Temper tantrums in front of the console are common in some children when playing video games. A Finnish study analyzes this phenomenon in order to understand where this anger comes from and what triggers it.
- 98% of children play video games, according to the syndicate of leisure software publishers.
- A third of gamers say video games have helped them make friends and feel like they belong to a community. The majority view their community as caring and welcoming.
- If one hour of video game can be beneficial, it is recommended to limit the time of exposure to screens (television, video games, Internet) to a maximum of 2 hours per day for children, according to a Spanish study.
How can an activity that is supposed to be entertainment make your child so angry? If the video game has often been unfairly singled out for its violence, the causes of this brutal nervousness are more complicated than that. Finnish researchers from the University of Eastern Finland wanted to understand this phenomenon.
To achieve this, they recruited sixth and ninth graders from three Finnish schools, aged around 12 to 15. The pre-teens expressed to them what they felt as players during private interviews. The results of their study were published in the journal International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction. The authors have identified four main criteria at the origin of anger, which do not always come from the game itself.
The anger among young players does not only come from the video game itself
First, the feeling of failure, caused by the loss of a game or by the death of their avatar, provokes annoyance, which can turn into anger, even rage, if the situation is repeated. The story of a sixth-grade girl, Amélie, quoted in the study, reports it. “If I die all the time, it’s quite annoying and… of course, the anger comes next.” she says.
The second criterion is the behavior of other players. For example, having a team of broken arms as allies or facing opponents much stronger than yourself. Then, the third source of frustration is technical problems. The famous “lag” (a connection that is too slow which prevents progress in the game) or bugs in particular.
Finally, the last is the interruptions of play because of outsiders. That’s what your child could blame you for if you came to cut him off to put him to bed.
Multiplayer video games are the most annoying
But not all games are created equal on the anger scale. The ones that cause the most frustration according to researchers are multiplayer video games, especially when they are competitive. The best known are Fortnite, a competition mixing survival and shooting game where up to 100 players can fight each other remotely until the last survivor, or League of Legends, a more cooperative strategy and action game. very competitive. Games with a demanding difficulty, where you spend more time failing to progress, are also a source of irritation.
Among these games, the community that surrounds the player can also be the source of negative feelings, because of the teasing or humiliation that beginners can suffer. To these factors of annoyance are of course added problems outside the game, such as the context (for example, the fact of having had a bad day before playing) or the environment (such as the noise around him) .
