COMPETENCE IMPEDANCE AND AGGRESSION 445 ffec Thi Mo player by way o To asse oarticipants'felt competer ontrols (the mediating var arch (Ryan Righy Items included"The game otal effect observed relati game type to change ted to do s the game it was easy to (path C).B hA) aggres as predicted by ma Results AB) .00 ranged fror 0.02t cant while the A"B path was significant. females tended to have les and I short-term shifts in aggressive feelings insofar as the more com cted a plex control interface impeded player competence includi raphics as c ntrol variable s and once le n the pa ut.The Study 2 raphics tedwhincrceaaomaslepy-0 ated only the graphics and nrative conceit game to ould be esd of the sam the t when controlling fo ne game sed le this byr sidualized chang ng 001.R2= 10 +.B97 06 data Method ed us Procedure.One hundred one unc aduates (36 males dit i gar (viole specifically for training purposes.Following this.dem and gar intcractcdt ted in order ided initia nt for the of in nterface get gar cont desig ld pr idable challenge btained by ototheganc-conditioncoteonviolknt--lhiebyiolcnc ctence in using the tudy allowe test a c d by a.200 R sing ch e in aggressive affec game.B(9s 004.p= Figre.Conceptual mediation model.regressed postplay scores onto preplay scores and saved the stan￾dardized residual scores. This enabled us to quantify change in aggressive affect for each participant. Mastery-of-controls. To assess participants’ felt competence using game controls, we used an intuitive controls assessment used in previous motivation and gaming research (Ryan, Rigby, & Przybylski, 2006). Three items assessed how effortlessly partici￾pants found the control interface for carrying out their intentions in the game. Items included “The game controls are intuitive” and “When I wanted to do something in the game, it was easy to remember the corresponding control.” The scale demonstrated acceptable reliability (M
4.59, SD
1.59,
.72). Results Demographics. Participants’ age and gender were collected in all seven of the present studies. Where significant differences emerged, the relations were relatively small in magnitude (average R2 .03) or were not of interest in the present inquiry; for example, females tended to have less gaming experience and lower levels of competence during play than did males. We conducted all analyses presented in this article twice, once including participant demographics as control variables and once leaving them out. The direction, magnitude, and significance levels did not vary between these parallel analyses, so we did not report the analyses including demographics to conserve space. Player competence. We hypothesized that poor mastery-of￾controls would be associated with increased levels of aggressive feelings following game engagement when controlling for type of game and the interaction of game type and mastery-of-controls. To test this hypothesis, we regressed residualized change scores in aggressive feelings simultaneously on mastery-of-controls, (97)
.33, p .001, R2
.10, and the target game type (non￾violent
1, violent
1), (97)
.06, p
.55. The data collected for Study 1 allowed us to evaluate the relation of players’ felt competence (i.e., mastery-of-controls) to aggression when controlling for game content (violent vs. nonviolent). We evalu￾ated a hierarchical moderation model to test the idea that game content moderated the relation between mastery-of-controls and aggressive feelings and found the interaction term was not signif￾icant, (95)
.07, p
.80. We thus did not find evidence that player felt competence and game content interacted to account for additional variability in player aggression. Results from this pro￾vided initial support for the competence-impeding hypothesis: Struggling with feelings of incompetence at the game interface relates to increased levels of aggressive affect. Target game differences. We predicted that the violent game used in this classic design would present a formidable challenge to mastery-of-controls, thus impeding participants’ experiences of competence. Results obtained by regressing mastery-of-controls onto the game-condition code (nonviolent
1, high violence
1), (98)
.20, p .05, R2
.04, showed the violent game presented a barrier to players’ competence in using the controls. The present study also allowed us to test a conceptual replication of the aggression effects reported by Anderson et al. (2004; Study 2). Results derived by regressing change in aggressive affect onto game condition-code did not show higher aggression for those randomly assigned to play the violent game, (98)
.004, p
.97. We also examined the indirect effect that game content (violent vs. nonviolent) had on players’ aggressive feelings by way of player competence. More specifically, we evaluated a mediation model in which we tested mastery-of-controls (the mediating vari￾able in Figure 1) as an intervening factor linking game type (the independent variable) to short-term shifts in aggression (the out￾come variable) following the bootstrapping approach outlined by Preacher and Hayes (2008). As noted previously, there was no total effect observed relating game type to change in aggressive feelings (path C), 
.08, p
.41; mastery-of-controls was predicted by game type (path A), 
.25, p .001; and change in aggressive feelings was predicted by mastery-of-controls (path B), 
.32, p .001. Bootstrapping indicated a significant indirect effect (path A
B). The 95% confidence interval for the indirect path, based on 10,000 resamples, ranged from 0.02 to 0.33, and it accounted for 10.61% of the variability (R2 ) in ag￾gressive feelings. Given that the C and C= paths were nonsignifi￾cant while the A
B path was significant, results indicated that being assigned to play the violent game had a positive influence on short-term shifts in aggressive feelings insofar as the more com￾plex control interface impeded player competence. Study 2 The aim of Study 2 was to conceptually replicate Study 1 in a more elegant way. Specifically in Study 2, we carefully manipu￾lated only the graphics and narrative conceit of a single game to have a violent version and a nonviolent version of the same game. As in Study 1, we tested the hypothesis that players who felt incompetent using the game interface would report increased lev￾els of aggressive feelings postengagement, over and above vari￾ability attributable to violent game content. Method Procedure. One hundred one undergraduates (36 males), mean age 19.6 years (SD
1.32), received extra course credit in exchange for participating. Upon entering the lab, all participants engaged in a 20-min practice period with a version of the game created specifically for training purposes. Following this, demo￾graphic information and aggressive affect were assessed, and par￾ticipants were randomly assigned to a high or low violence 20-min play period. These versions were created in order to present two levels of violence, holding constant other aspects of the game such as landscape, visual complexity, and gameplay mechanics. Target game content. We created two additional gaming environments based on the popular and commercially available game Half-Life 2 using a programmer tool kit. The first environ￾Figure 1. Conceptual mediation model. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. COMPETENCE IMPEDANCE AND AGGRESSION 445