Correlation Between Violent Video Game Play And Aggression

Over the last 20 years, the video game industry has grown into multi-million dollar business, as more teenagers and adults are spending time playing video games, especially the violent ones, than ever before. The popularity of video games has reached phenomenal proportions. Violence became the primary theme in most of these video games. The hypothetical line of reasoning that hypothesizes a causal relationship between violent video-game play and aggression draws on the very large literature on media violence effects. Also, there are some academic reasons to believe that video game effects are stronger than television or movie violence effects (Chambers & Ascione, 1987; Loftus & Loftus, 1983). This paper will review the current effect of violent

A correlation between any two variables only shows a relationship between them, but, it does not prove causation. The direction that this relationship moves in is not clear (e.g.: Do aggressive people like VVGs or do these VVGs cause aggression?). In addition, the correlation may also be a result of third variables. For instance, males tend to be more aggressive than females (Kock, 2010) and males are more likely to play video games (Murphy, 2010). Therefore, gender may in fact be related to what seems to be a VVG effect on aggression.

Furthermore, one of the researches poses that exposure to VVG games causes a rise in the aggressive behavior, cognition, and affect (Kirsh, 2003). However, in another research, scientists had found that playing violent video games can improve our performance on different tasks that measure visual and attentional abilities (Boot, Kramer, Simons, Fabiani & Gratton, 2008). That is why more experiments need to be done to see the effect of VVGs on different variables, not on only one

The violent effects of television and movie exposure have received considerably more research attention than the VVGs effects. The primary reason for this attention is that video games are consider a new medium of entertainment compared to movies and television, which have received decades of examination. We can hypothesize movies and television exposure will have similar effects on aggression and aggression related variables, due to their similarities to the VVGs. Nevertheless, there are still variety of reasons for differences between them that need to be approved. One of these reasons that VVGs involve almost complete involvement and attention, more reinforcement of violent acts, higher frequency of violent scenes, and more identification with violent characters (Anderson & Dill, 2000). On the other hand, graphics capability of television and movies is higher compared to the violent video games. This difference makes violent television exposure to be more