Learning Behavior Through Video Gaming

For many years, I have heard people disregard the learning and teaching potential in video games. The most common argument that people would cite often focused on the negative behavioral outcomes that video games might teach. In other words, violent video games produce violent people, no matter that they might have something positive to teach us. Inspired in part by Emily May’s weekly reading and response and my own curiosity into the science behind such a claim, I set out to find a study with some actual evidence to support or refute this claim. The most reliable study that I found was published by the American Psychological Association titled, “Playing Prosocial Video Games Increases Empathy and Decreases Schadenfeude.”

Behavioral modification is how the authors conceptualized learning and they executed multiple experiments to test whether or not perceived prosocial or schadenfeude games could teach these behaviors to the subjects playing the games. Two experiments were carefully constructed and carried out. Participants were selected based on a variety of personality traits, their age, and their sex and were instructed to play either a prosocial, schadenfeude, or neutral (control group) game after which they would review a story about someone’s misfortune and make decisions about their feelings toward the story in that moment. Unsurprisingly, they found that exposure to prosocial gaming encouraged increased empathetic thinking. This experiment provides evidence that games have the ability to influence and teach emotional response that can be applied to situations outside of the game. There is a social dimension to gaming at play here. Despite the game being played in a solitary manner, social constructs of empathy were built upon in game and used to evaluate non-game situations with increased amounts of prosocial response. To this end, the game spans multiple settings as these in game traits become a part of the thinking, decision-making human being who occupies the real world. This is incredibly important in helping us to identify how game play can be used for early learning, rehabilitation, and therapy to increase understanding of positive social interactions and empathy.

Though the authors had an initial experiment that validated their hypothesis, they admitted halfway through the article that there were definite flaws to the experiment. They started again with a more sound method of calculating the influence levels of their subject’s behaviors and again found the same results. This time, however, they were able to determine that games with a negative impact did not have any difference in schadenfeude than the neutral game that was played by the control group. While this is insightful in refuting claims about the negative social impacts of negative video games, it does little to dispel why negative behaviors are not learned as a result of playing violent games. We need to know what other behaviors must be considered when violent games are played, as this study only focused on two behaviors. The study also fails to note whether or not naturally aggressive personalities in gamers are able to increase their understanding of empathy or decrease it based on the type of game played. What might be the repercussions of a study like that?