Game over for first-person shooter games? The impact of playing experience on aggression

Because of recent school shootings, there has been a broad public discussion on whether playing violent digital games causes
aggression. Current empirical findings of media violence research on aggression are ambiguous. It is also unclear whether the positive
correlation is due to active playing or to media reports. Media reports may lead people who do not play (nonplayers) to associate violent
digital games with aggression, while active players (long-term players) may have differentiated knowledge structures. Therefore, we
conducted an experiment to investigate the relationship between the concepts “violent digital game” and “aggression” for long-term
players and nonplayers. Long-term players, nonprimed, and primed nonplayers performed two lexical decision tasks before and after
playing “Unreal Tournament.” While priming “violent digital game” activated the concept “aggression” for nonplayers, active playing
had no impact at all. The individual knowledge about these games had stronger impact on psychological responses than playing a violent
digital game.