Have you ever had one of those gaming sessions where you swear to GOD you pressed the jump button at the right time but ended up falling down the bottomless pit for the 100 th time anyway? Feel like throwing your controller through the TV screen? That my friend is aggression, and it’s what anti-video game lobbyists have been trying to say violent videogames have been programming us to be predisposed to ever since Mortal Kombat had its first spine-ripping fatality.
But a new study shows that it’s not the violence in video games that makes people aggressive, it’s the controls. Or, more specifically, the frustration caused by the controls. “If players feel thwarted by the controls or the design of the game, they can wind up feeling aggressive. This need to master the game was far more significant than whether the game contained violent material,” said Dr. Andrew Przybylski of Oxford. “Players on games without any violent content were still feeling pretty aggressive if they hadn’t been able to master the controls or progress through the levels at the end of the session.”
So according to this study, you are just as likely to get violent if you play Call of Duty as you are if you play Sesame Street TV with a broken Kinect. What do you think? Do crappy controls make you violent?
Source: University of Oxford