Psyche, Science, and Society

Gamers crave control and competence, not carnage

Study turns belief commonly held by video game industry, gamers, on its head

By Laura Sanders

Blood, guts and gore aren’t what thrill avid gamers when they slaughter zombies in The House of the Dead III video game, a new study suggests. Instead, feelings of control and competence are what the players crave. The new research, led by psychologist Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester in New York, appears online January 16 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“A common belief held by many gamers and many in the video game industry — that violence is what makes a game fun — is strongly contradicted by these studies,” comments Craig Anderson, a psychologist who directs the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University in Ames.

Many studies aim to determine how video game violence impacts players. Recently, lawmakers in the House of Representatives introduced a 2009 bill requiring violent video games to carry the following label: “WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior.”

Some psychologists and lawmakers think the link between exposure to such violence and committing violent acts is well substantiated, but others, including Ryan, think the topic is “unfinished business.”

To figure out how enticing violence is for gamers, Ryan and colleagues conducted a series of survey-based studies to identify the reasons players enjoy a certain game. The results from two surveys, based on responses from over 2,500 people who participate in an Internet chat group focused on video games, found that the inclusion of violent content did nothing to enhance players’ enjoyment. What did matter was feeling in control and feeling competent. “Games give autonomy, the freedom to take lots of different directions and approaches,” says Ryan.

In a smaller experimental study, the researchers extensively modified a popular first-person shooter video game called Half-Life 2 to have less gore. Half the people in a group of 36 male and 65 female college students were instructed to dispatch adversaries as the original game intended, “in a thoroughly bloody manner,” says Ryan. The other half was instructed to tag enemies with a marker. “Instead of exploding in blood and dismemberment, they floated gently into the air and went back to base,” Ryan describes.

An extensive survey of the two groups showed that the exclusion of violence didn’t diminish players’ enjoyment of the game.

In a different study of avid gamers, a group of 39 males who were, on average, 19.5 years old and played video games for 7.5 hours a week were asked to play the game The House of the Dead III with a low violence or high violence setting. Instead of realistic wounds and gratuitous blood on slain enemies, the wounded were covered in neon green goo in the low-violence version of the game. As before, violence did not affect players’ enjoyment of the games.

Feelings of competence and autonomy are factors important to many different aspects of happiness, according to Ryan’s previously proposed “self-determination theory.” Bruce Bartholow, a psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, is not surprised that the same is true for video game enjoyment. “It’s a decent thing to know, but it’s not something to shout from the rooftops.”

Bartholow cautions that the new study did not take subjects’ past exposure to violence into account. Ryan and colleagues note in the paper that more behavioral data, such as tracking video game choices and purchases over time, would add to the initial findings.

The results here are good news for game developers, gamers and also for parents who are concerned about their kid’s reasons for playing violent games, says Ryan.

“They may not be in it for the blood. They’re in it for the fun.”

Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind

By Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang

DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts.

Interestingly, restraining our consumer spending, in the short term, may cause us to actually loosen the belts around our waists. What’s the connection? The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.

In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.

Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone. Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.

What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.

In the short term, you should spend your limited willpower budget wisely. For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.

On the other hand, if you need to study for a big exam, it might be smart to let the housecleaning slide to conserve your willpower for the more important job. Similarly, it can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.

Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.

In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.

No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.

Whatever the explanation, consistently doing any activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower — and the ability to resist impulses and delay gratification is highly associated with success in life.

Sandra Aamodt, the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

The military uses personality disorder as a way to get rid of people they don’t want to deal with (for a number of reasons) by other means. They don’t do proper evaluations or make proper diagnoses and as such anyone with a PD diagnosis in the military should not believe it unless it is confirmed by a professional opinion, not the hacks they have in the military. I know of *many* people who have been discharged with PD and they are fully functioning people, not history of or signs of PD. It is a terrible thing that the military can do this is such immunity from being held accountable from their mistakes.

annoyed former sailor

Bad Apples and Bad Barrels: Bad Metaphors and Blind Spots Regarding
Evil?
by Vladimir J. Konecni
University of California, San Diego

The subtitle of Philip Zimbardo’s (2007) book, The Lucifer Effect, (reviewed by Wray Herbert, Observer, April 2007) is Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. The book follows Zimbardo’s talk of the same name at the 2006 APS convention, the crux of which, according to writer Eric Wargo (2006), was on the transformation of “good, ordinarypeople into perpetrators of evil” by situational pressures, using the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib as a case in point .

Even someone fully convinced of the sufficient applicability of the empirical results marshaled by Zimbardo, and of the value of invoking explanations post hoc, is presumably forced by the existence of guards who did not misbehave” to admit that a pure situational explanation cannot be at issue, but rather one involving the interaction of situational factors with those of the personality, attitudes, and expectations of convicted Abu Ghraib guard Sgt. Frederick and other perpetrators.

The point is important because the question arises as to why the battery of tests given to Frederick at Zimbardo’s request (personal communication, October 8, 2006) did not pick out any predispositions to react to the situational factors in a pathological manner. The answer must be that the predispositions to respond to situational factors in an “evil” manner were not appropriately measured. Why?

Is it possible that American social scientists have a “blind spot” for the behaviors and attitudes that might be good predictors, but seem to them unremarkable? For example, is volunteering for the Army or the Army Reserve “normal”? Is the belief that one’s country is the best in everything, and, especially, having a condescending attitude toward other peoples and countries, normative? Do such attitudes distinguish volunteers from draftees, and among the various groups of volunteers? Are future torturers more likely to subscribe to the “premise… that America possesses absolute power,” as the London Times columnist Simon Jenkins (2006) has put it?

The United States is not among the 104 signatories (including the United Kingdom) of the International Criminal Court Treaty, and it has used controversial incarceration and trial procedures with no international oversight. Arguably, a considerable majority of Americans does not agree with such policies despite 9/11: The question is whether Army volunteers agree with them to an unusually high degree — even before they enlist.

Have Frederick et al. been asked this simple question: “Do you believe that the wartime behavior of U.S. soldiers and occupation troops should be judged by an objective international court?”

Finally, one might ask: Why do American psychologists generally become motivated to explain “evil” in situational terms only when Americans commit the atrocities (Konecni, 2005)? Unlike Zimbardo in Frederick’s trial, no American psychologist with a “situational” worldview was a defense expert witness, for example, at the Hague trials of not just Milos?evic, but also of his subordinates. Even the “situational” defense of a civil war having taken place (with all the “evil” that civil wars usually involve) was denied to these defendants by the Hague prosecutors. Victor’s justice tends to impute exclusively “internal”causes to enemy atrocities.

Wargo (2006) quotes Zimbardo: “It’s time we asked the big questions like the nature of evil.” However, we seem to be no closer to a profound answer than the ones given by Dostoevsky, Robert Musil, and Hannah Arendt.

References

Jenkins, S. (2006, November 12). America gets real, but Britain is still lost in military fantasy land. The Sunday Times (London).

Herbert, W. (2007, April). The Banality of Evil. Observer, 20, 11-12.

Konecni, V.J. (2005, March 25). Abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib [Letter to the editor]. Science, 307, 1873.

Wargo, E. (2006, August). Bad apples or bad barrels? Zimbardo on ‘The Lucifer effect.’ Observer, 19, 33-34, 45.

Zimbardo, P.G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil.New York: Random House.