Behavioral Psychology : Playing With Violence : Interactivity , Videogame Violence , and Potential Impacts on Players

hands on MIT’s new PDP-1, one of the first computers that used a screen and keyboard instead of paper punch cards. Spurred by what Atari founder Nolan Bushnell calls a natural desire to “make computers do fun things,” the grad students created Spacewar, the first recognizable videogame (1, 2). Spacewar allowed two players to pilot spaceships (i.e. white dots) across a starry background (white dots) while shooting missiles (more white dots) at each other. Videogames grew up in the decades after Spacewar. Now games are an $18 billion global business. In the United States, games gross more than movie box office receipts: in 1999 alone, 215 million games were sold in the U.S.– the equivalent of two for each household (3). Eighty percent of adolescent boys have a videogame at home, and gaming has gone from “an embarrassing, ‘geeky’ pastime to a stylish, perhaps even chic, lifestyle choice” (4). The technological capabilities of videogames increased along with their popularity. Microsoft’s Xbox game console runs on a 733-MHz Intel processor – a decade ago, the Xbox would have qualified as a supercomputer (5). Today’s videogames achieve unprecedented levels of graphical and aural detail. New games “outclass early video games much as computer word-processing programs outclass stone tablets and chisels as writing tools” (6). Videogame violence ‘matured’ along with the medium. Grand Theft Auto III, the best-selling videogame of 2001, puts players in a gangland setting where they sell drugs, kill police, and sleep with prostitutes (7). The growing popularity of games, coupled with this graphic content, has spawned mounting concern about the effect that violent videogames might have on children playing them. In 1999 the Senate held hearings on whether violent games encouraged school shootings (8). In 2000, Indianapolis attempted to ban children from playing violent videogames without supervision (9). This year, Washington became the first state to legally restrict the sale of violent videogames to minors (10). Critics of media violence now decry videogames along with violent TV and movies. Some advocates claim that research demonstrating that TV and movie violence stimulates aggressive behavior can be cross-applied to videogames, proving that games cause violence as well: “The television and movie violence literatures suggest that exposure to video-game violence should increase aggression. There are also theoretical reasons to believe that video-game effects should be stronger than movie and television violence effects” (6). But the existing scientific research on videogame violence is contradictory and incomplete, and future research will need to address the differences between interactive game play and passive media consumption.