One of the undercurrents in the public arguments over the use of violent content in video games is that the game developers are foisting the material on what would otherwise be innocent youth. But that perspective avoids a very clear reality: developing games is a cutthroat business, and the developers wouldn't be producing these games if they didn't perceive a demand. A new study, however, suggests that the violence in most games is deeply tied to other factors that draw players in. When those factors are separated out, violent content alone appears to contribute little to the enjoyment of the game.
The long history of human violence has been used to suggest that violent content might have some intrinsic appeal to gamers, but the authors of the study point out that, for many games, violent content is inextricably linked to other factors that might also draw gamers in. These include a sense of competence and achievement, which often come from the defeat of computerized adversaries. In addition, the violence may contribute to the immersive nature of the game. Finally, for games like World of Warcraft and the Grand Theft Auto series, violent content is part of a world that offers the players significant autonomy, something which may be hard to come by in the real world.
To try to separate these factors, the authors performed both in-lab experiments using volunteers and surveys of forum users on a popular gaming site. The work included some basic personality profiling to assess any pre-existing violent tendencies, as well as questions that provided measures of the different aspects of a game's appeal.
So, for example, to assess whether a sense of achievement is a major part of a game's appeal, participants were asked how strongly they agreed with statements like "I felt competent at the game" and "I felt capable and effective while playing." Similar questions were used to probe the game's immersive nature and the overall appeal of the game. Violence was either controlled as part of the experiment or measured by a combination of ESRB rating and independent coding by the researchers.
The authors performed six studies in total, but they were in broad agreement, so we'll only discuss the more compelling ones here. For the experimental portion, these involved playing an essentially identical game with different degrees of violent content. One group of participants was randomly assigned to play the game House of the Dead 3 on the different extremes of its gore settings, while a second was split between those who played the normal version of Half-Life 2, and a those who played a modified version that turned the adventure into an elaborate game of tag.
In both cases, the primary influences on enjoyment were the sense of competence and satisfaction, along with the immersive nature of the game. Generally, females rated immersion as more important, while males went for competence (and consistently rated their own expertise very highly).
Violence didn't register when it came to enjoyment, even for those with pre-existing violent tendencies. That group did, however, express a preference for the game in general, as they indicated they were likely to play it again and would look forward to a sequel. But, when the levels of satisfaction were controlled for, this preference dropped below the point of statistical significance.
Survey says...
Similar results were obtained from the surveys, where gamers were asked to discuss games they play frequently. Again, ratings of enjoyment tended to correlate best with whether the players felt the games offered them a sense of achievement and autonomy, rather than violent content. In contrast to the controlled experiments, however, the factors were challenging to separate out.
"Violence ratings were mildly but significantly associated with more autonomy, both for our rating and that from ESRB," the authors note. "Further inspection of this relation suggested it was due largely to the popular massively multiplayer online World of Warcraft."
"Although many people, including many game developers and popular commentators, assume that violence motivates players or adds to video game enjoyment, our findings do not support that intuition," the authors conclude. "Instead, they suggest that video games are enjoyable, immersive, and motivating insofar as they offer opportunities for psychological need satisfaction, specifically experiences of competence and autonomy, to which violent content per se is largely unrelated." For those without violent tendencies, such content actually had a mild but consistent effect, in that it made the game less enjoyable.
The results suggest that game developers may, to a certain extent, be misreading the appeal of violent content—the autonomy offered by GTA may be far more important than its specific content, for example. Considering the background of the debate, however, it's also important to note that the researchers' measurements of violent tendencies consisted of asking people if they sometimes wanted to hit someone, not whether they actually did so.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2009. DOI: 10.1177/0146167208327216
Study: violence in games not that compelling for most gamers
