I am not an aggressive person. I avoid confrontation to the point of fault. And it made sense to me that I found, during the past two weeks, that the only reason my aggression level was higher was when I was playing the game and my concentration was interrupted by someone talking to me. This only seemed to be the case when I was actively paying the game in that moment. If I paused it, I would immediately calm down. This may be the case because I play video games recreationally, so I’m used to switching in and out of an aggressive mindset fairly quickly. I was able to learn at a young age how to manage aggression and frustration when playing video games. I can easily recognize when I am feeling outwardly aggressive towards the people around me as a result of the adrenaline from playing the game. Emotion recognition and management is not a difficult skill to learn, especially if you want to be sure you don’t hurt the feelings of the people around you. While when in this state of aggression, I will occasionally lose patience and snap at someone, I never physically lash out.
That is one major difference I have noticed; that I am completely at peace with killing things and acting violently in video games, but would never kill or act violently outside of self defense in real life. Even if it was self defense, I seriously doubt I could ever kill a person or an animal. I feel that this is the case with a lot of people, as video games are not real and generally have no real life consequences. The things in the game are not alive and cannot feel pain. The only times one might hesitate to kill in a game is if the thing is useful to you, if you have an emotional attachment to it, or if there would be in-game consequences that you don’t want to deal with. This is definitely not the case in real life. People are conscious, and have their own lives. They feel pain and when they die, they don’t really re-spawn. I would not be cool with killing people or acting violently in real life.