3. Violence In Video Games (Shockingly) Not Cause Of Aggression
You wouldn't know it from looking at the likes of Hatred or to a lesser extent the head-popping - and hugely enjoyable - Shadow of Mordor, but with the increased fidelity in graphical quality along with some more tactile-feeling control methods, games are still not little indoctrination machines, systematically breaking down any who play them and rebuilding them into desensitised narcissists with a penchant for saying the worst thing possible. At least not all of us anyway, we're going to get to #GamerGate in a moment. Anyway, in another shocker of a revelation where scientific research caught up to what gamers have known for years, Oxford researcher Dr. Andrew Przybylski pointed out in his April study that it's not the depictions of violence on screen that lead us so spread vitriol on the internet, break a controller or have other aggressive tendencies - it's the idea of not being able to control what's happening on screen. It's true too, how many times have you raged at the screen for swearing blind that you hit a command like a dodge button, only to get skewered in half anyway? To throw in our own two cents here, it's easy to say we're fairly desensitised to depictions of violence in the media these days anyway - just look at your average nightly news report - and instead 'gamer rage' or violent mindsets stem from, as Przybylski mentions "This need to master the game far more significant than whether game contained violent material." It's in the idea of becoming proficient at a game and having it stolen from you by a 'cheap' boss or enemy, or feeling like the game isn't fair that riles us up, not the very sight of some claret or a severed torso. Comforting, perhaps? You might be screaming "Duh!" at the screen at this point, but this is a worthwhile distinction to be made, so we recommend checking out link in the above text, alongside bringing this up whenever anyone attempts to pull the whole "Violence in video games is the antichrist" shtick again.
