With evolving technology, video games are getting increasingly realistic and violent games are also becoming more life-like. Most research has found that gamers feel guilt when committing violent acts while playing a game. Now, researchers from University at Buffalo have found that gamers may become desensitized to guilt after perpetrating unjustified acts of violence in a video game.
"What's underlying this finding?" asks Matthew Grizzard, the study’s principal investigator. "Why do games lose their ability to elicit guilt, and why does this seemingly generalize to other, similar games?"
Advocates of violent video games often make the case that what players do virtually is not representative of what they would do in real life. But Grizzard’s preliminary research, published in Media Psychology, finds that virtual actions are not completely separate from real-world actions.
Grizzard, who co-authored the study withRon Tamborini and John L. Sherry of Michigan State University and René Weber of the University of California Santa Barbara, wants to replicate his study to more closely examine whether violent video games play a role in desensitization. There are two main arguments for the desensitization argument, says Grizzard.
"One is that people are deadened because they've played these games over and over again," he says. "This makes the gamers less sensitive to all guilt-inducing stimuli."
The second idea is tunnel vision. "This is the idea that gamers see video games differently than non-gamers, and this differential perception develops with repeated play,” says Grizzard.
"This second argument says the desensitization we're observing is not due to being numb to violence because of repeated play, but rather because the gamers' perception has adapted and started to see the game's violence differently. Through repeated play, gamers may come to understand the artificiality of the environment and disregard the apparent reality provided by the game's graphics."
