WASHINGTON, Apr 8: Aggression in video gamers is linked to their experiences of failure and frustration during play, and not to a game’s violent content, a new study has claimed.
Researchers found that failure to master a game and its controls led to frustration and aggression, regardless of whether the game was violent or not.
The study is the first to look at the player’s psychological experience with video games instead of focusing solely on its content.
“Any player who has thrown down a remote control after losing an electronic game can relate to the intense feelings or anger failure can cause,” said lead author Andrew Przybylski, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, who said such frustration is commonly known among gamers as “rage-quitting.”
That experience is not unique to gaming, said co-author Richard Ryan, a motivational psychologist at the University of Rochester in US. For example, in sports, players may lose a game as a result of a bad call.
“When people feel they have no control over the outcome of a game, that leads to aggression,” Ryan said.
“We saw that in our experiments. If you press someone’s competencies, they’ll become more aggressive, and our effects held up whether the games were violent or not,” he said.
To test which aspects of the gaming experience lead to aggressive feelings, the researchers manipulated the interface, controls, and degree of difficulty in custom-designed video games across six lab experiments.
Nearly 600 college-aged participants were tasked with playing the games – many of which included violent and nonviolent variations – and then were tested for aggressive thoughts, feelings, or behaviours.
In one experiment, undergraduates held their hand in a bowl of painfully cold water for 25 seconds. They were led to believe that the length of time was determined by a prior participant, but in fact, all participants were assigned the same duration.
Next, participants were randomly asked to play either a simple or challenging version of Tetris, after which they were asked to assign the amount of time a future participant would have to leave their hand in the chilled water.
Players who experienced the difficult Tetris game assigned on average 10 seconds more of chilled water pain to subsequent players than those who played the easy version.
Across the experiments, researchers found it was not the narrative or imagery, but the lack of mastery of the game’s controls and the degree of difficulty players had completing the game that led to frustration.
The researchers also surveyed 300 avid gamers to identify how real world gamers might experience the same phenomena.
When asked about pre- and post-game feelings, gamers reported that their inability to master a game or its controls caused feelings of frustration and affected their sense of enjoyment in the experience. (PTI)
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