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Video Games are NOT the Cause of Violence

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Video Games are NOT the Cause of Violence

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Although many people assume that video games cause violent behavior in teens and young adults, there is no scientific proof that this is true. Therefore, what cannot be proven true is not true until proven so. Most of the children and young adults playing violent video games do not exhibit the signs of violence, but are instead normal, functioning people in society. Only a select few "learn" from these violent video games and act it out. These few most likely have some variation of a metal disorder that clogs the brain's judgment and ability to think morally, ethically, or logically. This is the largest factor in mass violence events, not the video games. A person who turns violent because of a violent video game will also turn violent because of a violent movie or TV show. If video games should be censored, then the movie industry would have to be subject to the censorship as well. Kids playing video games are not more likely to commit violent crimes compared to kids watching violent shows. There is no tangible evidence of video game violence and real world violence being interconnected. A child with a twisted mind will still retain that twisted mind no matter how much or how little video games he plays.

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What Science Knows About Video Games and Violence

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What Science Knows About Video Games and Violence

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As the thirteenth mission of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 begins, you're submerged in a sewer, watching soldiers herd prisoners at gunpoint through the nighttime streets of a near-future dystopia. A few inches in front of you, just below eye level, raindrops dapple the water, a bit of graphical realism that subtly reinforces the game's first-person perspective.

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You are there.

Twelve minutes later, you've gunned down 21 people and one dog. Most fall amidst head-shot geysers of blood. You've also killed some unknown number by rocket launcher or machine gun, their deaths lost in the haze. Every now and then, blood spatters onto the screen, as if in your eyes.

A Pressing Question

It's a bloodfest. It's also-at least to this journalist, watching a YouTube video walkthrough-glorious fun, a well-designed piece of action-hero arcade blockbuster thumb candy. Yet for the very same reasons it's so appealing, it's difficult not to be troubled, too. Is it possible, even likely, that so much vicarious slaughter ever bleeds into the psyches of at least some people who play these games?

Given that first-person shooters represent a $5 billion market, played by millions of people every day, it's a scary possibility, and one pushed into the national discussion soon after it was reported that Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people in Newtown, Connecticut, was an avid Call of Duty player. Also disturbing, however, is the possibility that first-person shooters don't influence real-world violence and are less a genuine suspect than a convenient scapegoat. After all, it's easier to talk about fake blood than real behavior.

Not surprisingly, people have turned to science for answers on the question of violence and video games. For now, though, there are no answers, at least not of the quantitative, immediately useful variety. Some researchers argue that video games like first-person shooters indeed influence violent behavior-not causing it in some simple, linear way, but making it more likely to occur. Other researchers say this link doesn't exist. Still others say it might, but it's impossible to say right now. What's possible to know scientifically quickly gives way to uncertainty and intuition.

The Hazy Science of Aggression

So what do we know? Before looking at the science, it's worth taking a moment to think about how scientists might arrive at something like a conclusive answer: By taking several tens of thousands of people, from children on up to adults, dividing them into groups with comparable socioeconomic, genomic, and behavioral profiles, setting them to play first-person shooters with varying amounts of regularity, then following them for years, routinely conducting psychological tests and tracking their real-world behaviors.

It would be an extremely revealing experiment. It's also one that nobody has carried out, nor will they. The logistical challenges would be enormous-and even it was possible, it would be hugely unethical, involving the deliberate exposure of potentially vulnerable people to something that might hurt them and others.

"Playing violent video games increases aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and physiological arousal."

Lacking such a study, scientists have studied video game violence in more limited ways. Typically this involves asking small numbers of students to play games for a few minutes, then seeing whether their behavior changes according to laboratory measures of aggression: Whether they react less negatively to violent videos, respond more forcefully to irritation, or are in a generally more aggressive frame of mind-tending to complete, for example, the word "explo_e" as explode rather than explore.

There are a great many studies of this variety. The results aren't uniform and have come under a certain amount of methodological criticism, but they tend to point in a common direction.

"We did a comprehensive review of every experimental study, reviewing 381 effects from studies involving 130,000 people, and results show that playing violent video games increases aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and physiological arousal," says Brad Bushman, a psychologist at Ohio State University who is one of the best-known proponents of the idea that first-person shooters influence real-world violence.

To Bushman, video games aren't likely to be the sole source of violence, but an amplifier. Indeed, if game-players, especially game-playing children, really do become more aggressive, Bushman is almost certainly right. It's well known that aggressive children are more likely to become violent adults. Yet the studies that Bushman and colleagues cite tend not to answer a key question: Does game-induced aggressiveness persist? Does it become a hard-wired way of being in the world, or does it dissipate in a few minutes or hours?

A Cautionary Tale

"I don't think we have enough science to suggest that playing video games causes violence in children any more than watching violence on TV," says Ryan Hall, a psychiatrist at the University of Central Florida, referencing a vast body of scientific literature that has failed to find any strong connection between violent television and corresponding behavior. "There is no indication at this time that violent video games are training killers."

Gary Slutkin doesn't think that virtual violence is a cause in itself, but neither does he think it's harmless.

To Hall, fears about video game violence are reminiscent of earlier moral panics about rock music, Dungeons & Dragons, and especially comic books, which in the 1950s were the subject of scholarly concern and even a Senate hearing about their role in juvenile delinquency. At that hearing, forensic scientist Frederic Wertham decried the "endless stream of brutality" in comic books, denouncing one title in particular as embodying sadistic fantasies that would be "particularly injurious to the ethical development of children." That comic was Superman.

Half a century later, notes Hall, comic books were again a subject of discussion at the American Psychological Association's 2010 annual meeting. This time around, contemporary comics were portrayed as dangerous, with Superman and other 1950's crime-fighting heroes lauded as moral exemplars from whom boys once learned the virtues of public service.

Hall's points are echoed by psychologist Christopher Ferguson of Texas A&M International University, who in January met with Vice President Joe Biden to help chart a course for studying video game violence in Newtown's aftermath. "It's normal for the country to be frightened and traumatized. It's a normal human reaction to want answers. Whether they're the right answers doesn't always matter. We want to restore a sense of control," Ferguson says. "There's this historical pattern. People are desperate for an answer, and so they reach out. Media is something people like to point at."

Monkey See, Monkey Shoot?

Another perspective, one less entrenched in debates over the methodology of studying the behavioral effects of video games, comes from Gary Slutkin, the founder of Cure Violence, an organization that has successfully reduced gun violence in parts of Baltimore and Chicago. Accustomed to working in communities where physical violence is an everyday part of life, Slutkin doesn't think that virtual violence is a cause in itself, but neither does he think it's harmless. Instead, he thinks the games make people more susceptible to becoming violent.

"The military knows this very well," Slutkin says, noting the U.S. military's use of video games in training soldiers, partly to break down their instinctive repulsion to killing. To Slutkin, what's known about our brains is justification for concern: Humans are social, highly conditioned creatures who learn how to behave by watching what's around us, turning social messages into so-called scripts that play in our minds as we engage the world.

These messages come from various sources, from media to the behaviors of people around us-and even if violent television doesn't seem to produce violent behaviors, it's a mistake to treat video games as an equivalent technological form. Video games are interactive rather than passive, an advantage that in other contexts, such as education, is regularly exploited. Games also create a system of constant reinforcement, rewarding behaviors practiced again and again.

Determining the relationship between video games and violence "may take 20 or 30 years."

"Video games could be expected to have a larger effect than media violence. The player is participating. They're being reinforced," says Rowell Huesmann, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. "The important thing is repetition. I think any child can play Grand Theft Auto or a first-person shooter a few times, and it's not going to have much effect. But if they play day in and day out, over a period of years, any psychologist who understands the power of observational learning is going to find it hard to believe that it's not going to have a major effect on increasing risk."

Slutkin and Huesmann believe that violence is contagious, spreading in a manner similar to infectious disease, but with behaviors rather than microbes as the instruments of transmission. Of course, pathogens don't always cause disease: Many other factors, such as a person's immune system strength, alter an infection's course. In keeping with this analogy, first-person shooters weaken the psychological immune system. They change the odds of whether violence takes root or whether a person can resist it.

Judgment Call

Even the idea that violence is contagious is still, however, a hypothesis, and the cognitive influence of video games a matter of plausible speculation rather than demonstrated fact. As with psych-lab aggression tests, understanding of video game violence soon becomes uncertain. "All research has potential flaws," Hall says. "It's very hard to have the perfect study. That being said, I don't think you stop looking. But you have to understand that this may take 20 or 30 years."

As to whether parents should allow their children to play first-person shooter video games, to indulge brutal fantasies of high-caliber, graphically realized murder, Ferguson considers it a judgment call.

"If parents turn to science to guide them, with this idea that they'll be avoiding harm, they're probably not going to get very far," he says. "A different issue, and probably the right issue for parents to focus on, is whether they morally approve. And then we're on firmer ground."

Photo © Stalman/iStockphoto

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The Science Behind Video Games and Violence | NOVA | PBS

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Not surprisingly, people have turned to science for answers on the correlation between them.

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US News: Video Games Don't Cause Children to be Violent

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US News: Video Games Don't Cause Children to be Violent

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Forbes: Do Games . . . Cause Real World Violence?

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Forbes: Do Games . . . Cause Real World Violence?

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Two events happened this week that many politicians and members of the media will link together.

The first: A mass shooting in Washington, D.C. in which an angry, mentally-ill young man shot and killed a dozen of his fellow citizens.

Second: The release of Grand Theft Auto V, the perennially controversial sandbox game.

The shooting has already sparked calls for censorship of video games, with members of the media claiming both that there must be a causal connection and that not enough research has been done on the violent side-effects of video games. I would dispute both these claims.
Blame Game
According to Media Matters, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski of the Morning Joe show said that "it's kind of hard not to make a connection [between games and the Navy Yard shooting] when you hear [the shooter's] friend saying that he would watch on a life size screen these violent video games for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours."

The Telegraph's Nick Allen described the shooter's "darker side" which "saw him playing violent "zombie" video games in his room, sometimes from 12.30pm until 4.30am." Is it odd to describe a mass murderer's "darker side" not as his killings or other unstable interactions with people, but as an activity he shares with millions of other people?

Quoth & Friends' Steve Doocey: "unfortunately you know it seems every time something bad like this happens we look at "is there a connection between video games and the shooter?" Well, take a look at some people who were described as addicted, from Columbine High School, Eric and Dylan Klebold, the Virginia Tech shooter, the Arizona shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, that Norway shooter who Anders Behring [sic], I think he shot 77 people. The Aurora shooter, James Holmes, the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, they're all described as essentially being addicted to video games."

His co-host, Elisabeth Hasselback, asked: "Is there a link between a certain age group or demo in this - twenty to thirty-four year old men, perhaps, that are playing these video games and then their violent actions? We have yet to find out."

In fact, numerous studies have been conducted and the results are mixed. Some studies have shown that video games increase aggression; others show the opposite.

No study has ever shown that violent video games result directly in actual violence, let alone mass shootings. That doesn't mean it isn't possible, though the numbers suggest it's very unlikely.

Analysts estimate 18 to 20 million copies of Rockstar's GTA V will be sold worldwide by the end of March, 2014.

It's possible that someone who buys and plays the game will later go on to carry out a horrible shooting. Should that happen, it will almost certainly occur in America, which boasts far and away the highest number of mass shootings (and shootings in general) while boasting no higher rate of video game consumption.

See this chart from the Washington Post's Max Fisher, which illustrates this fact starkly enough:

If and when this hypothetical shooting happens---and really, it's just a matter of when at this point---it will be terrifying and terribly sad, but it will pale in comparison to the reality of gun deaths in America.

Each day in this country, on average, 30 people are murdered with a gun, 162 more are injured, and 53 use a gun to commit suicide, according to the CDC.

In 2010 in the United States, firearms were used to carry out 11,422 homicides and 19,392 suicides.

But overall, violent crime is down in the US---indeed, as violent video games have become more popular, violent crime has fallen.

Each of the shooters Fox & Friends uses to bulwark their case for censorship played video games, but so do millions upon millions of other people every day. Games are a $70B industry, and violent games consistently top sales charts.

If there is truly a direct, causal link between games like Grand Theft Auto V and violent shootings, we will soon have 18 to 20 million killers on our hands, not to mention the countless millions more who have been playing violent video games for years.
Morality Play
In an article remarkable for its odd congruence of measured tone and hyperbole, The New Yorker's Simon Parkin argues that the "go-to argument that video games are analogous to innocuous playground games of cops-and-robbers grows weaker as verisimilitude increases." In other words, as games become more and more realistic, developers need to be more careful about their content.

Grand Theft Auto V can be viewed as a torture simulator (or strip club simulator) depending on which moments in the game you focus on. Parkin mentions a forum poster who hoped rape would be included in the game---it isn't---and imagines a future of games filled with such simulation.

"In a hypothetical motion-controlled video-game version of "Lolita," it would be possible to inhabit the body, as well as the mind, of Humbert Humbert," Parkin writes. "A virtual sex crime might elicit a very different response if, instead of pressing a button to instigate it, you were required to mimic its pelvic thrusts and parries-even if, as in Nabokov's work, it was included to illustrate or illuminate, not titillate."

We always worry about the decadence of our children, the dilapidation of our future society, the immoral nature of people who engage in activities we don't quite understand.

There will always be people who see great, calamitous moral failures just around every corner. Sometimes they're right; more often, I suspect, they're simply uncomfortable with a changing world. After all, we have a desire to explain why bad things happen, and often we blame and evoke fear in order to do that.

When it comes to video games, the loudest voices are very rarely gamers. Like film censors who don't watch film, or book censors who don't read, this creates a hollow sort of analysis.

Grand Theft Auto V does have morally reprehensible characters, but the vast majority of people who play this sort of game---hopefully the adults who play it, and not impressionable children---see this experience as one of virtual, temporary, and entirely fantastical debauchery.

We can drive through stop lights, mow over civilians, crash and die and start over, get in ridiculous gunfights and still walk away on two feet. Or even just go shopping, or play golf, or hunt. We are given a vast canvas of possibilities, and the freedom to pretend to break bad in a cartoonish, outlandish, alternative reality.

Most people can see this for what it is: escapism.

Then again, gamers all too often do the heavy lifting when it comes to painting the demographic in broad, ugly strokes. Game critics and developers have received death threats in the past for changing a game or panning it in a review. There is a small, but vocal, minority of gamers who do their level best to undermine the rest.
The Line
Not everyone can draw lines between fiction and reality.

There are those who almost certainly are influenced by violent media to act out violently. The Aurora shooter had an obsession with The Joker from The Dark Knight film. Would he have carried out his crimes without that film? Who knows. Probably. (Even with tighter gun laws, it seems likely he would have attempted a mass killing. His apartment was rigged with explosives.)

But the horrible actions of the few is no cause for censorship, and all too often the censors really only want to clamp down on other peoples' entertainment, not their own.

No, these shootings should point us to the elephant in the room, the other big common theme across all these mass murderers: untreated mental illness.

If there is a true culprit here, it is a society which allows so many of its mentally ill to fall between the cracks; it is the ease with which potentially violent, obviously disturbed young men gain access to firearms.

If it were as simple as saying "violent video games kill people!" then we'd really be in trouble. It's a silly fallacy, of course. (Homicidal maniacs kill people. Homicidal maniacs play video games. Therefore, video games cause homicidal maniacs to kill people.)

If it were true, millions of your neighbors, kids, and co-workers would be violent killers. So far as I can tell, this is not the case.

None of which is to say that violence in games doesn't matter, or that violence in games or any other media should be protected from analysis or critique. Gamers are rightfully fearful of censorship, but they too often mistake criticism for censorship, and that can make honest, amicable discourse on the topic difficult.

I believe strongly that the media we consume can and does impact our lives in other more subtle ways. "You are what you eat" is an adage that applies equally well to the images and experiences we code into our brains. It may not make us killers, but I find it hard to believe we are simply immune to the things we do on a daily basis.

Games like Spec Ops: The Line attempt to critique this violence and make us think about it critically, and even if we don't agree with the conclusion at least developers and writers are attempting to have the conversation on their own turf rather than on Fox & Friends.

Criticism and calls for censorship are two very different beasts. Video games are an easy scapegoat for a reactionary media and reactionary politicians, but that doesn't mean we should sit back and take an equally partisan, biased view of the ways our media might affect us.

Parents have a huge responsibility to understand and yes, censor, the media their children consume. Adult gamers have a similar responsibility toward their own cultivation of ideas and influences.

Thankfully, the US Supreme Court has made it very clear that the government has no such responsibility in limiting the speech of American citizens.

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Do Games Like 'Grand Theft Auto V' Cause Real-World Violence?

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Two events happened this week that many politicians and members of the media will link together. The first: A mass shooting in Washington, D.C. in which an angry, mentally-ill young man shot and killed a dozen of his fellow citizens. Second: The release of Grand Theft Auto V, the perennially controversial sandbox game.

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Call of Duty Advanced Warfare All Cutscenes Movie

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Call of Duty Ghosts Gameplay Walkthrough Part

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Official Call of Duty®: Ghosts Live-Action Trailer - "Epic Night Out"

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The official Call of Duty®: Ghosts live action trailer, directed by James Mangold and featuring Megan Fox, follows four buddies on the trip of a lifetime through Las Vegas and beyond. Call of Duty: Ghosts arrives globally on November 5th, 2013.