The YouTube video, featuring Michael Kasumovic, delves into the complex motivations and psychological impacts of video games, particularly violent ones, linking them to fundamental human drives such as status-seeking and mate attraction.
1. Motivation Behind Playing Violent Video Games
- Fun and Status Seeking: While video games are inherently fun, Kasumovic and his colleague Tom Denson believe that a deeper motivation for playing violent video games is the search for status. These games provide a platform to test one's "metal" against others, understand one's standing in a hierarchy, and gain a better understanding of oneself relative to others.
- Hierarchy and Aggression: Social hierarchies are prevalent in almost all animal species, including humans, with individuals at the top gaining more benefits. Violence and aggression have historically been ways to maintain or challenge this order. Video games offer a low-cost environment to constantly test and adjust one's position within a hierarchy.
2. The Importance of a Level Playing Field
- Fair Competition for Status: For a competition to be a reliable measure of status, the playing field must be flat. Games like Fortnite and Call of Duty Warzone are cited as examples where upgrades are primarily aesthetic, ensuring that a player's skill, not purchased advantages, determines victory. If advantages exist (e.g., better guns), a loss does not impact self-perception of ability as much as a loss in an equal match would.
3. Winner and Loser Effects
- Internal Response: Research on animals shows that winners are more likely to win future fights, and losers are more likely to lose, even when matched against equally capable opponents. This suggests an internal response, possibly physiological or hormonal, that shifts how individuals perceive themselves or perform, rather than just a conscious adjustment.
- Self-Perception in Humans: While physiological changes might play a role, in the context of video games where physical changes are controlled for, it's suggested that a significant part of the winner/loser effect in humans is about self-perception and the story we tell ourselves.
- Game Design's Influence: Game designers actively balance wins and losses to maintain player engagement, making it difficult for researchers to study the pure effects of winning and losing on self-perception in current video games.
4. Mate-Seeking and Self-Perceived Mate Value
- Predictor of Violent Game Play: Individuals with a stronger drive to find mates (for both men and women) are consistently more likely to want to play violent video games and play them more often. This is because higher status within a hierarchy often grants access to more mates and resources.
- Impact on Mate Value Perception: Playing violent video games can actually affect one's self-perception of their mate value. Individuals who perform poorly in violent video games experience a decrease in their self-perception of mate value, an effect not observed in non-violent games.
- Competitive Mate Loss Experiment: A study showed that men who virtually "lost" an opportunity for a coffee date were more likely to choose to play a violent video game afterwards. The hypothesis is that these individuals sought to regain the status they felt they had lost in the mate-seeking interaction.
- Age Effect: The desire for status, and consequently the drive to play violent video games, tends to decrease with age, correlating with a natural decline in the desire for sex. It's also suggested that individuals who are not getting satisfaction with their own status in real life may be constantly driven to play violent video games, creating a feedback loop.
5. The Blurring Line Between Virtual and Real Worlds
- Impact on Confidence: Successes in the virtual world, such as winning at Fortnite, can positively impact self-confidence, which may translate into real-world benefits in social interactions and mate attraction, even if the specific skills aren't transferable.
- "Male Sedation" Hypothesis (Counterpoint): Chris Williamson raises the "male sedation" hypothesis, suggesting that video games (and other digital entertainment) might be causing young men to retreat from real-world status-seeking, team-bonding, and reproductive behaviors. Kasumovic, however, views this as an oversimplification of a complex problem, pointing back to his research that shows a correlation between a strong drive for mates and playing violent video games.
- Automatic Behaviour: Many of these psychological responses, like the impact of online interactions on self-perception, are automatic and deeply ingrained from evolutionary history when social circles were small and local. The global scale of modern online competition overwhelms these evolved systems, leading to significant effects.
6. Aggression Towards Women in Online Gaming
- Halo Study: A study conducted by Jeff Kuznikov, and later analysed with Kasumovic, involved a male researcher playing Halo using male, female, or no voice. It was found that men received significantly more negative comments when playing with a female voice, especially from lower-status males who performed worse than the female-voiced player.
- Status Threat and Mating Opportunities: This aggression is explained by the idea that when a lower-status male loses to a female, it's perceived as a double blow: a loss of status and a potential reduction in mating opportunities. Aggression and sexist slurs become a tactic to discourage women from competing in these traditionally male-dominated hierarchies.
- Societal Shift and Intersexual Competition: Historically, men and women competed within their respective hierarchies (intrasexual competition). However, modern society, with its flattened playing field in education and employment, has led to men and women competing for the same jobs, status, and resources. This is evolutionarily novel and creates intersexual competition, which many men are not psychologically equipped to handle, leading to negative behaviors when women enter traditional male status domains.
- Cultural Shift Needed: There is a need for a cultural shift in how men perceive losing to a woman, moving past the idea that it's detrimental to their masculinity, especially in fields like gaming where physical differences are irrelevant (e.g., reaction time and information processing are equal).
7. Violent Video Games and Perceptions of Toughness/Anger
- Increased Self-Perception of Toughness: Individuals who play violent video games tend to perceive themselves as tougher.
- Reduced Anger Discrimination: Paradoxically, those who played violent video games were less adept at noticing shifts towards anger in others. This could be due to physiological changes (e.g., testosterone spikes) or desensitisation to aggression, potentially leading to more real-world confrontations.
In summary, the video highlights how seemingly recreational activities like video games tap into deep-seated evolutionary drives for status and mate selection, influencing self-perception and even impacting real-world social dynamics, particularly in the evolving landscape of gender roles and competition.