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Are video games to blame for today's violence?
Several years in the making, the future ‘Grand Theft Auto (GTA) VI’ has become one of the most anticipated video games of all time. Why is this fascination for such a blatantly violent, amoral series?
Laurent Bègue-Shankland1: Violence is a key component of popular leisure, and not just in video games. In movies alone, out of 800 major productions released over the past 50 years, 89% contain violent scenes, a percentage that’s constantly increasing. Most of the bestselling video games are just as harsh.
Furthermore, those with aggressive content include much more than acts of violence: the propensity for killing others is only one aspect of the entertainment, and not necessarily the most important. According to systematic tallies, among experienced gamers playing a first-person shooter game for 50 minutes, brutal actions – such as killing someone with a firearm – account for only 15% of the events and take up just 7% of the total play time.
The appeal of bellicose scenes is probably the result of a desire for stimulation. Violent video games trigger certain intense emotions and impart a feeling of control, often as part of a group. A study conducted in the United States showed that when the ‘blood’ option (which activates the display of blood flow when adversaries are killed) was enabled during the game Mortal Kombat, the players’ blood pressure rose – indicating an intensification of physiological arousal.
Other studies have shown that the amygdala (a brain structure involved in the interpretation of threatening stimuli – see image below) is mobilised during rough virtual sequences. In our laboratory, we have also detected an increase in players’ stress levels measured in terms of cardiac indicators. In short, people like encitement, at least to a certain extent, and the lack of it is unappealing.
Every time a violent video game is released, it triggers a flood of criticism accusing it of promoting aggressive behaviour among the players. What do the scientific studies say about this?
L. B.-S.: It’s a highly controversial topic in public opinion, even though we have a whole body of scientific literature from the past two decades that, up to now, has revealed a wide range of effects of violent video games on aggressive behaviour, hostile reactions and reduced empathy.
At the University of Grenoble (southeastern France, Ed’s note), we carried out a series of experiments on this subject. The first phase of the study took place over three consecutive days: 70 adults of both genders were randomly assigned to violent or action games of comparable difficulty and excitement levels, playing for 20 minutes per day. After each session, the participants would complete a task conceived to measure their hostility. They would read a story with an undetermined ending, for example: “A driver crashes into the back of another, damaging both their vehicles. After checking the extent of the wreckage, the main character approaches the other driver.” The participants were asked to recount what happened next, what the protagonist said, thought and felt. We then encoded the gradient of violence contained in the written responses.
In another phase, the subjects took part in a competition for which they were instructed to respond faster than an opponent when a visual signal appeared on screen. When they won, they would choose the intensity (60 to 105 decibels) and duration (0 to 5 seconds) of an audio shock supposedly administered to another person seated in front of a screen in the next room, according to a conventional protocol for measuring aggression. The results showed a linear escalation in the intensity of the audio shocks and their duration as the days went by, whereas no such increase was observed among the control group. In addition, the more hostility was expected to grow, the more aggressive the participants’ behaviour.
More generally, an extensive meta-analysis involving 130,000 participants has shown that playing violent video games led to growing hostile thoughts, emotions and behaviour, a drop in cooperative attitudes and a rise in physiological arousal.
Some defenders of video games with aggressive content argue that their violence has a cathartic function, preventing forbidden, punishable behaviours in everyday life by fulfilling them on the screen. What is your opinion?
L. B.-S.: If that were the case, then video games should reduce aggressive demeanour, and children should even be encouraged to play them at school to make them less defiant. But what takes place is the exact opposite.
Consider this study: one group of eight-year-olds played a video fighting game for 20 minutes, while another was involved in a non-violent motorcycle race. They were then taken to a playroom where they were filmed for 15 minutes without their knowledge, interacting with other children. Outside observers evaluated various aspects of their behaviour, keeping track of gestures like hitting, shaking, kicking, pinching, etc. The results revealed that the children who played the fighting game committed twice as many aggressive acts as those who participated in the motorcycle race.
In another study, 430 children aged nine to eleven were interviewed, along with their classmates and teachers, and then interviewed again one year later. It confirmed that those who played more violent video games at the time of the first interview thought, even one year later, that other people were hostile. They were consequently more verbally and physically aggressive, and less likely to be altruistic. Overall, more than 8.5% of the ruthless acts recorded in the second interview were explained by the practice of this kind of game in the intervening year.
In conclusion, the correlation between aggression and violent video games invalidates the cathartic hypothesis, which is more myth than empirical observation.
In what way does this increase in individual aggressiveness manifest itself in society?
L. B.-S.: The results of these studies must be understood as a sample and not in terms of individual cases. It’s not possible to know who will be negatively influenced by a violent video game, but if we consider the averages, we see that a group of people who have played this type of game is at increased risk compared with others, whose activity had no violent content.
Even so, the observed effects remain relatively mild. The most common manifestations of this undesirable influence include disruptive behaviour in class, a touchy reaction to another student’s teasing, aggressive horn honking when driving… Yet violent video games cannot be blamed for any acts of severe violence, let alone homicide! Although they can sometimes be an additional risk factor, they are not a major cause of violence and criminality.
Why is there such a focus on violence in video games and not in movies or television series?
L. B.-S.: Before video games, a great deal of research focused on television. A summary of more than 280 studies involving over 51,000 participants points to a link to violence. There is clearly an acculturation, a habituation to violence in our societies.
However, according to specialists in aggressive behaviour, the effect of violent video games is even greater. Identification is stronger with the aggressor, whose actions are controlled by the player, who is more personally involved in them. Based on the principles of learning according to which the active participation of the individual has a greater impact than simple observation, simulating violence will have more repercussions than watching a violent film or reading a violent story.
When we compared the aggressivity of people who played violent video games with those who simply watched the screen while someone else played, we found that the players showed more aggressive behaviour than onlookers.
The publisher Rockstar Games has announced that, for the first time in the history of its franchise, gamers will be able to play female characters in ‘GTA VI’. Will this change anything in terms of the representations of violence?
L. B.-S.: Women now make up half of all video gamers. So it makes sense that a multinational publisher like Rockstar Games would seek to include them in this flagship product. According to a survey conducted in the UK in 2023, 44% of female gamers had already played GTA, compared with 72% of males. Since identification with the character is a key aspect of the immersive potential of a video game, it would have been surprising if Rockstar had not revamped its offer.
Still, it is unlikely that the introduction of women in GTA reflects a desire to combat sexism. The introduction of Lucia in the new version will not alter the hallmarks of the series – it will still feature plenty of hypersexualised characters and latent misogyny.
For further reading
Are fans of TV series addicts or control freaks?
- 1. Professor at the Université Grenoble Alpes and director of the MSH-Alpes (CNRS / Université Grenoble Alpes).
- 2. “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind”, Science, 4 July 2014: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1250830
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