Does Playing Warcraft Make Me a Bad Person?

One of my favorite things to do after class is play World Of Warcraft, a.k.a. WoW. For all those who've never heard of it, it's a popular online game. Ask anyone who's actually played it, or quit playing WoW: it's incredibly involving and addicting, with over nine million subscribers. It's an MMORPG, a massively multi-player online role playing game-- basically, a computer game where you team up with people all over the internet to save the world by pretending to be elves and orcs fighting monsters. Like most MMORPGS, the best way to advance in game is to kill. Many, many times. After I killed my 3,000th rabid yeti, I had to wonder: maybe it's not the violence in video games that gets to you. It's how much there is, and how unavoidable it is.

Unsurprisingly, some researchers are worried that committing violent acts in a virtual world makes people predisposed to violence in the real world. Some are even worried that the effects of internet addiction would make any resultant aggression worse. So, the good professors of Yonsei University's Department of Psychiatry in Korea studied 1471 online gamers, 82.7% of them male, 17.3% female. The gamers self-reported their demographic information and responses to tests measuring self control, narcissism, aggression and online-game addiction (this was measured with a modified scale for internet addiction). The participants were recruited through ads posted on the official sits for three of the most popular MMORPGS in Korea: World of Warcraft, Lineage, and Mabinogi. Once the results came in and the researches plugged their data into Statistical Analysis Software, several trends were noticed.

In general, people who lack self-control and are prone to aggression and narcissism are more likely to experience video games addiction. MMORPGS are uniquely alluring for gamers with these issues, due to how one must advance in the game. Gamers need to acquire wealth, status, and powerful gear to advance. The more they have all three, the more recognition they receive not only in-game, but also throughout the wider gamer community.

Careful re-reading of the Yonsei Study has led me to rethink my thesis. The casual, constant violence of MMORPGS doesn't turn ordinary people into anti-social narcissits; anti-social narcissists are drawn to the casual, constant violence due to how the structure of the MMORPGS reward them for their nueroses. So, it's perfectly fine for a well-adjusted teen (for example, me) to kill a few ravening, demon-posessed boars to blow off some steam after class.

But wait...

The study mentions a little thing called a "bi-directional causal effect". In other words, if you're just a little bit too narcissitic, just a little bit too aggressive, and have slightly too-little self-control...MMORPGS can make those problems worse. You get stuck in a vicious circle, where the game rewards you for violent resolutions to your conflicts, and your behavior grows that much more aggressive in response. Since society doesn't like people who solve their problems through killing, you turn to the game to receive the approval you can't find anywhere else. And on and on and ever on...unless you have the presence of mind to break the circle, stop playing, and seek other forms of admiration.

So, it's not a matter of how violent the game is. It's a matter of how the violence is rewarded.

Kim, Eun Joo, Kee Namkoong, Taeyun Ku, and See Joo Kim. "The relationship between online game addiction and aggression, self-control and narcissistic personality traits." European Physchiatry
31 Oct. 2007: 23