How Long Do The Effect Of Video Game Violence And Competition On Aggression Last

Violence in video games has always been considered as the main factor resulting in aggression for adolescent. China has introduced a kind of game-rating system to manage the market of video games. This system puts violence in the first place. But is it fair? It is well known that competition is very common in violent video games. Maybe competition is the real culprit instead of violence. This study take both violence and competition into consideration in order to find which characteristic has the greatest influence. In addition, the persistence of the effect of video games is also the focus of concern. And it is helpful to understand the essence of video games’ effects on aggression for us.We adopt two-way completely random design, two independent factor were game type and delay task respectively. Game type included four video games chosen through pilot testing matched well on difficulty, pleasure, excitation, depression, realism and the pace of action, but differed on violence and competitiveness. And two of the games were equally violent but one was more competitive than the other, while the other two games were equally nonviolent but one was more competitive than the other. Delay task was a15minutes task which is unrelated to the purpose of this study. If aggression increasing is derived from cognitive priming, intensity of aggression will be lower than before when aggressive clues is absence. Otherwise, aggression increasing is the result of the activation of attack goal.Subject were asked to play one game of the four type for about15minutes during experiment. Then they completed tests of state of hostility, aggressive expectation and tolerance of violent crime. The study arrives at several conclusions.Firstly, both violence and competitiveness can improve aggression, however, they have no significant difference in contribution to the increase of aggression. Secondly,15minutes delay is enough to decrease aggression. State of hostility in delay-task-group is lower than that in no-delay-task-group. It’s the same with aggressive expectation. Our study give support to the hypothesis of cognitive priming. Thirdly, there is a significant difference between gender. Males have more game experience than females, and they are more aggressive and indifferent than females. Furthermore, tolerance of violent crime in female group is smaller than male group, but15minute delay can reduce male’s tolerance significantly.The greatest significance of this research lies in that we make a deeper attempt in the discussion of mechanism of violent video games’ influence. However, there still exists some limits in our study. Firstly, this study failed to compare the size effect between violence and competitiveness. In our research, the nonviolent game with high competition is faster than the violent video games with low-competition. The difference of speed between the two games may interfere the final conclusion. Secondly, although significant difference have not been found in our study on some aggression-related variables, video games containing violence or competition achieve higher aggression than the control group from the descriptive statistics. Perhaps one of reasons is the inadequate pool of subjects in our study.Further research should set more strict requirements on video games, and improve the representativeness of subjects to make conclusions more persuasive.