Posted on: August 3, 2009

Good Gaming

Some video games may make children kinder and more willing to help - if they have the right content

By Perry Gattegno
CTW Features

It's well documented that violent video games can have many unwanted effects on their players, but researchers had never investigated a potential link between video games and character improvement. Until now.

New research published in the June issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Thousand Oaks, Calif., finds a strong correlation between games with prosocial content and players' kindness. American and East Asian psychologists conducted three separate studies with different methodologies and age groups. All found that prosocial content in video games caused players to be more helpful to others after the game was over. Prosocial games involve nonviolent characters who aid and support each other.

Lead author Douglas Gentile, a psychologist at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, said this study is the one of the first ones to record such a correlation.

The three studies occurred in Japan, Singapore and the U.S. Nearly 2,000 Japanese children ranging in age from 10 to 16 completed surveys directly after and three to four months after playing prosocial games. Researchers found a significant connection between how often they helped other people and played prosocial games.

"This suggests there is an upward spiral of prosocial gaming and helpful behavior," said Brad Bushman, a professor of communications and psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., and a co-author of the study.

The Singaporean study tracked 727 students with a mean age of 13 and their favorite games. They answered questions about whether characters in those games helped or hurt each other and then about their inclination to participate in philanthropic activities and cooperative efforts or their tendency to react aggressively in various situations. The American study asked 161 college students to play either a prosocial, neutral or violent game and then to pick an easy, medium or hard puzzle for another student to play. They were told the other student could win $10 for completing the puzzle. Those who played prosocial games routinely assigned the easier puzzles and those who played violent games often selected the tougher ones.

"Taken together, these findings make it clear that playing video games is not in itself good or bad for children," Bushman says. "The type of content in the game has a bigger impact than the overall amount of time spent playing."