Playing violent computer games chills you out

4 Apr 2008 | 15:00 BST

By Sylvie Barak

IN WHAT MAY WELL provoke a violent reaction from sanctimonious law enforcers and parental watchdog groups everywhere, a new study has added to the ongoing controversy over whether violent video games make people blood crazed and psychotic in real life, by saying that they don’t. They even make people calmer apparently.

The research, published in Develop magazine, says that psychologists recruited 292 male and female online gamers, to play the game World of Warcraft. The players, aged between 12 and 83 years old, were first asked to complete a questionnaire on anger, aggression and personality and then allowed to play the game for two hours.

After the two hours were up, they were asked to complete the questionnaire again. The results seemed to point to the fact that players were actually much more likely to feel calm or tired after playing a round of the blood splattered online game, although it did also depend on their personality types. Basically, the not-exactly-groundbreaking report doesn’t really prove anything, except that if a person was violent to start with, games won’t make much difference to that, and if a person is a calm and easy going person, all that blood and gore is likely to just send them off to sleep.

But Jane Barnett, who headed the Middlesex study, was impressed with her irrelevant findings anyway and noted that it would help future development of an emotion and gaming questionnaire which could possibly identify which types of gamers were most likely to transfer their online aggression into everyday life. The ones stomping on their consoles after losing, perhaps? µ

L’Inq
Develop Magazine

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