FlashReport
Media violence and the self: The impact of personalized gaming characters
in aggressive video games on aggressive behavior
Peter Fischer a,*, Andreas Kastenmüller b
, Tobias Greitemeyer c
a
Karl-Franzens-University, Social Psychology Unit, 8010 Graz, Austria
b
Liverpool John Moores University, School of Psychology, UK
c
University of Sussex, Social Psychology Unit, UK
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 17 February 2009
Revised 2 June 2009
Available online 21 June 2009
Keywords:
Media violence
Aggression
Video games
Self-activation
Identiﬁcation
a b s t r a c t
A recent development in video games is that players can design and personalize their own in-game characters.
It was predicted that this innovation could lead to elevations in the intensity of the psychological
effects of video games. The present study conﬁrmed this hypothesis, revealing that participants who
played an aggressive video game using their own, personalized character exhibited higher levels of
aggressive behavior than participants who played an aggressive game with a non-personalized character.
The aggressive behavior levels of the own-character players also exceeded those of individuals who
played a non-aggressive game, regardless of whether or not they used a personalized character. Process
analyses revealed that participants playing a violent video game with a personalized game character
experienced more arousal and self-activation than they did when playing with an impersonal, default
game character, which in turn increased aggressive responses.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Over the last 10 years, playing video games has become extremely
popular (Gentile, Lynch, Linder, & Walsh, 2004). Among adolescents,
the amount of time spent playing video games per day
now exceeds even that of television viewing (Huston, Wright,
Marquis, & Green, 1999). The most popular and proﬁtable video
game genres typically contain aggressive content, such as ﬁrst person
shooters (Anderson & Bushman, 2001), sports simulators, and
car racing games (Fischer, Kubitzki, Guter, & Frey, 2007). Recently,
video games have been created that enable players to generate
their own, in-game character. For example, the Nintendo Wii console
enables its users to design their own ‘‘Mii”; a customizable
game character whose physical attributes (e.g., haircut, hair color,
nose, mouth, physical stature, etc.) can be modiﬁed to match the
player’s own (Nintendo, n.d.). There is ample evidence that playing
aggressive video games can increase real-life aggressive tendencies
(e.g., Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Anderson & Dill, 2000; Bushman
& Anderson, 2002). The present research tests whether these
personalized game characters can amplify the effects of playing
violent video games on aggressive behavior.
Violent video games and the self
Media violence research has consistently revealed that video
games with aggressive content increase aggressive cognitions,
emotions, and behaviors in those who play them. For example, partakers
of violent video games have been found to display elevated
levels of aggressive expectation within their social environment
(Bushman & Anderson, 2002), and administer more noise blasts
and electric shocks to other participants when in Milgram-derived
experimental paradigms (Anderson & Dill, 2000; Bartholow &
Anderson, 2002; Bushman, 1998). The effects of aggressive video
games on aggressive responses have mainly been explained by
the General Aggression Model (GAM), which assumes that aggressive
behavior results from the interplay between personality variables
and situational variables, which inﬂuence ‘‘several related
internal states and the outcomes of automatic and controlled appraisal
(or decision) processes” (Anderson & Dill, 2000, p. 773).
The GAM addresses processes of priming, imitation, and learning
triggered by aggressive game content. That is, video games (as well
as other forms of violent media) show their recipients what aggression
is (learning), how it is performed (imitation; modeling), and
trigger pre-existing cognitive knowledge structures, emotional
associations, and behavioral scripts about aggression (priming).
Drawing on these theoretical conceptions, the GAM identiﬁes a
multitude of self-relevant processes that can be triggered by
violent video games, such as aggressive self-perceptions; increased
arousal and associated self-activation; identiﬁcation with aggressive
game content; and self-efﬁcacy beliefs about aggressive
behavior (cf. Anderson et al., 2004; Anderson & Dill, 2000;
Bushman, 1998). For example, investigations by Uhlmann and
Swanson (2004) highlighted that playing aggressive video games
0022-1031/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.06.010
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: peter.ﬁscher@uni-graz.at (P. Fischer).
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010) 192–195
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp
can foster increased automatic associations between aggression
and one’s own self-concept. Similarly, Fischer et al. (2009) found
that players of racing games exhibited higher risk tolerance in critical
road trafﬁc situations because they perceived themselves as
being more ‘reckless’ after playing street-racing games (where trafﬁc
rules have to be violated), compared to their self-perceptions
after playing non-racing-related video games. The present research
aims to extend these previous investigations by showing that
increased identiﬁcation with a game character can combine with
increased levels of self-activation elicited by aggressive media content
to intensify the effect of violent video games on aggressive
behavior.
The present research
The present research tested whether playing violent video
games with a personalized game character would lead to increased
levels of aggressive behavior. To answer this question, a current
video game trend that enables players to create their own in-game
character was utilized. Players of an aggressive sports game (boxing)
and players of a non-aggressive game (bowling) were compared,
with both groups either playing with a self-customized
game character or one that was provided as the game’s default. It
was hypothesized that the aggressive game would evoke greater
levels of self-activation in its players compared to the non-aggressive
game. It has been functional in evolution that situational triggers
of aggression (such as those now provided by violent media)
alert the cognitive system via priming and spreading neuronal activation
(Bushman, 1998), encouraging the preparation of potential
aggression-management behaviors (e.g., defend; attack; ﬂee). This
increase in cognitive alertness (or arousal; Zillmann, 1983) should
be accompanied by increased reﬂection upon aggression-relevant
resources within the self (i.e., self-activation; Brewer & Gardner,
1996; Verplanken, Walker, Davis, & Jurasek, 2008) that may be
functional for dealing with potential aggression, such as skills related
to the performance of aggression, and the norms and values
related to it. It was predicted that this effect would be particularly
pronounced in the personalized character condition, where players
have a strong, in-game visual representation of the self to identify
with – and are thus more likely to ﬁnd attacks upon it self-relevant
and self-activating. Therefore, aggressive attacks on the game character
should be more relevant to the player, leading to increased
levels of self-activation in order to prepare for an appropriate response.
Finally, since increased self-activation has been shown to
increase the consistency between the activation of self-aspects
(e.g., aggressive values and norms) and related behaviors (e.g.,
aggression; Verplanken et al., 2008), increased alertness for aggression
and associated self-activation of aggression-relevant resources
should result in a speciﬁc increase in levels of aggressive
behavior when individuals play a violent video game using a personalized
(high identiﬁcation) character. In summary, it was
hypothesized that players playing an aggressive game with a personalized
character would show the highest levels of aggression
(relative to the remaining three conditions). In addition, it was expected
that increased levels of self-activation would mediate this
effect when participants played a violent game with a personalized
game character.
Method
Participants and design
Seventy-six students (50 women and 26 men; ages ranging
from 18 to 47; M = 22.56, SD = 4.66) at a German university participated
in the study in exchange for course credit. One participant’s
data was excluded from further analyses because he did not ﬁnish
the questionnaire. The study had a 2 (type of game: aggressive vs.
non-aggressive) Â 2 (personalized game character: yes vs. no) between-subjects
design. Participants were randomly assigned to
one of the four experimental conditions, with eighteen in the low
aggression/non-personalized character condition, and nineteen in
each of the other three.
Material and procedure
At the experiment’s onset, participants were informed that they
would take part in two distinct studies, with the ﬁrst being a marketing
survey on various video games, and the second a study on
different food additives. The participants’ ﬁrst task was to play a
video game, which they were to evaluate in terms of quality and
consumer appeal. Participants in the non-personalized character
conditions played either the aggressive or non-aggressive video
game with a default character, which was unrelated to the participants’
personal appearance (i.e., a typical, medium-age Nintendo
cartoon ﬁgure without typical male or female characteristics). In
contrast, participants in the personalized character conditions
were instructed to design their own ﬁgure before playing either
of the games. These were created via the Nintendo Wii’s Mii feature,
which allows the player to model each facet of their character’s
physical appearance after themselves. Upon ﬁnishing,
participants began to play their designated video game. In the
two aggressive conditions, this was a boxing simulator, with the
two non-aggressive conditions featuring a bowling simulator. Both
of these games featured in the Nintendo title ‘‘Wii Sports”, allowing
for potential differences in software to be minimized. All participants
played their respective game for 25 min. After playing, participants
reported how much they enjoyed the game and
whether they would recommend it to other people. These items
were not signiﬁcantly related to the main dependent measures,
and were thus not considered further. As a manipulation check,
identiﬁcation with the game character was measured with the
item ‘‘I could identify with the game character”, on a scale from
0 (not at all) to 6 (very much). Next, self-activation was measured
by asking participants how awake, strong, attentive, active, upset
and motivated they felt, on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very
much). The reliability of this scale was satisfactory; a = .72.
Upon ﬁnishing the questionnaire, participants were thanked
and told that the ﬁrst study was over. They were then informed
that a second marketing study would take place, involving testing
the taste of hot and sweet sauces (although only hot sauces were
employed). However, because the experimenter needed to be blind
to the experimental condition, it would be the participants’ own
task to administer an undetermined amount of hot chili sauce to
a subsequent participant. This subsequent participant would then
have to consume all of the dispensed sauce (in reality, this individual
did not exist). Participants were informed that the chili sauce
was extremely hot, and that it had been found that 84% of all
Germans did not like its taste. However, it was stressed that the
amount they would dispense for the following participant to consume
was entirely their own decision. After this introduction, the
experimenter gave the participants a bottle of hot chili sauce, a
spoon, and a plastic cup. Participants were ﬁrst asked to use the
plastic spoon to test the hotness of the chili sauce themselves,
and then to pour an undetermined amount of the sauce into the
plastic cup. The amount administered was measured in grams
and utilized as a behavioral measure of aggression (Fischer &
Greitemeyer, 2006; McGregor et al., 1998). After ﬁnishing, the participants
were thoroughly debriefed about the real aim of the
study. Special attention was given to inform participants that they
did not harm anybody in context of the hot chili task. No participant
had suspicions about the hypothesis of the experiment.
P. Fischer et al. / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010) 192–195 193
Results
Check for background effects
The variables of participant age and gender were not signiﬁcantly
associated with aggressive behavior, nor did they interact
with the experimental conditions; all Fs < 1.
Identiﬁcation with the game character
A 2 (type of game: aggressive vs. non-aggressive) Â 2 (personalized
game character: yes vs. no) analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed
a signiﬁcant main effect of personalized game characters;
F(1, 71) = 20.55, p < .001, g2
= .22. Thus, participants who created
their own ﬁgure (M = 3.05, SD = 1.90) reported higher levels of
character-identiﬁcation than those who played using a non-personalized,
default game character (M = 1.41, SD = 1.21). Thus, the
study’s manipulation was successful.
Self-activation
The ANOVA revealed a signiﬁcant main effect for type of game,
F(1, 71) = 7.88, p < .01, g2
= .10, with participants who played the
aggressive (boxing) video game (M = 3.09, SD = 0.57) reporting
higher levels of self-activation than those who played the nonaggressive
(bowling) game (M = 2.69, SD = 0.67). Following the
analytic strategy recommended by Rosenthal and Rosnow (1985),
the main hypothesis was directly tested with a planned contrast:
participants who played the aggressive game with their own, personalized
character (M = 3.31, SD = 0.45; contrast weight: 3) reported
higher levels of self-activation than individuals who
played the aggressive game with a non-personalized game character
(M = 2.87, SD = 0.61; contrast weight: À1); these levels also surpassed
those of participants who played the non-aggressive game,
regardless of whether they used personalized (M = 2.68, SD = 0.59;
contrast weight: À1) or non-personalized (M = 2.71, SD = 0.76;
contrast weight: À1) game characters; t(71) = À3.46, p = .001,
d = À1.00.
Aggressive behavior
The ANOVA revealed a signiﬁcant main effect for type of game,
F(1, 71) = 7.54, p < .01, g2
= .10. Participants who played the aggressive
video game administered a larger quantity of hot chili sauce
for a subsequent participant to consume (M = 10.88, SD = 11.18)
than those who played the non-aggressive game did (M = 5.61,
SD = 3.44). Thus, the classic media violence effect was replicated.
More importantly (and in support of the study’s main hypothesis),
a planned contrast revealed that participants who played the
aggressive game with a personalized game character administered
more hot chili sauce (M = 12.92, SD = 15.04; contrast weight: 3)
than participants who played the aggressive game with a non-personalized
character (M = 8.84, SD = 4.70; contrast weight: À1), as
well as participants who played the non-aggressive game with
(M = 5.32, SD = 3.52; contrast weight: À1) and without (M = 5.92,
SD = 3.42; contrast weight: À1) their own character; t(71) = 2.83,
p < .01, d = À0.56. This pattern of results is depicted in Fig. 1.
Aggressive behavior signiﬁcantly correlated with self-activation
(r = .34, p < .01).
Mediational analyses
Next, it was tested whether differences in the level of self-activation
would mediate the effect of our main contrast (i.e., playing
an aggressive game with a personalized game character vs. all
remaining conditions) on aggressive behavior. To test this potential
mediation effect, a bootstrapping analysis based on 1000 bootstraps
was run (Preacher & Hayes, 2004). Results showed a significant
direct effect of the contrast on aggression, t = 2.82, p < .01,
which was reduced to non-signiﬁcance, t = 1.85, p > .05, when controlling
for the possible mediator self-activation, which still was
signiﬁcant, t = 2.21, p = .03. Moreover, this analysis revealed a signiﬁcant
indirect effect (LL 99 CI = 0.27; UL 99 CI = 4.94; p < .01).
Hence, the aggression-related impact of playing a violent video
game using a personalized game character was mediated by increased
levels of self-activation.
Discussion
A recent development in video games is that players can create
their own game character and designate its physical attributes. It
was hypothesized that this innovation could amplify the psychological
effects of video games. In line with expectations, the present
study revealed that participants who played an aggressive
video game with their own personalized character exhibited higher
levels of aggressive behavior than participants who played an
aggressive game with a non-personalized character, as well as
players of a non-aggressive game with and without personalized
game characters. In sum, the present investigation shows that
the recent trend in video games to enable participants to use their
own personalized game characters increases the negative effects of
aggressive video games on aggressive responses.
Process analyses revealed that playing an aggressive video
game with a personalized game character (relative to playing with
an impersonal, default game character) increased self-activation,
which in turn enhanced aggressive behavior. Although the GAM
addresses self-relevant processes as a function of violent media
consumption in its core assumptions (cf. Anderson & Bushman,
2001; Anderson & Dill, 2000; Bushman, 1998), the effects of video
games on processes of the self are a rather under-investigated area
in video game research (cf. Gentile & Gentile, 2008). Thus, the present
study is an important step towards incorporating processes of
the self into the literature on video games. However, future research
in this vein is deﬁnitely needed. For instance, it would be
interesting to test whether similar effects of personalized game
characters are found for other types of software, such as pro-social
games (Greitemeyer & Osswald, in press-a, in press-b) or racing
games (Fischer et al., 2007).
A limitation of the present study is the brevity of the employed
dependent measures for identiﬁcation and self-activation, and that
the alpha for self-activation was only in an acceptable range.
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
non-aggressive game aggressive game
hotchillisauceingram
non-personalized
personalized
Fig. 1. Aggressive behavior (chili sauce in grams) as a function of experimental
condition.
194 P. Fischer et al. / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010) 192–195
Hence, future research should use extended and standardized measures.
In addition, we did not ﬁnd any gender differences in aggression;
a reason for this may be the unbalanced gender distribution
in our sample (i.e., 50 women and only 25 men). Moreover, we
used boxing as aggressive behavior. To a certain extent, this is a socially
acceptable type of aggressive behavior. Thus, it would be
fruitful for future research to test whether similar aggression-elevating
effects of personalized game characters occur when participants
play a video game that condones socially unacceptable
aggressive behavior (e.g., killing of other game characters).
In conclusion, the present research suggests that the negative
effects of playing violent video games on aggressive behavior
may be further accentuated when players create their own game
character (rather than using a pre-existing, default game character).
As an increasing number of video games are offering their
players this game-play option, convincing parents to screen their
children’s exposure to this form of media is more necessary than
ever.
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