What is Virtual Aggression

This chapter reports on the transformation of a classical seminar paper presentation course into a completely virtual classroom experience beginning with the planning phase and ending with the students’ final evaluations. The virtual course included homework lessons and online examinations. Findings on what is actually needed to accomplish this goal are provided, while demonstrating what barriers arose in the process and how they were solved. The course topic was the psychological impact of violent video games and included learning in virtual environments. An up-to-date internet multiplayer game was applied encompassing comprehensive communication features and non-violent interactivity of the players with each other as well as the environment. Beyond the classical paper presentations held via voice chat, accompanying missions for the game were designed to demonstrate the crux of the matter in a playful style. This included both real world procedures well known to the participants such as map reading and vehicle driving as well as rather uncommon ones like flying a helicopter and complex missions with different roles needed like emergency rescue or organized mass killing. This way, participants were able to compare their known real world experiences with virtual ones and evaluate the relevant psychological theories in a comprehensive virtual world. Further, participants could reflect on learning in general and especially on the learning of aggression in virtual environments in a depth that would hardly have been possible without experiencing the interactive phenomena by themselves.