Violence and Video Games.

Do computer games relieve actual anger? I know they are entertaining which could replace anger, but I thought that came from overcoming the challenge of the game and not the acting out of aggression virtually. It seems a bit hard to be very aggressive with a keyboard or controller short of throwing them out the window!?

Not about violence in video games, but new research about gaming itself;

Video Gamers Really Do See More - Gamers capture more information faster for visual decision-making

"Gamers see the world differently," said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. "They are able to extract more information from a visual scene."

It can be difficult to find non-gamers among college students these days, but from among a pool of subjects participating in a much larger study in Stephen Mitroff's Visual Cognition Lab at Duke, the researchers found 125 participants who were either non-gamers or very intensive gamers.

Each participant was run though a visual sensory memory task that flashed a circular arrangement of eight letters for just one-tenth of a second. After a delay ranging from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds, an arrow appeared, pointing to one spot on the circle where a letter had been. Participants were asked to identify which letter had been in that spot.

At every time interval, intensive players of action video games outperformed non-gamers in recalling the letter.

Earlier research by others has found that gamers are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than non-gamers. When playing a game, especially one of the "first-person shooters," a gamer makes "probabilistic inferences" about what he's seeing -- good guy or bad guy, moving left or moving right -- as rapidly as he can.

Appelbaum said that with time and experience, the gamer apparently gets better at doing this. "They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster."

Source: Greg Appelbaum, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Duke School of Medicine & Stephen Mitroff's Visual Cognition Lab at Duke

The more intense and in depth the game, the more info you have to process faster....anyone that's played the newer madden games knows this without thinking about it :laugh: I suppose all the fps's too...as I play a wide array of games depending on mood...

Adder wrote: Do computer games relieve actual anger? I know they are entertaining which could replace anger, but I thought that came from overcoming the challenge of the game and not the acting out of aggression virtually. It seems a bit hard to be very aggressive with a keyboard or controller short of throwing them out the window!?

In order for something to be a catharsis it must be: safe, positive, and constructive.