The Positive Value Of Playing Violent Video Games Cooperatively: Increasing Cooperative Behavior And Reducing Aggressive Behavior

Playing violent video games with other players cooperatively or competitively canboth affect players’ cooperative behavior and aggressive behavior. However, there are both cooperative game context and competitive game context in the real video games, which hasn’t been explored by researchers in this area yet. Previous researches that explored the influence about the relationship of the violent video game players and context of the video games to the players is limited. What’s more, there are little researches that exploring the effect about playing the violent video games cooperatively or competitively on the players’ aggressive behavior.Thecurrent study conducted the first experiment that examining whether the mixture of cooperative game context and competitive game context could affect players’ cooperative behavior; That was to say, on the one hand, context of the competitive game could reduce cooperative behavior of players who playedviolent video games competitively, while subsequent cooperative game context could mitigate the negative consequences that were caused by competitive game context. On the other hand, cooperative game context could increase cooperative behavior of players who playedviolent video games cooperatively, while subsequent competitive game context couldn’t destroy the positive consequences that were caused by cooperative game context. That is to say, the positive consequences were continuous for some time in the violent video games.The first experiment used the experimental method to explore the effect of cooperative game context, competitive game context and the mixture of cooperative game context and competitive game context in violent video games on players’ cooperative behaviorwith the method of the social dilemma task. There were five experimental conditions in the current study: cooperative, competitive, cooperative and competitive, competitive and cooperative group and the control group(not playing games). The dependent variable of current research is the cooperative behavior of the players in the social dilemma task. The level of tit-for-tat behavior exhibited in the social dilemma task represented players’ cooperative behavior. Tit-for-tat behavior is a pattern of behavior that typically precedes cooperative behavior,and it’s one of the best strategies for increasing long-term cooperation in the social dilemma task.The findings of the first experiment showed that: Firstly, Playing violent video games cooperatively increased players’ cooperative behavior compared with competitive group and control group; Secondly, Playing violent video games competitively reduced players’ cooperative behavior compared with the control group;Thirdly, Players in the cooperative and competitive group and the competitive and cooperative group both had more cooperative behavior than competitive group, while their cooperative behavior were not significantly different from the cooperative group.These results indicated that: Firstly, cooperative game context could increase cooperative behavior of players who playing violent video games cooperatively, which also could continue for some time; Secondly, while competitive game context reduced cooperative behavior of players who playing violent video games competitively,subsequent cooperative game context could mitigate the negative consequences that were caused by competitive game context.Previous studies have found that the communication of friends caused the feeling of trust, which is the critical thing in the dealing with the social dilemma task. It indicates that friends are more cooperative with each other than strangers, which are behaved as using more cooperative methods in the social dilemma task, such as the tit-for-tat behavior. Previous researches that explored the influence about the relationship of video game players and context of the violent video games to the players is limited.The current study conducted the second experiment to exam the difference of the cooperative behavior between the friends and the strangers in the cooperative and competitive video games. It was a 2(the type of players’ relationship: friends vsstrangers) * 3(the context of the games: cooperative vs competitive vs control)experimental design.The dependent variable of current research is the cooperative behavior of the players in the social dilemma task. The results showed that friends were more cooperative than strangers, and theinteraction of the types of players’ relationships and context of the games. These findings were consistent with some previous researches.The third experiment used the Competitive Reaction Task(CRT) to explore the effect about playing violent video games cooperatively or competitively on the players’ aggressive behavior. There were three experimental conditions in the current study:cooperative, competitive, and the control group(not playing games). The dependent variable of current research is the aggressive behavior of the players in the CRT. The intensity of noise blasts that players set for their partners in the CRT represented players’ aggressive behavior.The third experiment found that Playing violent video games cooperatively decreased players’ aggressive behavior compared with the competitive group and the control group. These results suggested that: Cooperative game context could decrease aggressive behavior of players who playing violent video games cooperatively.Many previous studies have found that violent video gameshave a negative impact on the players’ aggressive behavior, aggressive feeling, aggressive cognition and other relative aspects, the public also generally believed that violent video games have a terrible effect on the players. The current research didn’t deny the value of these researches, however, the current research attempted to find the positive elements of the violent video games, in order to ease the potential negative impact of the players brought by the violent video games with the method of using these positive elements.In conclusions, meaningfully, the present study found that the social context of the violent video games had an important influence on subsequent cooperative behavior and aggressive behavior with the method of three experiments, which led to a new way to mitigate the negative effect of violent video games and enriched the research of the social context in violent video games. The more relative discoveries and conclusions still need further study in the future.