User experience-principles-of-interactive-design-and-neteazens
Journalism paper
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Daniel Chidel
Journalism 201 Media and Society
Option #1
4/26/2015
How do Violent Video Games Affect You?
The Social Learning Theory was developed by Albert Bandura and generally disagreed
with most prior theories focusing on the human being’s learning processes. Bandura’s social
learning theory states that learning is a cognitive process that takes place by observing
behaviors around you and their consequences within certain social situations. This means
learning is the process of observing, processing what was observed, and ultimately making
decisions about what was observed. Though this is just the surface of the theory however,
there is the underlying premise that everyone’s behavior is influenced by both other people
and by social situations together. Many theories that came prior to the social learning theory
stated that learning was a behavioral process that required conditioning, as stated within
Pavlovian conditioning. The social learning theory is different than Pavlovian conditioning
because instead of conditioning the proper, or desired, behavior into a person it is understood
that as they observe others they begin to process and act out the behaviors they witnessed.
During my observations of a friend playing Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare I began to notice
shifts in his behavior as the hour of gaming progressed.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is a futuristic video game based on wars of the future
and how changes and occurrences in the world have changed the entire system of war. Call of
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Duty’s violence, alongside its graphic content and language, landed it with the rating of mature,
which means it’s only supposed to be played by people above the age of seventeen. I did not
want my friend to know I was taking notes of him playing, so I could avoid over exaggeration
within his reactions. To make sure his reactions were genuine I made sure I conducted my
study when he was not paying attention, focused heavily on the television in the dorm room.
This was also at a time when he and I were the only two people in the room so there were
fewer outside influences on his behaviors. The setting of my observations was in my dorm in
Earl Hall on the University of Oregon campus. My dorm is a small space that constricts
movement, as it is not much more than a glorified closet; and since there are others living on
the same floor as my dorm yelling is frowned upon my friend’s reactions were not entirely
genuine.
My friend is normally a very laid back person, who rarely gets mad at anything, and a
friendly person who goes out of his way to make others feel better. Even if we are teasing him
a little when he messes up or does something that is fairly stupid, he still retains his cool
demeanor, and normally just laughs at himself for his blunder. I have noticed before that video
games tend to frustrate him but had never truly focused on how much they alter his
personality. His change was gradual, and peaked right around forty five minutes, but playing
this violent video game changed his entire persona. While normally he is laid back, playing Call
of Duty turns him into a raging monster, yelling screaming, and becoming generally aggressive.
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I started to notice the shifting of his behavior around the midway point of his first game,
which in Call of Duty is roughly seven minutes since one game can last up to fifteen minutes.
He started to change by cursing under his breath, clearly getting frustrated, sometimes even
muttering that the person who “killed” him was any number of racial slurs. As the game
progressed his curses and slurs began to rise in volume, and he even began to string them
together in profane sentences. This was only fifteen minutes into his hour of playing, and that
had been during a game where he had been doing relatively well. He ended the game fairly
happy but had, over the course of that one game, clearly become more on edge, and excited
than he is normally.
Over the course of the second game my friend’s behavior quickly began to take a turn
for the worse. Prior to the second game some new people had joined the online match and by
the way the second game started they were clearly better players than my friend is. This made
my friend extraordinarily mad, and while in the dorms we are normally supposed to keep our
voices down, his renewed outbursts had turned into full blown roars. At one point he said, “I
wish I could reach through the TV and strangle this mother f----- so his b---- a-- will stop killing
me”. Even this was one of his relatively tamer outbursts, but was still memorable because it
involved an unfounded desire to hurt one of the opposing gamers.
As the hour of gaming began to wind down I decided to do a little extra to see if I could
elicit an even more profound reaction from him, so during his final game I began to partake in a
little humor at his expense. He reacted very quickly to my shenanigans and would immediately
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jump up, run over to me, and begin to repeatedly hit me in the shoulder, not too hard, but still
a surprising reaction coming from a person who is normally laid back. He finished his series of
games fairly averagely, and in many people’s cases they might even be happy with that result,
however he was not one of those people that day. After I reminded him of his overall result he
promptly yelled out in frustration and slammed the PlayStation controller on the ground in
anger. My friend, a man who is normally gentle, kind, and funny, after one hour of playing Call
of Duty, had transformed into a vulgar beast who yells and screams at the slightest provocation.
I did not ask him immediately how he felt about that hour of playing and let him cool
down for a couple hours before I admitted to taking notes on his gaming. When I asked him
how he felt while playing Call of Duty he said, “I was having fun for most of it but sometimes
people can piss me the f---- off, like seriously”. I understood that, I have played my fair share of
Call of Duty and have felt that exact feeling, however I did not believe he understood how much
he really changed while playing. After I had pointed it out to him, and showed him my notes he
was suitably chastened and surprised at the radical shift in his behavior. After some thinking he
said the only times he could remember acting anywhere near as aggressively as he had only a
couple hours previously was when he played lacrosse in high school. He could not even
remotely think of any reason, ever, even with physical activity that would make him act the way
he had. I have known him for quite a while and believe the only reason he acted this way was
because he had been highly stimulated by the flashy and aggressive nature of the video game
he was playing. The nature of Call of Duty stimulates your brain and tends to put it on
overdrive, and the aggressiveness of the game makes those playing it feel aggressive and
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angry as well. While he had only reacted the way he did in a closed setting, it did have an
unsettling effect on me, now I can envision him in both happy and angry phases, and I have no
desire to anger him ever again.
My friend’s behavior had been modeled and changed the more he observed and took
part in the social climate of the violent video game. Eventually the entirety of Call of Duty
became linked to his behavior, and his success and failure within each match reflected upon his
behavior. Not only did his success and failure reflect in his behavior, but my friend’s violent
reactions also mirrored the basis of violence in the video game. Just as Albert Bandura
hypothesized, as my friend observed the behaviors and participated in the social situation, his
behavior was modified by what he had processed while playing Call of Duty.
