Want to Relax? New Study Says Play Games

We take a look at a study recently published which suggests that playing violent games causes players to become relaxed, and less violent.

The media, parents, clinical studies... the list goes on of sources that claim that violent video games will make kids more vehement themselves. And until now, there hasn’t been much evidence to dispute these claims. In fact, it’s almost become an accepted fact that hardcore action games will cause people to potentially commit aggressive acts of misbehavior. That is until now.

A new study is out that proclaims gamers playing violent video games are actually less violent and even more relaxed after playing them. This shocking new study has come out of the London-based Middlesex University. Middlesex's findings were recently presented by the British Psychology Society to a Dublin-based symposium.

Their analysis asked players questions before and after they partook in violent gameplay. In order to conduct a study like this, a series of questionnaires were given to the gamers before and after they played in order to discover the amount of aggression they were experiencing. The new study resulted in the fact that higher states of relaxation were observed before and after the violent games were played than would be feelings of anger.

One use of these findings that researchers hoped to put to work was which personality was more prone to transfer violence in video games into everyday life. As Jane Barnett (the person who spearheaded the Middlesex study) said, "There were actually higher levels of relaxation before and after playing the game as opposed to experiencing anger but this did very much depend on personality type." She went onto add, "This will help us to develop an emotion and gaming questionnaire to help distinguish the type of gamer who is likely to transfer their online aggression into everyday life".

Basically what her study concluded is that video games aren't going to change a crazed lunatic into a calm person but they're also not going to make a normal person a violent offender. They may even help relax them.

This Middlesex University study is quite a variance to things that have previously come out. One study done all the way back in 1983 was a near copy of the Middlesex version and dealt with players after they had entertained themselves on arcade games. Called the "Gibb Study", this work claimed that aggressive behavior was related to playing the arcade games and that, as the violence in the games got more realistic, so did tendencies for violent thoughts.

Another study that came out in 2000 from the University of Central Lancashire echoed the Gibb Study and found that teenagers got more hostile after playing violent games.

Even the end results of a study presented at this year’s Dublin symposium didn't favor heavy video game play. It presented the similarities between game addiction and a form of high functioning autism, also know as Asperger's syndrome. Apsperger’s syndrome is a combination of anti-social behavior, being overly agreeable, and neuroticism.

A representative from the University of Bolton and Whitman College said, "Our research supports the idea that people who are heavily involved in game playing may be nearer to autistic spectrum disorders than people who have no interest in gaming." These accusations of avid video gamers having autism were of course false but researchers from Bolton and Whitman did conclude that these people will interact better with a machine better than they do with people.

However, as much negativity as these studies cast towards the act of playing video games, it is still nice to know that there is something on the other side of the fence with regards to the Middlesex Study. Because let's be honest: a sane human being isn't going to become a mass murderer just because they play a violent video game.

Article by Jake Olson.