After a round of a violent shooter game, the players who felt most hostile were not the regulars. They were the beginners and the ones who played badly. Experienced, high-scoring players came out with less hostility and a better mood.
That is the finding of two experiments by Patrick J. Ewell of Kenyon College, James C. Hamilton of the University of Alabama and Rosanna E. Guadagno of the University of Oulu. Their paper was published online on January 8, 2025 in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
The authors argue that the long, unresolved debate over whether violent games make people aggressive may partly come down to two overlooked factors: how much experience players bring to the lab, and how well they do once there.
Capture the flag in the lab
In the first study, 217 introductory psychology students at a large Southeastern university played “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” on an Xbox 360 in pairs. After a five-minute warm-up, they played a 15-minute capture the flag match alongside a live partner and computer-controlled soldiers. The game’s own score served as an objective measure of performance.
Before playing, students reported how many hours a week they had spent on first-person shooters over the previous six months. Afterwards they completed standard scales of state hostility and positive and negative mood. Twenty-seven participants were excluded after guessing the hypothesis.
More experience went with lower hostility, less negative mood and more positive mood. Higher scores showed the same pattern. Statistical mediation models showed that experience reduced hostility indirectly, through better performance. Once performance was accounted for, the direct link between experience and hostility disappeared.
A sabotaged controller
The second study recruited 188 students: 94 experts who played at least two hours a week and 94 novices who played none. Experts were paired with experts, novices with novices. Half the pairs got a controller with inverted directional controls.
Experts scored far higher, averaging about 3,594 points against 1,629 for novices. The scrambled controller cut scores for everyone, from about 3,470 to 1,809 on average.
Performance again tracked mood. Score correlated at -0.28 with hostility, -0.24 with negative mood and 0.51 with positive mood. Experts showed lower hostility and negative mood, and the effect again ran through how well they played.
Surprisingly, the frustrating controller did not raise hostility or negative mood, though it showed a trend toward less enjoyment. The authors suggest experts may have blamed the controller for their poor play rather than getting annoyed.
Why it matters for the violent games debate
The implication is methodological. A study that happens to recruit mostly novices would be more likely to find that a violent game raises hostility, while one heavy with experts would be less likely to. Comparing two games of different difficulty could also create differences that have nothing to do with violence.
The authors are careful about limits. Experience was not randomly assigned, so the main results are correlational, and hostile people may simply be less likely to take up gaming. Gender was strongly tangled with experience and performance: women scored higher on hostility overall, but the difference vanished once performance was controlled.
Their recommendation is concrete: future violent game experiments should record both how often participants play and how well they score before drawing conclusions about aggression.
Study Details:
- Title: The Spoilers of Virtual War: Experience and Performance Mediate the Relationship Between Violent Video Games and Hostility
- Authors: Patrick J. Ewell, James C. Hamilton, Rosanna E. Guadagno
- Journal: Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking
- Publication Date: January 8, 2025
- DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2024.0246