Is it the violence or is it the extreme competitiveness and pre existing toxicity that links verbal aggression. You can find people throwing slurs and insults at others in competitive roblox or minecraft game modes.

They must've sampled League of Legends players for this study. It's not called League of Cancer and League of Salt for nothing you know...

The really annoying part of this is the author says:

“The crucial finding is that the number of violent video games you’re exposed to has an influence on your verbal aggression and hostility,”

Only to go on and say:

“It’s very important to stress that our findings are not causal,”

More than that, the study doesn't even measure their "exposure" to violent games, it requests their three favorite games and then checks their PEGI rating.

Whew. Okay, so reading the actual research article here, and, this article is kind of trash. First off, the study group was recruited from ads posted on Reddit and Discord, notably from r/samplesize, r/narcissism and r/truegaming and Cluster B Circus, r/NPD Official and NPD Recovery 2.0 respectively. One is a place for polls, one is a gaming subreddit, and the rest are all communities for people with narcissism. So they're skewing their sample population explicitly towards how people with narcissism that play violent games respond. Which, I think was the original intent of the study, and they bolted on the additional conclusions for a spicier publication, since the only way these numbers are meaningful is with a control group of people with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) that do not play violent games, and even then, it only provides a correlation between people with NPD who play violent video games and increased verbal aggression (one of which was arguing if people disagree with you).

I'm beginning to feel regret for putting way too much effort into a comment, because this is a long ass article, but further in, the study states that respondents had "healthy" levels of narcissism, which goes unremarked despite their primary sample sourcing being targeted at narcissism instead of a population of gamers. I'm calling it a wrap here, but essentially this is a remarkably unreliable study to write that headline off of.

Playing competitive games is also apparently linked to fucking my mom.

Dad isn't complaining, so I'm happy for her, get you some!

I mean... I swore a whole lot more playing real sports than I do playing esports.

at the end of the day it has nothing to do with video games. its competition, remember in the late 80s people would fight each other if they lost a game of cards or game of marbles.

It’s almost like competition addiction is an issue that has never really been studied let alone recognized while it’s glaring everyone in the face since the first game was invented. But sure. Let’s have another reality tv competition show /gym shredding routine/football game and query where this random aggression comes from like it only exists when video games are in play .

Somebody never played on a Wii.

Let's see how long it takes for this one to get discredited too.