This strange AP article provides even more proof that despite seemingly endless global problems, there still isn't enough good research (or research-assigners) to go around. There's no other way to explain the study of 1,347 matchups in the online combat game Unreal Tournament 2004, let alone the study's subject -- do you create more virtual carnage if you end up with the red team or the blue team? Enlighten us:
As is the case with most team-based online shooting games, players of Unreal Tournament can choose to be on either the red team or the blue team, and their avatars wear those colors. But that choice is not as neutral as it seems: 55 percent of the time, the red team won, according to the study published this week in the journal Cyberpsychology & Behavior.
Wait, there's a journal of Cyberpsychology & Behavior?! With a deceptively thorough website? Here's one to put in the "to read" pile for sure (red/blue study abstract here). Some back issues are even free -- Self-Representation in Mediated Environments: The Experience of Emotions Modulated by Auditory-Vibrotactile Heartbeat, here we come (full pdf).

But back to that 55% advantage for the red team. The article quotes a neuroscientist who suggests that stalking the red team in a first-person shooter, or even competing one-on-one with a red-clad Olympic wrestler, is "a psychological distractor for men, possibly because men flush and turn red when they're angry." Sounds like a bullfighting myth to us, but we're no cyberpsychologists. Thanks, online gaming researchers for giving whining gamers and athletes everywhere one more strange excuse.