Co-op games promote co-operative behaviour

Business

September 27, 2012

A study over at the Ohio State University in America has found that playing co-operative games makes people more co-operative in real life, while competitive games make people more competitive. Media influences people? THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!

Researchers had participants play Halo 2 and Unreal Tournament, both co-operatively and competitively, and then had the same people complete a coin trading task that measured their co-operation and/or competitiveness.

Each participant was given four dimes and told they could choose to keep them or pass them to another participant, doubling the coin’s value.

“The idea is that you can be selfish and keep your dimes or you can give them away, and if each person gives their dimes away they get more money so that’s the measure of cooperation,” OSU professor of communication and study co-ordinator David Ewoldsen Ewoldsen said.

Those people who played co-operatively swapped coins, but those who’d played competitively were reluctant to do so and instead tried to “win” the task at everybody else’s expense.

On the controversial subject of games and player behaviour and how these two things may or may not impact one another, Ewoldsen said that it’s “a much more complex relationship” than we might have been previously led to believe.

“It’s not the content of the game that matters, it’s how you play the game that matters,” he added.

So it’s pretty simple to avoid becoming a teen psychopath. Play Manhunt, but don’t kill anybody. Or apologise afterwards if you’ve got no other option besides strangling somebody to death with a plastic bag. Manners count, people.