violent video games

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YOU PLAY, YOU PAY Small-screen violence may still have a big effect on your brain.

Smartphones are great because they let grown men geek out playing shooter games without looking like, well, geeks. The problem? Tapping and zapping on your morning train ride may make you more aggressive and less empathetic at work, says Bruce Bartholow, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri. In fact, the easy accessibility of these games may cause them to be more problematic than their big-screen brethren. “If you have the game in your pocket and can play all the time, there may be no opportunity for those effects to diminish,” says Bartholow. His advice: Limit yourself to an hour a day. —LILA BATTIS

BY TOM McGRATH

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRAIG CUTLERSpecial

Report

WHEN KILLING IS A GAME

As shoot-’em-up video gaming becomes even more immersive, scientists are racing to finally

answer a controversial question: Does virtual violence turn some boys into real killers?

NONE OF THIS IS REAL. Still, as I enter the building through the open

doorway, my body tenses and my eyes scan the room as quickly as possible. Is there danger in here? I move forward tentatively, my senses heightened in anticipation. Suddenly I see a fig- ure in the shadows. My finger moves instantly, twitching for what seems like dozens of times as the rat-a-tat-tat explodes around my ears. I see a body slump. It’s the one I’ve been aiming at, and I feel a surge of satisfaction in my chest.

It’s a Saturday afternoon, and though physi- cally I’m perched on a chair in my basement with a smooth plastic Wii controller in my hand and a chunky 15-year-old TV on the table in front of me, mentally I’m in the war-torn streets of whatever unidentified city is the setting for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. I’ve been play- ing the game for the last 45 minutes, and though my skill level is pretty lame—I seem to be killed almost as often as I kill—in many ways I feel lost in this other world.

I play for about 10 more minutes, blow- ing away a few more bad guys, until I’m blown away myself (again) and decide I’ve had enough. Because I’m in my basement and not in a lab somewhere hardwired to all sorts of monitors, it’s difficult to say for sure what’s happening to me physiologically. But it’s a safe bet that my heart rate and blood pressure are both elevated and stress hormones are coursing through my body. I feel a little on edge.

Which, as I walk up the stairs to the kitchen, makes me wonder: Would you really want to be my wife, my kids—even my dog—right now?

FOR THE PAST TWO DECADES, THE WORLD HAS been engaged in a massive and unprecedented social experiment: What happens when mil- lions of people—most of them boys and young men—are allowed to pretend, in the most vivid way possible and often for hours on end, that they’re professional killers? Does the experience increase the odds that they’ll someday turn into killers themselves? Does it shape their person- alities in other ways? Or is it all simply forgotten in the hours after the game ends?

The anecdotal evidence isn’t reassuring, at least in light of the mass shootings of recent years and the number of those shooters who’ve had strong connections to violent video games. Columbine’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, for example, were serious fans of the sci-fi horror game Doom. James Holmes, who opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others, allegedly told one

person that during the shooting he felt like he was “in a video game.” And late last year it was revealed, in Matthew Lysiak’s book Newtown: An American Tragedy, that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old behind the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy, had logged more than 500 hours play- ing the first-person shooter game Combat Arms, during which he recorded a staggering 83,496 kills (including nearly 23,000 head shots).

And yet scientific evidence about the effects of violent video games is muddled. On one side is a group of researchers, backed by dozens of stud- ies, who are convinced that our mass infatuation with such titles as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto is a public health threat and that such games are making us more aggressive and less sensitive to violence. What’s more, these experts claim, the threat is particularly strong for men: Men buy the majority of games, and according to a Harris Interactive survey, young men are about 2½ times as likely as young women are to describe themselves as “addicted” to playing.

“We can’t say whether the games lead to vio- lent criminal behavior. But we know they lead to aggressive behavior and thinking,” says Brad J. Bushman, Ph.D., a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University who has spent the past 25 years looking at the effects of violence in media. Bushman coauthored per- haps the most persuasive paper on the topic, a 2010 meta-analysis that looked at more than 100 previous studies. The paper’s conclusion: Play- ing violent video games ranks alongside sub- stance use, poverty, and abusive parents as a risk factor for both short-term aggression and the development of aggression-prone individuals.

On the opposite side of the argument is another contingent of researchers who essen- tially believe that all of the above is b.s. They counter that much of the research indicting video games is flawed and that their own stud- ies generally show no ill effects from playing. Indeed, they see the hand-wringing as classic “moral panic”—people fearing and demoniz- ing something because they don’t understand it. “Obviously video games have an effect on us or we wouldn’t play them,” says Christopher

122 MENSHEALTH.COM | June 2014

When Killing Is a GameSpecial Report /

HOW TO PROTECT A TRIGGER-HAPPY KID Ban a boy from playing violent video games, and you may start a war. Instead, achieve détente by using these strate- gies from human behavior researcher Cheryl Olson, Sc.D., and clinical psycholo- gist Catherine Steiner-Adair, Ed.D.

Ferguson, Ph.D., a professor of clinical psychology at Stetson University and an outspoken oppo- nent of the video game critics. “But do they have any dramatic public health effect? No.”

The stakes are huge. The video game industry, which in 2013 made about $93 billion worldwide, has surpassed the global film industry. Given that four of the five best-selling games of last year were violent shooter titles, software develop- ers and even game-system manufacturers may take a hit if violent games are found guilty. More important, the popularity of these games may mean that not only are more Adam Lanzas out there but new ones are being trained every year.

WHEN HE STARTED PLAYING COMBAT ARMS IN 2009, Lanza was a skinny, socially awkward 17-year-old who’d been diagnosed with Asperg- er’s syndrome, a form of autism disorder. Or at least that’s who he was in real life. In the game, onscreen, he was able to create a different ver- sion of himself: a muscle-bound soldier wearing fatigues, goggles, and a black beret and carrying a military assault rifle. In Lanza’s chosen mission in Combat Arms, players were to rack up a certain number of kills as quickly as possible—even if it meant turning the rifle on themselves and com- mitting suicide—and Lanza became obsessed with it. By 2011, he had moved on from Combat Arms to other violent games, such as Call of Duty and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where again the goal was to tally as many kills as possible.

Had Lanza been born just a generation ear- lier, such a violent outlet would have been hard to come by even in the world of video games. In the early days, of course, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong dominated, and in retrospect these games seem not just benign but almost sweet. That began to change in the 1990s with the develop- ment of a new genre: the first-person shooter. Titles like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and several others allowed players to see the world not from an objective outside perspective but from the point of view of the person doing the shooting. As the technology and graphics improved dra- matically in the following decade, first-person shooters exploded in popularity.

“In a lot of ways, it’s the easiest thing to do,” says game writer and designer Walt Williams when asked why violence is at the heart of so many games. Almost all video games operate on the same principle: giving players obstacles to overcome, pixels that need to be clicked on and made to go away. Creating those obstacles in the form of people—and making them disappear with virtual bullets—is one of the simplest solu- tions game creators have.

But Williams believes that the attraction of first-person shooter games runs deeper. “I think it’s connected to a power fantasy,” he says. “You’re put in a situation that reinforces the power being in your hands. That’s appealing.”

So how does your body react when that power takes the form of shooting an onscreen repre- sentation of a human being who might shoot you first if you don’t act quickly enough? Numerous studies have shown an uptick in all the measures you might imagine: blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormone levels. In short, though the vio- lence isn’t real, your body reacts as if it were.

Even more intriguing is what happens in your brain. In a 2011 study from Germany, researchers showed violent screen shots from the game Counter-Strike to gamers with first- person-shooter experience. Typically, showing people negative images provokes activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, the area involved in emotional processing and control. In this study, though, the experienced gamers showed sig- nificantly less activity in that region. They had become desensitized to the death and gore.

OF COURSE, PHYSIOLOGY IS ONE THING; BUT behavior is another. A number of studies from the 1990s and early 2000s showed that playing violent video games leads, at least in the short term, to more-aggressive attitudes, emotions, and actions. In one of the most frequently cited

studies—published in the Journal of Personal- ity and Social Psychology in 2000—college-age students played either the violent game Wolfen- stein 3D or the nonviolent Myst. Afterward they answered a questionnaire designed to measure their attitudes and emotions; then they took part in a competitive activity in which they could blast another student with white noise. Those who’d played Wolfenstein 3D not only demon- strated thoughts that were more aggressive but also delivered longer noise blasts to their oppo-

June 2014 | MENSHEALTH.COM 123

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Do you handle the obstacles you face in real life the same way you handle those on the screen— with aggression?

Both events made Ferguson, now 42, leery of grownups overreacting to things they don’t understand. “Adults clearly didn’t know what they were talking about,” he says. Still, his skep- ticism didn’t fully kick in until he became an adult himself and read a research paper stating that the link between violent media and aggres- sive behavior was nearly as strong as the link between smoking and lung cancer. Ferguson’s reaction: That’s absurd.

Much of Ferguson’s career since then has been spent trying to debunk the notion that a strong scientific connection exists between vio- lent media—particularly violent video games— and negative outcomes of any kind.

For starters, he questions the methodology of many of the studies, arguing that they frequently lack standardization, often don’t control for gen- der differences, and don’t necessarily measure what they purport to measure. One of his favor- ite examples is a 2004 study supposedly prov- ing that playing violent video games gave college students a more aggressive mindset. His gripe? The researchers’ chosen method for measuring attitudes was asking study participants to fill in the missing letter in the following word: explo_e. As it happened, the participants who had played violent games were more likely to put a d in that word (“explode”) than the control group, who more often chose r to spell “explore.” But, Fer- guson wonders, does that really tell us that they were likely to be aggressive?

He also suspects publication bias—that is, some journals choose to publish studies that show a result over those that show nil effects. Finally, he’s conducted several of his own studies over the years and says they all fail to prove a significant negative effect from playing games.

In one of Ferguson’s most recent studies, published in January 2014, he and his coau- thors explored the question many have asked over the years: Are violent games particularly dangerous for people with preexisting mental health conditions—specifically children diag- nosed with either depression or ADHD? The study, which appeared in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, found no

PUT UP NEW TARGETS Pinpoint the game elements that bother you and the features he’s look- ing for, and then try to find a compro- mise, says Olson. If he loves combat and competition, nudge him toward fantasy or sci-fi games in which he can annihilate aliens and not people.

SAY, “SHOOT HOOPS, NOT PEOPLE” Children use gaming to de-stress after school, but killing stuff is a bad coping tool. So set aside the first hour at home for any sport or game except the video kind. “If video games aren’t an option, he’ll learn to deal with stress in a better way,” says Steiner-Adair.

TELL HIM TO STAND DOWN Abbreviating his gaming sessions may lead to frustration—players often can’t advance far in brief periods. Instead, designate game-free days, says Steiner-Adair. In return, promise a few long stretches of game time so he has a chance to advance to a new level.

RECRUIT HIS BUDDIES Those immersive shoot-’em-ups can encourage isolation. To counteract that, find games that foster children’s capacity to play together, says Steiner- Adair. Go to commonsensemedia.org, search for games based on skills taught, and try to agree on a few. —L.B.

nents than the Myst players did. The virtual violence, in other words, seemed to prime them to react more aggressively in the real world.

More-recent research suggests that the pro- pensity toward aggression isn’t something that necessarily fades minutes after the game has ended. A 2008 study published in Pediatrics measured the aggressiveness of Japanese and American schoolkids at two different times, with three- to six-month gaps between assess- ments. Those who habitually played violent video games were more likely to be aggressive during the first measurement period, and their aggression was also more likely to increase by the second one. Another study, published in Developmental Psychology in 2012, surveyed high schoolers annually from ninth to 12th grade about their video game habits and aggressive behavior. Higher amounts of violent video game play predicted higher levels of aggression.

It should be noted that none of these stud- ies link video games to violent behavior. That’s important because there’s a difference between aggression and violence: Aggression is defined as any behavior carried out with the intent to harm another person, while violence is an act intended to cause extreme physical harm, such as injury or death. Still, researchers say, we need to be concerned. “I’m much more interested in types of aggression we experience in our every- day lives,” says Doug Gentile, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Iowa State University. He means

the general way we interact with one another: If someone bumps into you, do you see it as an acci- dent or a provocation? Does your temper flare more easily than it normally would? Put another way, do you handle the obstacles you face in real life the same way you handle those you face on the screen—with aggression? The research so far suggests that for heavy gamers, the answer is yes.

Studies also suggest that video games, which make you an active participant in the onscreen proceedings, are more powerful than passive media, like movies or TV. In a 2008 study, Euro- pean researchers had kids ages 10 to 13 do one of three things—play a violent video game, watch someone else play the same game, or play a non- violent game. Afterward, boys who had played the violent game were the most aggressive of the three groups. (Curiously, girls showed no dif- ference in aggression among the three groups— a fact that the researchers speculate could be because boys in the study had played a lot of violent video games outside the study, while the girls had played relatively few. The boys, in other words, may have been hardwired by previous game exposure to behave aggressively.)

For Gentile, none of these effects are surpris- ing. To habitually engage in violence in the virtual world, he believes, is to train your brain to think in a certain way, which then manifests in aggressive behavior in life.

“Your grandmother was a great neurosci- entist,” Gentile says. “She always told you that practice makes perfect.”

ONCE UPON A TIME, PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR Chris Ferguson was an awkward teenager too. Or at least he was a fan of Dungeons & Dragons, a role-playing game that in the 1980s was a target of some conservative Christians who feared that its fans were on a slippery slope toward devil worship. (Others feared that it put kids on a less alarming path toward Renaissance fairs.) This was the era during which Tipper Gore mounted her famous crusade against overly explicit song lyrics; as a result, the music industry was forced to put parental warning stickers on certain albums lest teenage souls be corrupted. CONTINUED ON PAGE 171

“In real life, killing is a traumatic experience. But in video games, it can happen a hundred times a minute.”

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WHEN KILLING IS A GAME, CONT. FROM P. 123

evidence of increased bullying or delin- quent behaviors among kids in the trial who played violent video games.

To Ferguson, the lack of impact was to be expected. In contrast to Doug Gen- tile and other researchers who believe that video games condition our brains to respond to perceived threats in cer- tain ways, Ferguson says our gray matter is quite capable of responding to fantasy scenarios and real threats differently. “People aren’t stupid,” he says bluntly. As evidence, he notes that even though video games have soared in popularity in the past 13 years, the youth violent crime rate reached a 32-year low in 2012.

What about those mass shooters who were so devoted to their video games? Not only is blaming video games the 21st- century equivalent of people freaking out over the dangers of Dungeons & Drag- ons, Ferguson argues, but it also distracts us from what he believes is the actual issue underlying all those shooting cases: untreated mental illness.

SO WHO’S RIGHT? OR PERHAPS MORE important, where do we go from here?

After the Newtown shootings, President Obama asked Congress to fund deeper research into the effects of violent video

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games, which hopefully could help clarify our understanding. In the meantime, one intriguing path comes from within the game industry itself.

Over the past few years, game creator Walt Williams has found himself becom- ing concerned not so much with the lev- els of violence in video games as with the banality of it—that is, how mundane it all seems to the player.

“In real life, killing is a traumatic expe- rience,” Williams says. “But in video games, it’s something that can happen a hundred times a minute.”

In 2012, a new game debuted that Williams helped write and design. It was called Spec Ops: The Line, and the goal was to portray violence—and its effects— in a much more realistic way. At one point, for example, the game’s main char- acter, a soldier named Walker, is faced with the possibility of having to open fire on a group of civilians, albeit hostile ones, in order to survive. As the action pro- gresses, Walker (that is, you, the game player) encounters as many moral chal- lenges as physical ones. Williams says one of the ideas driving the entire game was this: “What if the toll of taking a life actu- ally weighed on you?”

For what it’s worth, Spec Ops: The Line received some positive critical notices, but it was certainly no Grand Theft Auto in terms of sales. Given the choice between moral ambiguity and a power fantasy, per- haps the market has spoken. �

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