ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a model for understanding the appeal of violent video games that takes into account evolved psychological mechanisms. According to analytical perspective, virtual threats to either life or public humiliation during play instantly trigger the players' sympathetic nervous system, thereby producing a naturalistic physiological response pattern via associative appraisal processes. By providing simulated threats within a virtual environment, violent video games embed the biological imperative of our threat defense system, thus, triggering realistic responses from the sympathetic nervous system. By highlighting the interplay of different evolved psychological mechanisms, the proposed integrated model provides a complementary analytical perspective on the appeal of violent video games that can be heuristically valuable for future empirical research in this area. The widespread but by no means inevitable appeal of violent video games can, hence, be best explained by the role and function of evolved psychological mechanisms, some of which are sensible to situational circumstances.
