Video Game Competition and Violence influence on Aggressive Behavior

Based on previous research about the effect of video games in aggression, Paul Adachi and Teena Willoughby conducted a research to determine if it was the competitiveness or violence of video games that could cause an aggressive response on university students. According to Adachi & Willoughby, much of the previous research on the topic had failed in leveling external variables such as competitiveness, difficulty and pace of action, and that those variable could have easily affected the results. They have also not taken into consideration if the aggressive behavior was caused either by competitiveness or by the violence or by the combination of both.

In their research Adachy and Willoughby (2011 p. 260) included and defined he following independent variables: violence (e.g. fighting wrestling, shooting or killing), competitiveness (e.g. competing with other players or computer-created opponents), difficulty (e.g. how difficult is to win the game) and pace of action (e.g. how fast are the action sequence happening). They also defined aggressive behavior (dependent variable) based on Lieberman’s Hot Sauce Paradigm (1999), which assigned a standardized number depending on the hotness rating and the weight in grams.

Pilot Study 1

The purposes of the pilot study was to define if Conan and Fuel (two video games selected) differed in terms of violence, but were similar in terms of competitiveness, difficulty and pace of action (Adachi & Willoughby, 2011 p. 262). Conan was defined as a violent game where battle players would fight using words and axes to survive and defeat their opponents. Fuel is a race game in which players go through a series of races using cars and motorcycles.

In this study, fourteen students (6 men and 8 women) ...

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...esearch, were theory and practice made a good match. The researchers were able to control the side variables, and obtain trustful data to prove the hypothesis that there is a relation between violent video games and aggression, and that when isolating specific video game characteristics, competitiveness had a much larger impact on aggressive behavior than the violent content.

Works Cited

Adachi, P.J.C. & Willoughby, T. (2011). The Effect of Video Game Competition and Violence on Aggressive Behavior: Which Characteristic Has the greatest influence? Psychology of Violence 1(4), 259-274.

Barlett, C. P., Branch, O., Rodeheffer, C., & Harris, R. (2009). How long do the short-term violent video game effects last? Aggressive Behavior, 35, 1–12. doi:10.1002/ab.20301

Cozby, P.C., & Bates, S.C. (2012). Methods in Behavioral Research (11th Ed.). New York: NY, McGraw Hill.