Empathy drop dwarfs social benefit of online gaming with friends

One possibly redeeming quality of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) is their ability to get adolescent gamers to work together toward a common goal via digital connection.  Any parent who has overheard their son from his gamer seat can probably relate to the enthusiasm and occasional building of communication skills through the issuance of brief, declarative commands to game mates.

“Move in” “Stop right there!”  “Hurry, hurry—now!” a gamer might shout to a networked sidekick. 

But where socialization is concerned, is group gaming enough to conclude that gamers’ online cooperation constitutes healthy interpersonal connection?

Often accompanying the research on aggressiveness that ensues from video gaming is the amount a gamer’s prosocial behavior is affected, which is normally considered through two lenses: (1) the degree a given gamer experiences a decrease in empathy toward family, friends and society-at-large and (2) a reduction in helping behavior.

A lower empathy level, alternatively described as increased desensitization, is the most identified prosocial behavior of seasoned gamers:

“I was a bit detached from the real world,” observed Ben Baker, a 22-year-old college senior in a science-related field, said of the time span where he played violent video games within his near lifetime of gaming.  “It didn’t quite click what the amount of virtual violence was representing.”

Boiled down, the type and duration of a player’s violent video gaming can impact his ability to feel or understand the perspective of another, according to research done by the likes of Sarah Coyne, who along with several colleagues published their conclusions on the subject in 2012.[1]

According to this line of thinking, even gamers who don’t act aggressively can become desensitized (and therefore less empathetic) through the repetitive practice of video game play.

To wit, Baker— who grew up among loving, supportive and educationally minded family members— admits to being “cold, more irritable & more easily angered” toward his parents during his violent video gaming span.

The two main factors in developing desensitization in gamers are:

(1)   points to level up for eliminating foes in a given game’s theater of activity.  

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(2)  repetitive harming or killing of other characters without real-life consequences of pain or injury.

Taken together, these two things create compulsive game play loops. Ken Hall, a former art director for Realtime Worlds, is among those in the video game industry who have realized its products were inadvertently creating the undesirable cycles.

Having once spent time interviewing real-life aviators who went on to experience emotional trauma for years afterward, he set out to create a game called Destiny’s Sword that would be about battlefield performance and managing a particular squad’s mental health.[2]

The approach bodes well with Coyne, a video game researcher from Brigham Young University, who stated:

“Including the emotional trauma is a great way to make the games more realistic and decrease harm to players.”

In addition to putting some pain back into the virtual act of harming others, Hall also took steps to ensure Destiny’s Sword didn’t contain the consumer-hostile mechanisms, like gambling, threat generations and unfair time requirements that are prone to get gamers playing in perpetuity.

Unfortunately, and considering the number of mature-rated games out there that don’t contain displays of emotion produced by violent behavior, there remain untold numbers of youth who continue the unfeeling practice of bringing harm to characters on a screen. 

And, like Ben Baker admitted about himself during his more violent game playing days, they are gradually depleting their reservoirs of goodwill toward their ‘fellow men.’

[1] Associations Between Violent Video Gaming, Empathic Concern, and Prosocial Behavior Toward Strangers, Friends, and Family Members by Ashley, M. Fraser, Laura M. Padilla-Walker, Sarah M. Coyne, Larry J. Nelson and Laura A. Stockdale.

[2]  What it Takes to Make a Kinder, Gentler Video Game by Caren Chesler, 11/26/22 from Wired Magazine.