Those of you who have followed the literature examining potential connections between violent video games and real-world violence know that the evidence for such a connection is pretty tenuous. Studies purporting to show such a connection appear on a regular basis, often alternating with other studies that suggest that the connection is illusory. If it's any consolation, researchers in the field find the contradictory results just as confusing as you do, and some have called for efforts to be focused on understanding the reasons underlying the confusion. A paper that's in press at Psychology, Crime & Law claims to have accomplished just that.

The authors of the study note that the literature contains a combination of studies that show a connection between aggression and violent games, others that showed no such connection, and a few studies showing that gaming reduced aggression. They claim that their study is unique in that it considers the possibility that these represent three distinct responses to gaming, and suggest that prior studies may have produced conflicting results by trying to shoehorn these into a binary classification.

They designed a study in which measures of anger levels acted as a proxy for violent behavior. They recruited 135 children, but were forced to kick some out of the study due to bad behavior, leaving them with about 110 boys and 15 girls with a mean age of 14.6 years, all of them familiar with the game of choice, Quake II. The children were given personality profile tests and measured for anger levels, at which point they were set loose for 20 minutes of gaming. Anger levels were measured again following the gaming session.

Crunching the numbers indicated that there were three clear groups. The anger levels of 77 of the subjects remained unchanged after the gaming session. In 22 of the subjects, anger levels nearly doubled from a starting point similar to that of the unaffected children. But 8 of the test subjects started out at this high anger level; for them, 20 minutes of gaming dropped them down to levels similar to those seen in the unaffected group.

The research team then correlated these groups with the personality profiles, and an clear pattern emerged. Those with personalities that were scored as stable largely wound up in the unaffected group, while the remaining two groups were populated by personalities that were considered less stable.

The authors propose that gamers fall into two groups: stable personalities, and those with emotional states that are susceptible to being influenced by game play. Within the latter group, the response to violent games largely depends on the emotional states of the gamers when they begin play. Angry gamers will cool off, calm gamers will get agitated. They also note that only two of the cases of rising anger reached levels that would be considered cause for concern, suggesting that dangerous levels of anger were rarely triggered by gaming.

The authors made it clear that their study should not be viewed as the final word on the matter. The link between anger and aggression is far from clear, and they would like to see similar results reproduced with other test groups and using different games and experimental setups. It's also worth noting that they attempted to measure a wide range of additional factors during their study, but many of these measurements produced statistically insignificant or contradictory results. Nevertheless, the study appears to be significant in that it is the first I've seen that attempts to move beyond adding to the large body of confusing results that already exists, and instead tries to identify the reason that it's so easy to produce contradictory findings in the first place.