שיתופי או תחרותי? השלכות חיוביות ושליליות של האינטראקציה בין נטיית השחקנים לאלימות ומאפייני משחק דיגיטלי אלים

Digital games become a common hobby and violent content functions as a
factor attracting gamers. Research literature regarding violent digital games
presents two theoretical approaches that lead to contradictory conclusions.
According to the General Aggression Model - GAM (Anderson & Bushman,
2002), violent digital games increase violent behavior and arouse negative
inclinations of the players. In contrast, the Catharsis Theory (Ferguson et al.,
2010) emphasizes the positive effect of online games - purgation of negative
emotions, which reduces offline violent behavior. The purpose of this study
is to examine the effect of violent games on online behavior of players: both
the positive effect, such as increasing the sense of belonging to a game group,
and the negative consequence, such as compulsive game playing. These
effects could be an effect of the player's traits (players with high versus low
baseline of aggression) as well as a game's characteristics such as a game
strategy (cooperative game versus competitive game). Two hundred
seventeen Israeli gamers aged 18+ completed a self-report online
questionnaire distributed via social network "Facebook" during May-July
2013. The findings show that the sense of belonging to a game group was
higher among more aggressive players and in cooperative compared to
competitive game strategy. However, compulsive game playing was a result
of participant aggression baseline only, regardless of the game strategy.