Research: playing fps games does not lead to reduced empathy

A study by German scientists shows that playing first person shooters has no negative long-term effects. Gamers who spend a few hours daily playing Counter-Strike or Call of Duty for years do not have a diminished capacity for empathy.

To examine the gamers’ capacity for displaying empathy and aggression, they were presented with a number of psychological questionnaires. They were then shown a number of pictures designed to elicit an emotional and empathetic response. This is evident from the published research.

While viewing these images, the gamers’ brains were scanned with a functional MRI. This allowed the researchers to determine the location of the brain activity. In this way, the researchers were able to determine, for example, whether the part of the brain that is normally active in aggression was also active in the gamers. During the MRI scans, the gamers were also asked how they would feel in the situations depicted in the images.

The same study was conducted on a group of non-gamers, after which the researchers compared the results. This shows that in the questionnaires there was no difference between the group of gamers and the non-gamers. The same was true of the brain scans, which showed that both groups had a similar neurological brain response to the provocative images.

The researchers did not expect outcomes to be the same in both groups. The formulated hypothesis shows that the scientists assumed that gamers would have reduced activity in the part of the brain that shows activity during empathy. The brain scans showed that there was no reduced sensitivity when processing weighty emotional stimuli. The researchers therefore think that if negative effects occur at all from playing violent games, they can only occur for a short time.

Researcher Gregor Szycik says more research is needed on the long-term effects of playing violent games. In a possible follow-up study, he wants to use videos that show emotional and provocative events instead of pictures. Most other existing studies on the effects of playing violent games have focused on the short-term effects.

In this study, the scientists examined a group of 28 male gamers. Women are deliberately excluded from this group because aggressive behavior is more common among men and they play violent games relatively more often. All gamers have played games such as Counter-Strike, Call of Duty or Battlefield for at least two hours a day for the past four years. The average of the daily gaming sessions was four hours. To avoid any short-term effects of gaming, gamers were not allowed to play games until three hours before the start of the study; the majority of gamers hadn’t played games for much longer than three hours.

The research has received financial support from, among others, a German ministry and various German funds that support scientific research, such as those of Volkswagen and TUI. The games industry was not involved in this investigation.