Visible Blood Contributes to Player Aggression, Claims Study

Fri, May 16, 2008

If an experimental study in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology is to be believed, reducing the level of blood in Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe may do more than placate the kid-friendly superheroes' creators -- it might also reduce the aggression of those who play it.

Conducted by researchers at two State Universities -- Iowa and Kansas -- the study instructed 74 student test subjects to play Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, that game chosen because the game settings allow for four different blood levels (maximum, medium, low and off). After being divided into four different groups corresponding to those blood levels, the students played fifteen minutes each, then underwent a series of tests for aggression. You can read more about their methods and their experimental design at VG Researcher.

According to the British Psychological Society's research digest, which published an overview of the study today, the researchers' findings were as follows:

Of 74 students who played the Mortal Combat game for 15 minutes, those who played on the maximum blood level experienced larger increases in hostility after playing (as judged by their agreement with statements like "I feel furious") and larger increases in arousal as measured by their heart rate, than did the players on the lower or zero blood levels.

Those students who played the game with blood also showed higher levels of aggression, compared with those who played without blood, as indicated by their greater use of their character's weapon in the game, which they'd been told would inflict more damage on their opponents.

A second experiment with 31 students showed that playing Mortal Combat on the maximum blood level, as compared with the no blood level, activated more aggression related thoughts, as measured by participants' choice of how to complete ambiguous word stems like KI-- (e.g. KILL vs. KISS).

"...[T]he violence, plus the high amount of blood, primes more aggressive thoughts in memory compared with just playing the violent game without the blood," the researchers said.

Far be it from me to argue with published results in a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal, but it doesn't take a genius -- just a gamer -- to realize that the study has some problems.

Setting aside for the moment the inherent problem in all such studies that aggression as measured after playing a video game can stem from frustration just as easily as from violence (perhaps even more so), how could the researchers possibly expect that players would do anything other than use their character's weaponry, when it is the weaponry that obviously does far greater damage?

Let me explain by way of a quick video:

In Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, the impale move (which, of course, requires a weapon) is immensely powerful to the point that it is decidedly unbalanced -- and you can tell it is powerful precisely because of those torrents of blood spurting out of your enemy's open wound. Take away that blood, or even reduce it, and a novice player who doesn't notice his opponent's life bar slowly dropping will cross the move off as a waste of time. Use of weapons hardly indicates aggression; all it indicates is a desire to win.

The word stem game is more compelling; I'll have to check out the associated literature to see if completing four-letter words has anything at all to do with thoughts of aggression. On a hunch though, I'd say that it's rather likely that if I just finished killing a virtual someone, I'd tend towards writing KILL rather than KISS, and vice versa if I'd just finished kissing someone. If I go on a virtual rampage, then spend several hours with my girlfriend and still end up writing KILL, then perhaps you have cause for worry.

Finally, although we trust that the researchers themselves mention this prominently in their study's list of caveats, we'd like to remind our all colleagues in the media that there is no way on earth to take the results of a test on a mere 31, or even 74 college-age Kansas students and generalize these findings to the population at large.

Thanks to the Guardian's Games blog for the link.

DC, Mortal Kombat, research, violence

This post was written by:

Sean Hollister - who has written 825 posts on GameCyte.

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1 Comments For This Post

SolarianKnight Says:
May 18th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
I would be curious to know if these games were played against another player or against the CPU. Playing face-to-face with a rival tends to bring out a lot more competitive aspects including anger when beaten, particularly if the two players are not acquainted. Fighting games are possibly the most competitive games in the industry, even more so among those who take them seriously. I can't help but wonder if their results would be different if they examined FPSes.

Just from the material presented in the articles, it does not sound like the researchers took every variable into account. I also agree they need to pick a larger sample size; statisticians would cringe at these claims supported by such small numbers.

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