• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers found that people who played games as a heroic character were more likely to reward others
• They warned that how gamers represent themselves in the virtual world of video games may affect how they behave toward others in the real world
The debate about whether video games can encourage violence is nothing new.
And now a study suggests that people, who play video games from a villain’s perspective, become a little bit meaner in the real world.
How gamers represent themselves in the virtual world of video games may affect how they behave toward others in the real world, U.S. researchers have warned.
Gunwoo Yoon, a researcher from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said: ‘Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers.’
The conducted a novel blind taste test experiment to come to their conclusion.
He and Patrick Vargas, another co-author of the study, which was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explained that virtual environments afford people the opportunity to take on identities and experience circumstances that they otherwise can’t in real life, providing ‘a vehicle for observation, imitation, and modelling.’
They recruited 194 undergraduates to explore whether the experiences of taking on heroic or villainous avatars might carry over into everyday behaviour.
Students were randomly assigned to play as Superman (a heroic avatar), Voldemort (a villainous avatar), or a circle (a neutral avatar).
They played a videogame for five minutes in which they, as their avatars, were tasked with fighting enemies.
The students then participated in a blind taste test and were asked to give either chocolate or chilli sauce to another student.
They were told to pour the chosen food item into a plastic dish and that the future participant would consume all of the food provided.
Those who played as Superman poured on average nearly twice as much chocolate as chilli sauce for an unknown student to consume.
The researchers also discovered that the gamers who played as a hero poured significantly more chocolate than those who played as either of the other avatars.
However, participants who played as Voldemort the villain poured out nearly twice as much of the spicy chilli sauce than they did chocolate, suggesting their desire to inflict discomfort on other participants of the experiment.
They also poured significantly more chilli sauce for students to consume compared to the other participants, the scientists said.
