Contrary to popular opinion and most previous research, the new study found that players' "robust exposure" to a highly violent online game did not cause any substantial real-world aggression.

After an average playtime of 56 hours over the course of a month with “Asheron’s Call 2,” a popular MMRPG, or “massively multi-layer online role-playing game,” researchers found “no strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game,” said Dmitri Williams, the lead author of the study.

Players were not statistically different from the non-playing control group in their beliefs on aggression after playing the game than they were before playing, Williams said.

Nor was game play a predictor of aggressive behaviors. Compared with the control group, the players neither increased their argumentative behaviors after game play nor were significantly more likely to argue with their friends and partners.

“I’m not saying some games don’t lead to aggression, but I am saying the data are not there yet,” Williams said. “Until we have more long-term studies, I don’t think we should make strong predictions about long-term effects, especially given this finding.”

Williams, a professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an expert on the effects of online video-game play. He conducted the study with Marko Skoric, a lecturer at the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Their findings appear in the June issue of Communication Monographs in an article titled “Internet Fantasy Violence: A Test of Aggression in an Online Game.”

According to Williams, researchers have suspected a strong linkage between games and aggression “but, with the exception of relatively short-term effects on young adults and children, they have yet to demonstrate this link.”" [more]