In a research researchers have found, "repeatedly playing violent video games reduces emotional responses like guilt."
Researchers from University at Buffalo, Michigan State University and University of California Santa Barbara in the US carried out a research in which they found that the moral response produced by the initial exposure to a video game decreases as experience with the game develops.
Rapidly advancing technology has created more realistic video games. These games are so real that gamers feel guilty committing unjustified acts of violence within the game. Reason of this is still unknown as said by Matthew Grizzard, from University at Buffalo.
It is often claimed by gamers their actions in a video game are meaningless to the real world. Researchers wanted to find the realibility of this claim, whether virtual actions are actually responsible for desensitisation processes.
Although the findings suggest that desensitisation occurs, mechanisms underlying these findings are not entirely clear.
There are two arguments for the desensitisation effect, Grizzard said.
"One is that people are deadened because they've played these games over and over again. This makes the gamers less sensitive to all guilt-inducing stimuli," he said.
The second argument is a matter of tunnel vision.
"Gamers see video games differently than non-gamers, and this differential perception develops with repeated play," he said.
"Non-gamers look at a particular game and process all that's happening. For the non-gamer, the intensity of the scene trumps the strategies required to succeed," he said. "But gamers ignore much of the visual information in a scene as this information can be meaningless to their success in a game", according to Grizzard.
"This second argument says the desensitisation we're observing is not due to being numb to violence because of repeated play, but rather because the gamers' perception has adapted and started to see the game's violence differently," he said.
"Through repeated play, gamers may come to understand the artificiality of the environment and disregard the apparent reality provided by the game's graphics," Grizzard said.
The study was published in the journal Media Psychology.
