Difficulty inspires more aggression in gamers than violent material

Struggling to play a video game inspires more “significant” levels of aggression in the player than whether the game contains violent material, researchers have found.

With studies already published on the link between aggressive thoughts and violent imagery in some of the most popular gaming titles, researchers at the University of Oxford in Britain, and the University of Rochester in the US, examined how competence impacted on the person’s psychology.

They set up a series of test scenarios which included asking players to play a version of the very popular shooting game, Half-Life 2, which had the violent elements removed.