Study finds no link between video games and aggression - 12.8.05

In new long-term study trying to establish a connection between playing violent video games and violent behavior in the real world, gaming has come out on top.Players clocking up and average of 56 hours play over the course of a one month period on the the violent MMORPG 'Asheron's Call 2', were found to have no violent or aggressive side-effects as a result of playing the game.

Players were not statistically different from the non-playing control group in their beliefs on aggression after playing the game than they were before playing, Williams said.

Nor was game play a predictor of aggressive behaviors. Compared with the control group, the players neither increased their argumentative behaviors after game play nor were significantly more likely to argue with their friends and partners.

Although the leader of the project, Dmitri Williams said that there is no connection between the games tested and violent behavior, he did not rule out the possibility of some aggression from other games but stressed that a lot more testing needs to be done before his team can reach any definitive conclusions.

Williams, a professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an expert on the effects of online video-game play. He conducted the study with Marko Skoric, a lecturer at the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

No strong link seen between violent video games and aggression

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