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Abstract
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Playing a violent game for a few weeks did not alter neural and behavioral responses to the pain of others in inexperienced male gamers.
The release of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001 marked a turning point in the public discussion around video games (McLaughlin, 2008). With graphics more lifelike than ever, the game allowed players to act as criminals free to roam a city and commit senseless acts of violence against its population. Inevitably, social and research questions were raised regarding how this type of media could impact social and emotional wellbeing, in particular in the young men who form most of the gaming community. How would playing highly realistic games that allow the gratuitous murder and exploitation of others impact their psychological functioning?
This question has been notoriously difficult to answer scientifically, and it remains harshly debated (Devilly et al., 2023; Bushman and Anderson, 2021). Indeed, both real world observations and lab-based experiments have limitations when trying to assess how gaming may impact emotional, neural and behavioral mechanisms. Observational studies, which rely on measuring these processes without influencing them, are confounded by the fact that violent games tend to attract individuals who already have specific personality and social profiles (Braun et al., 2016). In contrast, experimental work is restricted by practical considerations; in the laboratory, participants can only be exposed to games for short periods, for example. It has also been hindered by inadequate study design, with experiments featuring control conditions that fail to effectively isolate violent content, or recruiting participants who have extensive experience with violent games. Now, in eLife, Claus Lamm and colleagues at the University of Vienna and Karolinska Institutet - including Lukas Lengersdorff as first author - report having designed an experimental study that overcomes many of these limitations (Lengersdorff et al., 2023).
The team recruited 89 young men with little gaming experience and no previous exposure to Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V). Half the participants were assigned to play a normal version of the game and incentivized to kill as many people as possible; the other half accessed a modified version of GTA V devoid of all violent content and got rewarded for taking pictures of other characters. Both groups played for seven hours over two weeks in a supervised lab setting. In addition, the participants' neural and behavioral responses to images of people in pain or in emotionally charged situations were measured at the start and the end of the study, with Lengersdorff et al. using well-established fMRI and behavioral approaches to measure empathy and emotional reactivity (Singer et al., 2004).
Language: en |