The Effects Of Game Mode On Player’s Cooperative And Aggressive Behavior

Previous researches of video games affect individual behavior development and their psychologicalmechanisms were focused on the game content. With the development of the Internet network, players canparticipate in the game through various interactive modes; two typical game modes are cooperation andcompetition. Therefore, under the theoretical framework of General Learning Model (GLM) to research therelationship between game context and player’s behavior is the emerging hot topics in the field of videogames researches. According to the basic assumptions of GLM theory, the way that players involved ingames, as a kind of environment variables, should affect individual’s internal state, and thus affect itssubsequent behavior. According to the social interdependence theory, under the positive interdependence,individual performance more cooperative behavior; while under the negative interdependence, theindividual will be more aggressive. In addition, the former related research has shown that positivecorrelation between prosaical behavior and empathy, and negatively correlated with aggressive behavior.However, on the whole, the number of studies on the effect of game context and player’s behavior is sparse,lack of systematic and logical consistency on each other. In addition, previous studies were pairing violentgame with neutral game, which have two deficiencies: one is difficult to match the competition of thegames, the other is there is interaction of the content and the game mode.This study uses a neutral video game as experimental material, through two experiments to investigatethe game mode on the player’s cooperative and aggressive behavior, and discusses the possible the innermechanism--empathy. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) Compared to the neutral condition, cooperatively play improved the participants’ cooperationtoward game partners and strangers, while reduced their aggression toward game partners and strangers.(2) Compared to the neutral condition, competitively play reduced the participants’ cooperation towardgame partners, while improved their aggression toward strangers.(3) Compared to the game partners, participants showed higher aggression toward strangers.(4) Compared to the neutral condition, competitively play reduced participants’ state empathy, whilecooperatively play improved their state empathy.(5) Empathy complete mediated corporately and competitively play and aggressive behavior.