn't look right (We're looking at you, Sonic design with the creepy teeth). But Fallout doesn't put a foot wrong aesthetically.

Things that could be considered Easter eggs for fans of the game don't even feel like Easter eggs, they're just how they should be. When a stimpak just more or less heals a stab wound, or when the exact hacking mini game from the games shows up while someone is trying to access a terminal, it doesn't read as fan service, it just feels right.

From the Vaults down to the stitching on the inside of the Power Armour, every prop, set, costume and location feels like it's been ripped straight from the games, and it all shines on screen to deliver that iconic retro-futuristic Fallout vibe.

2. Personality

The Fallout games may be set in a bleak, post-apocalyptic wasteland steeped in violence, but they're surprisingly funny.

They're camp, cheeky, and full of dark humour and satire, poking fun at the absurdities of capitalism and greed that managed to get the world blown up in the first place. The show captures this in spades.

Even the violence is funny. Bullets hit like punchlines, while the comic timing on a decapitation scene is masterful stuff.

Top tier comedians deliver some of the show's stand-out moments too: Chris Parnell's turn as a cyclops Overseer is hard to take your eye off; Matt Berry, a man who could read a microwave instruction booklet and make it hilarious, voices a friendly, organ-harvesting Mister Handy robot in a pitch-perfect bit of casting.

3. Expert hands

Credit must be given to the expert hands of all the crew involved.

That said, it feels like Westworld director Jonathan Nolan was absolutely the right person to help bring this show to life. Nolan was executive producer and directed the first three episodes, which are always crucial in setting a show's overall tone and feel. And no doubt his time with Westworld helped set him up for success here. Deserts? Check. Robots? Check. Dystopian sci-fi interpretation of classic Western themes? Check.

It's also clear that the team at Bethesda Game Studios, helmed by famed Game Director Todd Howard, has kept a gulper throat full of fingers in this pie, making sure it all remained game-accurate and fit into the existing lore. Clearly, it's been a successful creative partnership.

Of course, behind-the-scenes talent is wasted if the actors can't pull off their roles. Not a problem for the three leads of Fallout.

Walton Goggins' turn as American hero Cooper Howard-turned-bounty-hunting-Ghoul is electrifying. He fills his scenes with a Clint Eastwood-esque, "Do you feel lucky, punk?", energy that puts you on edge for each inevitable quick draw.

Ella Purnell nails the wide-eyed, naive, do-gooder Lucy McLean. Her main story quest to find her Dad, à la Fallout 3, confidently leads us on her descent from her American Dream life in the Vault, out to a world where drinking irradiated water from a toilet is going to be a highlight of your day.

Aaron Moten's Maximus hits all the right notes in his journey to be a hero, a shining Knight in Power Armour, a wannabe stereotypical good guy in a world where being "good" usually has to take a back seat to just being alive.

And, of course, there's the real star, Dogmeat. Ok, it's not THAT Dogmeat, she's CX404, but she's still a very good girl. Yes, she is.

5. I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire

If you read that heading and didn't hear the song starting to play in your head, then I feel bad for you, son.

The use of music in the Fallout games has been one of its most defining traits, and it's a trait the show doesn't skimp on.

The crackle of those cheery old-timey tunes as horrible acts of hyper-violence play out across the wasteland is paid due service here, with many of the most iconic songs used in the games making for perfectly timed needle drops.

Even the games' official soundtrack gets used to good effect.

6. Amazon money

Shows like this ain't cheap, and it's clear this has had the full support of that Amazon coin behind it. From the impressive sets of the Vaults and towns to the effects so good you can barely tell they're effects, it looks as good as any big budget film.

According to Variety  the first season cost US$153 million (AU$238 million) to make, which puts it at almost US$20 million (AU$31 million) per episode. For reference, most Game Of Thrones episodes averaged around US$6 Million.

It's an insane amount of money, but it shows.

7. Leave the games out of it

The Fallout games were always going to be perfect for adapting. They're classic, sprawling Bethesda-style role playing games which, for those who don't play games, just means they're games where you get spit out into an open world and left to do whatever you want.

This isn't like The Last of Us — where the show quite faithfully retells the story of the games for a new audience, but leaves those of us who've played it seeing every major plot coming from a mile away. (By the way, if you haven't played The Last of Us 2, you ain't ready for Season 2).

It isn't even like Halo, where they felt the need to rewrite much of the universe and timeline to make it translate on screen, much to the chagrin of die-hard fans.

Instead, just like the sandbox the games let us play in, Fallout the series gives the creatives here that same sandbox to tell their own stories in. Sure, it has a well-established universe with timelines, lore and characters that the show faithfully adheres to, but it's not forced into retelling any specific story.

It can create new characters, show off new Vaults, and explore new areas of the Universe, all while respecting the source material and adding to it, leaving us with one of the best game adaptations we've seen to date.

It's definitely just a little bit special.

Fallout is streaming now on Prime Video.

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Nikola Jokic’s brothers seen on video punching fan in violent altercation at Nuggets-Lakers game

N ikola Jokic helped lead the Nuggets to a 101-99 comeback win over the Lakers in Game 2 on Monday night. His brothers were busy, too.

Jokic’s two brothers, Strahinja and Nemanja, were caught on video throwing punches against an assumed Lakers fan in the crowd shortly after the Nuggets clinched the win to earn the 2-0 first-round series lead.

TMZ Sports confirmed the incident through witnesses in attendance at Ball Arena.

The video posted to TikTok on Monday showed the brothers plowing through the crowd to find a fan in a grey T-shirt, who was instantly punched in the face by the Jokic’s older brother, Strahinja.

It’s unclear what sparked the altercation and the NBA is conducting an investigation, per multiple reports.

The two continued to have choice words for one another after the hit and the other brother, Nemanja, was also there.

Three women in the video appear to try to calm tempers down and stop the brothers from causing any havoc in the crowd.

One of the women was Nikola Jokic’s wife Natalija, who could be seen holding their 1-year-old daughter Ognjena while reaching out to hold Strahinja back, per TMZ.

It’s not unusual for Jokic’s brothers to be involved in a heated moment during a game.

During the Western Conference Finals last year, they notably heckled Jack Nicholson after the Nuggets took a 3-0 series lead.

A video emerged of one of the brothers giving Nicholson a thumbs up while the other yelled, “See you next year! Bye-bye! Bye-bye!”

The Nuggets, the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference, have a 2-0 series lead after rallying from 20 points down on Monday night.

Jokic recorded a triple-double on Monday, tallying 27 points, 20 rebounds, and 10 assists. In Game 1, he had a double-double with 32 points and 12 rebounds.

The defending champions will travel to Los Angeles for Games 3 and 4 at Crypto.com Arena, and if needed, the Nuggets will host Games 5 and 7.

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Nikola jokic brother punches fan in crowd ... nba investigating.

• Exclusive Details

8:20 AM PT -- TMZ Sports has learned ... the NBA is currently looking into the situation.

Nikola Jokic 's brother was in no mood to celebrate the Nuggets' comeback win over the Lakers on Monday ... 'cause he straight-up punched a fan in the stands at the playoff game -- and it's all on video.

According to witnesses, the violent incident went down shortly after Joker and his Denver teammates completed their 101-99 win against LeBron James and co. to go up 2-0 in the first-round series.

The clip shows Joker's older brother, Strahinja , hop over a Ball Arena seat and down a row ... kicking his way through the crowd to get closer to the male spectator.

As soon as Strahinja got within arms reach, he unloaded a fierce punch with his right hand that hit the fan right in the face.

The two sides weren't done with each other after the hit, though ... they continued to bark at each other as Strahinja's brother, Nemanja , followed right behind him for support.

The two-time MVP's wife, Natalija , was just feet away from Jokic's brothers throughout the altercation ... holding their young daughter as she reached out to reel Strahinja back.

It's unclear what led to the altercation ... we're working on it.

The massive Jokic brothers are notorious for passionately defending the NBA superstar at games ... and they're certainly not shy to let their feelings known to players, referees and fans.

The NBA is known to throw the hammer down on unruly fans ... but considering Jokic is one of the best players in the league, it'll be interesting to see if any punishment comes from this.

Originally Published -- 7:42 AM PT

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Breaking news, lebron james fumes over controversial calls in lakers’ playoff collapse.

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DENVER — LeBron James was seeing red after the Los Angeles Lakers watched a golden opportunity slip away.

His frustration wasn’t so much centered on blowing a 20-point lead. Or his late missed 3-pointer that rimmed out with the game tied. Or Jamal Murray’s fadeaway buzzer-beater that gave the Denver Nuggets a 101-99 win over the Lakers in Game 2 of their first-round series Monday night.

James’ anger was more distant — the NBA’s replay center in Secaucus, New Jersey.

At the heart of his wrath was a second-half foul of Michael Porter Jr. that was overturned with the league saying MPJ had made only marginal contact on D’Angelo Russell.

Michael Porter Jr. hit D'Angelo Russell in the face. MPJ was called for a foul which was then challenged. Nuggets won the challenge. Thought? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/X01ufZXX4g — ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) April 23, 2024

“I don’t understand what’s going on in the replay center, to be honest,” said James, whose team heads back to Los Angeles for Game 3 on Thursday facing a 2-0 deficit. “D-Lo clearly gets hit in the face on the drive. What the f–k do we have a replay center … it doesn’t make sense. It makes no sense. It bothers me.”

James was also complaining to the refs about consecutive possessions near the end of the game.

James was called for a foul on Murray on a drive to the basket that led to two free throws and the Nuggets tying the game 97-97. On the next possession, James hit a layup but thought he should have had a 3-point play opportunity.

Murray then ended the game with back-to-back mid-range jumpers to tie the game and then to win it at the buzzer.

James wasn’t his usually expansive self in his postgame interview after the Lakers watched Murray and the Nuggets storm back from a 68-48 hole to capture their 10th straight win over the Lakers.

James had a chance to give the Lakers a lead with around 16 seconds left on a wide-open 3-pointer.

“Rimmed out,” lamented James, who finished with 26 points and 12 assists.

Porter grabbed the rebound, setting up Murray’s game-winner, a fadeaway jumper over Anthony Davis as time expired.

James got right to the point after the game.

— On Denver’s comeback, which included being outscored 32-20 in the fourth: “We missed shots. We still got great looks and we just missed them. And they made it.”

— On Russell hitting seven 3s after going 1 for 9 from deep in the series opener: “We never lost confidence in him. D-Lo is D-Lo.”

— On if the Lakers can take anything from this game into Game 3 in L.A.: “Every game is its own challenge.”

— On the challenges after a heartbreaking loss: “Of course it’s a heartbreaking game and you don’t want to lose in that fashion.”

"I don't understand what's going on in the replay center, to be honest… It makes no sense to me… Then I just saw what happened with the Sixers/Knicks game too, what are we doing?" – LeBron James pic.twitter.com/7OWLmuf8jn — Spectrum SportsNet (@SpectrumSN) April 23, 2024

That’s when James began voicing his frustration with the replay center.

Earlier in the game, Murray was called for a foul when James drove to the basket, only to have the Nuggets successfully challenge for the foul to be waved off.

In his replay-center rant, James referenced Monday’s earlier game, when the Knicks rallied in the final 30 seconds for a wild 104-101 victory over the Philadelphia 76ers.

The Knicks got the go-ahead 3-pointer from Donte DiVincenzo with 13 seconds left, a possession that started when they stole the ball from Tyrese Maxey.

Joel Embiid said Maxey was fouled, and also that coach Nick Nurse and some players had attempted to call timeout before the Knicks got the ball.

“What are we doing?” James said as he ended his postgame interview.

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