Game Theory - Do Video Games ACTUALLY Cause Violence?

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Join former Game Theory Host MatPat as he uses YOUR survey data to determine whether or a game like Fortnite can actually cause you to be more violent

Sup fam, it's your boy, back for another round of Fortnite videos. Today we're gonna mix things up a bit. It's the Licker Strip Challenge! For every kill I get to choose whether our guest removes one piece of clothing, or I can lick them. No joke, this is a real thing. Seriously, it's a real thing. Brittany is our guest today. Wait, who are you? Yeah, Brittany couldn't make it, so I'm your guest. Name's Dave. What? Okay, let's do this! Today's today's guest is sweaty Dave don't expect too many kills today guys don't run into the grenade

you idiot fine take off the damn hat noob all you had to do was shoot me shoot me shoe darn it other shoe why aren't you wearing any socks keeps my feet cool I tend to get a bit hot shut up sweaty Dave why is everyone so bad today Licker strip. Uh, shirt, I guess. Oh, thank goodness. It was getting hot in here. Oh.

Oh! Last choice, because let me tell you, if I don't wear socks, I bet you can guess what else I don't wear. No, please lick. Lick then. Hello, Internet. Welcome to Game Theory. Show that, as always, couldn't exist without you.

And with regards to today's episode, that's especially true. an astounding 330,000 of you who saw my last video on fortnight helped to make this theory of reality by taking our poll about gaming habits and your personality type guys that kind of support is overwhelming most scientific papers that i read for this series have like a thousand people participating if they're lucky and if they're paid so thank you seriously thank you so much and without even having to crunch the numbers there were some findings that i think that science will be very very very interested to explore further, like the fact that apparently there are over 600 different genders. You know, I've always taken pride knowing that we have a diverse audience watching, but I never in my wildest dreams imagined it was so diverse to include people who self-identify as everything from a 1960s-era Coca-Cola bottle to a weaponized battle-toaster. I've heard that gender is a spectrum and all that, but can someone explain to me whether gay jalapino is to the left or right of literal piece of human fecal matter. Oh, and by the way, to the 1,610 of you who responded with Apache attack helicopter,

thank you so much for raising awareness for the oft-overlooked hellisexuals. Also, to all of you who say that this show is for kids, I think we finally have our conclusive evidence that that simply isn't the case. The average age of respondents to this survey was two quadrillion years old. Apparently, theorists just have really good genes. And to the 242 of you who responded with 69 L'all. Good one. You got me. So clearly there was some data that needed to be cleaned up, but with 330,000 responses in total, even throwing out a few thousand left me with hundreds of thousands of data points. So the real average age of survey takers was 17, and the male-female split was 80-20. The goal of this whole experiment was to explore the major differences between the players of two different, yet very similar and very popular battle royale style games. Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, PubGee, for short, and Fortnite. Secondly, I wanted to examine whether aggressiveness or violent video games increased aggression in their players in the wake of news stories like this. Now the latest video game craze is Fortnite. It's free, addictive, violent, and kids love it.

And this. Possible crackdown on violence of video games, President Trump meeting with top executives from the gaming industry. And I gotta say, after crunching the numbers, it's gonna be pretty hard to make video games a scapegoat ever again. So I hope you're listening, Media. And some, Scientific community. I mean, let's face it, I know they're not, but you know what? You are and arming yourself with knowledge to use in your next Twitter rant aimed at the Wall Street Journal is all that truly matters Firstly, are PubG players significantly different from Fortnite players? Well, statistically no, not a whole lot in the survey I asked gamers to break down whether they had or were currently playing either Fortnite PubG full or neither and when comparing the gamers who were only playing Fortnite with the ones who are only playing PubG there wasn't a whole lot of difference.

PubG players were slightly older, 17.5 versus 16, and were much more heavily skewed toward the PC master race, with 63% preferring PC versus 44% of Fortniteers. And honestly, that shouldn't be all that surprising, right? Fortnite is more widely released on console and didn't start its early days on PC only. So those were the minor differences, but in the important areas like playstyle, social behavior, and personality type, the two were practically identical.

They even agreed on their stance in the classic internet debate of fighting one horse-sized duck versus 100 duck-sized horses. 55% of fortnighters and 55% of PubGers agreed, fighting a horse-sized duck wins. And can I just be honest here? How is this still a question online? I feel like at this point the one-horse-sized duck answer is the clear winner. Now, what I want to see debated is whether you'd want to fight a tiger-sized hedgehog or 100 hedgehog-sized tigers. Now that is a battle that feels a bit more balanced to me. Go ahead, start debating it now in the comments.

Go ahead, we got a lot of data to get through. But here's where things got interesting. While there wasn't much of a difference between people who had played either PubG or Fortnite, there was a significant difference between people who had played both games versus those who had only played one. Let's call them the hardcore battle royallers versus the more casual battlers. And what's more, the group who hadn't played any battle royale style game also showed significant different results from the other two categories. So from here on out, I'll be comparing the battle royallers group consisting of those who actively played both games against the Pub Niders, those who've only played one of those games,

to the group of people who hadn't played either, a category I'm gonna call the Idubber, which obviously stands for I don't usually battle Royale that Z you see is silent and any similarity to known and popular YouTuber names is purely coincidental, I assure you. Now to give some context, the I Ddubber were on average slightly older, 18, and the battle royallers were closer to fortnight age, 16.5. In total, of those 330,000 responses, about 150,000 were a pub-nighter, 130,000 were an idubber, and the other 50,000 were battle royallers. And there were a few things all three groups agreed on, like how they're all slightly better than average at playing video games. When asked to rate their skills as a gamer, 68% of responses, regardless of category, rated themselves at either a seven or an eight.

Only one or two truly brave souls rated themselves as a one. To those people, I say, thank you. You are the true American hero. Everyone also tended to agree that consistently good play was better than winning just once. In general, that was a 70-30 split. But then I turned to analyze aggressiveness and risk-taking behavior. If Battle Royale games are truly making players more violent,

then it stands to reason that gamers would report that their play style is more aggressive in those games. Furthermore, we would expect to see that gamers who play non-shooter games would yield lower aggressiveness scores, and that those who had played multiple shooter games would have the highest scores of them all. And wouldn't you know it, but that's exactly what the data showed. When asked about risk-taking behavior and aggressiveness of tactics in game, the battle royals were the highest, showing an average rating of 7.3 out of 10.

The Pub Niders, who only played one game, were slightly lower at just 7, and the iDubbers were least aggressive and most risk averse. with a score of 6.5. Risk-taking behavior followed a similar pattern, 7.3, 7, and 6.6. To further explore the topic, I also asked about pacifist routes and games, and whether, given the option, the player would choose to take the peaceful, non-aggressive route, or just solve the problem by running and guns blazing. Plus, since I recognize that most pacifist routes in games, let's be honest, suck,

I included an option of, no, I wouldn't choose it because it's a mechanic that's usually poorly implemented, to ensure that people weren't avoiding non-violent playstiles because no one but Undertale can figure out how to make a complete game without killing things Anyway, the results were shocking a whopping 48% of idubbers would choose pacifism when offered Compared to only 29% of battle royallers and as we would expect Pubniters were smack in the middle at 32%. So it would seem like the data is telling us that Fortnite and PubG are in fact prompting more aggressive strategies in higher amount of risk-taking. But before you run off and misquote me, Good Morning America, hold up. Correlation doesn't mean causation. Just because aggressive play lines up with a certain genre of game,

there are any number of variables to account for that. Maybe it's not the game causing the aggression, but rather the gamer's personality being more prone to aggressive play styles. And that's where the personality test comes in. I asked all respondents to take a Myers-Briggs-esque personality assessment, which breaks down your personality into 16 key types based on four different categories. Are you quiet and introverted or do you like being extroverted and talking with people? Are you intuitive and focus on imagination and ideas or observant and focused on the actual world and real-life events around you? When making decisions, are you a thinker and use logic or a feeler who considers the emotions of others?

And lastly, how do you run your life? Are you structured and scheduled or open and flexible? That's a judging versus prospecting, J versus P, Neither word really makes sense there. I honestly just think they ran out of letters. Anyway, my logic was this. Games don't necessarily make people more aggressive, but certain personality types may be more drawn to these sorts of games. We would expect to see some personalities show up more or over index for playing battle royale games if this is indeed true. And immediately in the data, one point stood out.

The royaleers were just more extroverted overall by about 14% relative to the eye-duber category. So seeing that, I really started to crunch some numbers. And if I could just take a minute for a PSA right now. Teachers, I'm Matt Pat, online personality and all-around nerd, and I have one thing to say to you. Screw PowerPoint presentations and introduce your students to excel. Anyone can drag and drop a stupid star wipe. Learning how to master a pivot table on the other hand is like a nerd's greatest superpower. It allows you to totally t-bag data.

So teach your students some useful life skills. And remember, not that. Knowledge is power the more you know So to eliminate the variable of the games I crossed the eight different personality traits measured by the test against aggression and risk-taking responses And it turns out my hypothesis was right introverts on average reported their levels of aggression to be 5.7 Extroverts on the other hand rated themselves at nearly 6.5 on average Thinkers also rated their play style as more aggressive relative to feelers 6.3 compared to 5.7.

And wouldn't you know it, but a combination of the two traits, extroverted thinkers produce the most aggressive players by far. You actually see the scale go up. Introverted feelers are at the super low 5.5. Introverted thinkers and extroverted feelers jump up to 6.2. Again, remember that both of these only have one of the more aggressive personality trait types. And finally, extroverted thinkers, the double whammy, are at the highest levels of aggressive play at 6.8.

A similar trend is visible in the risky strategy category. Meanwhile, the other personality traits, Intuting versus Observing and Judging versus Prospecting, showed no difference. Fascinating, right? But if you actually stop and think about what these traits mean, it starts to make sense. An aggressive strategy is gonna require you to get up in people's faces.

Be forceful and assertive, all things that are much easier for an extrovert to do, even in a virtual world. It also means that you're gonna have to make enemies by directly confronting them, something that a feeler, who's gonna be more sensitive to the emotions of others, is gonna want to avoid. So when I went a layer deeper and divided up extroverted gamers who play battle royale games versus introverted battle royallers, the trend still held. Extroverted battle royallers were more aggressive relative to their introverted counterparts. Same with battle royale thinkers versus feelers. It even existed in the eye-duber category. No one is questioning whether playing Mario games is getting people to take more risks and yet there you were.

People who played platformers with the E and T traits were just more likely to rate themselves as being more aggressive. So the long story short, it's not the game making people aggressive or teaching them bad behavior. Players with personalities that are more comfortable taking risks and getting aggressive are just more drawn to these sorts of high action, high intensity games. So already I've given strong evidence to that initial point that I wanted to prove, that battle royale games aren't the rage virus that mainstream media outlets want to make them. But in the meantime, remember, it's all just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.