First-person shooters

The German public was shaken when a teen shot and killed 16 people, including himself in March 2009. Media reported that he'd been a player of first-person shooter video games, suggesting that the hours he spent shooting people on the screen might have led to the real-life murders.

That's a common but oversimplified reaction, according to Christian Montag, a psychology professor at the University of Bonn.

"After deadly school shootings the same media headlines show up saying, 'It's the games, it's the games, it's the games,'" he told Deutsche Welle. "I came to know a lot of gamers and they showed me that gaming also has some social aspects, and I said it's probably not as easy as the media suggests."

Emotional de-sensitization

After observing the media's habit of linking violence to video games Montag conducted a study designed to test gamers' response to emotional stimuli. His results were published in the October edition of the journal Biological Psychology.

He and a team of researchers at the University of Bonn compared MRI scans of brain activity of gamers versus non-gamers while being shown a series of images that ranged from pleasant scenes at a beach to real-life photos of people injured or killed and screenshots from the popular Internet-based game Counter-Strike, which pits players posing as terrorists against counter-terrorists.

Montag found that gamers who played 15 hours a week of Counter-Strike or other similar games showed "significantly lower" activity in the left lateral medial frontal lobe - the part of the brain responsible for the regulation of emotion.

"The control group showed stronger activities in these areas than the first person video players with respect to the processing of unpleasant pictures," Montag said, adding that the results suggested violent games led to emotional de-sensitization as non-gamers had to work harder to cope with the images of violence, while the gamers could shrug the violent scenes off.

Inconclusive research

Other experts dispute whether studies like Montag's serve as an accurate measure of games' effects on gamers.

"I can watch a TV program with violent images and you can study me in a sense watching it, but then if the whole point of the game is that I am the person doing the killing, by pressing the button, it seems to me that this is not being tackled in this study as it could and should be," said Nick Robinson, who teaches and researches issues of politics and video games at the University of Leeds in England.

Robinson also questioned whether de-sensitization to violence leads to more violent acts.

"We seem to have a curious paradox, which is that we know people are playing a lot more violent games, yet if we look at crime statistics in North America, which in some sense is the barometer of this, there violent criminality is going down," Robinson told Deutsche Welle, adding that such statistics could indicate some people vent their frustrations through games instead of actually committing violent acts.

Members of a "crew" who took part in a simulated mission to Mars by remaining locked in a Russian container for 17 months said they played Counter-Strike to relieve tension in their cramped, windowless environment.

Politicians wise up to games

Birgit Roth from the German Game Developers Association said she does not think such research will change the public discourse on gaming in Germany.

"The debate is getting much more content-driven," she told Deutsche Welle. "Politicians know much more about games and that it's not ok if you say, 'You are playing a violent game which means you are violent in your daily life as well.' There is no study that proves a connection between violence in a game and violence in your daily life."

Strict controls in Germany already prevent the sale of particularly violent games to any potential consumer, let alone children, but Roth said she also thinks the parents bear some part of this burden, along with government and developers.

"You have to teach your children media literacy - show your boy or girl that these are good games or these are games you can play next year or in two years time," she told Deutsche Welle. "We need everybody, we need the companies and the protection systems, the software and we need the parents as well. We all have to work together."

While families, software developers and politicians all struggle to find common ground on the topic of video games and violence in the media, the science is continuing.

At the University of Bonn, Montag has plans for a follow-up study where a group of non-gamers will have their brain activity measured before and after several weeks of intensive game playing. The results could indicate if gaming is the cause of any changes in the emotional responses of the test subjects.

Author: Stuart Tiffen / sms

Editor: Cyrus Farivar