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When Grand Theft Auto 4 came out it was very controversial because of the amount of violence involved in it. In the end it didn't encourage more violence and it didn't prevent violence. It was neutral but people were blaming the game for the outburst of violence. It had no correlation and it didn't influence players to commit to violent acts.

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Back when Grand Theft Auto 4 came out in 2008, there was some controversy over the things the game allowed you to do. For example, you could solicit prostitutes, and then kill them and get your money back. The game didn't encourage you to do it, but it didn't prevent you from doing it either. You could also drive down the sidewalk of a virtual city mowing down pedestrians, you could run around attacking people at random, and all sorts of other demented stuff that would be horrible in real life. But the "killing prostitutes" thing was what really got people going.

Now that Grand Theft Auto 5 has finally come out, some folks still aren't happy about letting people be as sick as they want to be in a fantasy world that does not exist:

I can't believe I'm saying this about college students, but some of them are right. It's fiction. And fiction has always been filled with violence and depravity. Shakespeare, anybody? I'm not saying the makers of GTA 5 are Shakespeare, of course. Or even Tarantino. Or even Uwe Boll. But they're operating in the same tradition. They're playing to the groundlings. Cheap thrills for the cheap seats. The only thing that's changed is the technology.

Back in the '50s, moral scolds went after horror comic books for corrupting the fragile minds of America's youth. Back in the Old West, hacks cranked out potboilers about notorious outlaws, and it was a sign of the End Times. The examples are too numerous to count. Fiction has always glamorized violence and brutality and moral decay, and it always will. And there will always be people who want to decide for you whether or not you can handle it.

Some people think video games cause violence. Other people think guns cause it. And busybodies on both sides of the aisle who think they know how to run your life better than you do are always stepping in. "If we could just put limits on [X], we'd have fewer problems with [Y]." Well, that's not how life works. Violence exists because people exist.

I mean none of this as an attack on Caleb Bonham. He has every right to be disgusted by Grand Theft Auto 5, and I would advise him not to play it. I admire him for interviewing students about it and getting their reactions, and he presents a legitimate moral question. I don't blame him for coming to the conclusion he does. I just don't agree with what he thinks it all means.

And for the record, I wouldn't approve of a video game that allowed characters to rape each other. So I'd take the appropriate step: I wouldn't buy it.

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Video games (still) do not cause violence

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Back when Grand Theft Auto 4 came out in 2008, there was some controversy over the things the game allowed you to do. For example, you could solicit prostitutes, and then kill them and get your money back. The game didn't encourage you to do it, but it didn't prevent you from doing it either.

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Countries that play and consume video games tend to be the safest countries in the world. This man researched violent schooler shooters and what type of video games they liked to play or any connection they had to video games to see if they correlated and in the end they didn't. For example, the shooters of Columbine. They played violent video games like Call of Duty but they played other video games more often. They video games they played weren't linked to violence at all actually. When the Columbine shooters were asked what their favorite video game was they said Mario Kart. If they played violent games like Call of Duty, why was Mario Kart their favorite game? This proves violent video games have no correlation to violent actions.

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Image courtesy of Activision
This article is part of a special series on the intersection of guns and games. For more, click here.
We usually take the notion that games don't correlate to real-life violence for granted. But what's the science behind that statement, how did we get there, and can we break the cycle where in a search for answers, games are blamed?

Like most of the country, all of us at Waypoint spent the last month processing the horror of yet another school shooting, while admiring the bravery of the student survivors from Parkland, Florida rising up, demanding change, and taking no bullshit.

In the lead up to this weekend's March for Our Lives, Waypoint is publishing a series of stories this week about gaming's relationship with guns. We're not suggesting playing games, even violent ones, causes real-life violence, but as Austin said in a piece today, "that doesn't mean that the way guns and violence are portrayed in our favorite hobby cannot test our consciousness or that we cannot be critical of their depiction."

To learn more, I spoke with Villanova University professor of psychology Patrick Markey, co-author of the 2017 book Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong. It was a fascinating conversation, in which Markey explained why he used to be someone wondering if games contributed in a way that should worry us:

If you look at my first studies I did a decade ago, they are these studies looking at mundane forms of aggression. These were questionnaires-like, do you feel hostile playing violent video games? I was finding these links were right after you play a violent video game-your mood was temporarily changed. In the early articles [I wrote], I even talk about school shootings in the context of my findings, so I was very much in the camp of it.

But then what happened was Sandy Hook.

After Sandy Hook, I suddenly got inundated with calls from reporters and politicians and so forth, using my research as a suggestion that's what caused it. It made me really reflect on the generalizability of my findings. Can we really take the stuff we've done in the lab and relate it to horrific acts of violence like school shootings? That's when we started to look at real acts of violence-homicides, aggravated assaults, and so forth-because it was a much more direct comparison. It was that investigation where I started to change my mind on whether we should be using what we find in the laboratory to suggest there's a link between real acts of violence.

How the evidence suggests countries that play a lot of games have less real violence:

One thing we found is that the countries that play or consume video games the most often tend to be the safest countries in the world. That's even when we control for all types of variables. We find this correlation- and correlation doesn't mean causation, there might be some third variable that might be causing it-so our job is to try and break it, to put in as many variables in that we might be explaining that relationship, and we haven't been able to. No matter what we try to control for, it always stays negative, it never becomes positive. By negative, I mean the countries that consume the most video games are the safest ones. It never flipts in the other direction.

And how the stereotype that mass shooters play violent games is largely untrue:

We tend to remember the cases that fit our narrative. We have this illusionary correlation. We remember Columbine, we might remember Sandy Hook, the ones that fit our narrative. The ones that don't fit our narrative we don't relate to it, we tend to forget about. We create this false impression that there's a relationship. And even the ones we tend to think relate to it actually don't relate as much as we think. Certainly Columbine, they played Doom, and they played Doom a lot.

But if we look at other cases, like Sandy Hook, that's a prime example. It was often said that he obsessed about violent video games and played them all the time. He definitely owned Call of Duty, there's no doubt he owned it, but it's this million unit seller, it's not surprising an adolescent owned it. But actually what we know from what he was doing up until the killings was, based on the GPS in his car, he kept going to this movie theater, and it's unclear why he was going. But what it turned out, the reason he was going to the movie theater was to play Dance Dance Revolution every single day. If he had an obsession with games, it was Dance Dance Revolution. Even interviews with his friends, his peers, when they were asked about his favorite game, they said his favorite was Super Mario Bros. He played video games, like most adolescent students, but the ones he obsessed about are not the ones we tend to link to violent crime.

Towards the end, we touch on the future of studying games, and whether the bigger danger for games is having them declared formally "addictive." Oh, and loot boxes!
Follow Patrick on Twitter. If you have a tip or a story idea, drop him an email: patrick.klepek@vice.com. Have thoughts? Swing by Waypoints forums to share them!

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We Know Games Don't Cause Real-Life Violence, But Why?

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Image courtesy of Activision This article is part of a special series on the intersection of guns and games. For more, click here. We usually take the notion that games don't correlate to real-life violence for granted.

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Violent video games are actually more likely to destress you and calm you down than anger you and make you want to cause violence. It's proven that if you play video games for less than an hour a day it will make you less aggressive. I think this helps you destress and calm down because video games consist of total focus and patience so this will calm you down more than making you want to act violent.

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FRIDAY, April 3, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- A small study offers a mixed view on whether video games may make kids more aggressive.

Those children who spend more time playing games might be slightly likelier to be hyperactive and to get into fights. But violent video games seem to have no effect on behavior, according to British researchers.

The researchers also said they discovered that kids who played video games for less than an hour a day were more likely to be less aggressive and rated as better-behaved by their teachers.

And even if spending a lot of time playing video games every day may alter the way kids act in everyday life, "all observed behaviors were very small in magnitude, suggesting only a minor relationship at best and that games do not have as large an impact as some parents and practitioners worry," said study author Andrew Przybylski. He is an experimental psychologist at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University.

In the study, researchers looked at 217 teens, 110 males and 107 females, and examined both their video game-playing habits and their personalities as judged by their teachers.

A bit more than half of the girls had never played video games, compared to just 13 percent of the boys. Sixteen percent (18) of the boys played video games more than three hours a day, compared to 3 percent (4) of the girls.

The researchers found that the 22 kids who played video games the most each day were the likeliest to have behavioral problems, exhibit hyperactivity and have trouble academically, although the effects were "quite small in magnitude," Przybylski said. He added that there's no way to know whether kids are drawn to video games because of their personalities, or whether video games alter their personalities.

The kinds of video games that the kids played appeared to have no effect after the researchers adjusted their statistics so factors such as gender wouldn't have an effect.

And there was even an unexpected benefit to playing for short amounts of time each day, the study authors found.

"Individuals who regularly played less than an hour a day of any type of game were actually less likely than their non-playing peers to fight with or bully peers and were rated as better behaved by their teachers," said study co-author Allison Fine Mishkin, a graduate student at Oxford Internet Institute. "This suggests that, in small doses, video games are a valuable and valid form of play which we do not need to fear."

Christopher Ferguson, chair of the psychology department at Stetson University in Florida and a leading critic of studies linking violence to movies and video games, praised the study. In this research area, "it is often difficult to discern good science from overstated panic," he said.

The new study is "in many ways an improvement over what has come before," he added, especially since it relies on perceptions from teachers about the behavior of kids, not the self-descriptions of the kids themselves.

Craig Anderson, director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University, has a different view. He said the study doesn't say much that's new, and he believes that violent video games have been proven to increase aggressive behavior and thinking.

Dr. Claire McCarthy, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, wouldn't go so far as to criticize video games. Considering the lack of definitive research, "we need to be a little bit careful when it comes to vilifying video games," she said. "And we are unlikely to ever know all the answers about the true effects of video games," she added.

"All we can really do is use our common sense, and make sure that kids get plenty of time away from screens, too," McCarthy said. "Playing video games doesn't usually help kids learn the behavioral skills they need to succeed. They still need to get shut off sometimes."

The study was published online recently in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture.
More information
For more about video games and teens, visit the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.

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Violent Video Games Don't Influence Kids' Behavior: Study

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FRIDAY, April 3, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- A small study offers a mixed view on whether video games may make kids more aggressive. Those children who spend more time playing games might be slightly likelier to be hyperactive and to get into fights.

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People mistake celebrating death in media such as movies and video games and think celebrating death in real life can be linked to how the media presents death but it's false. It's not due to videogames it's due to the situation the person's death was in to be considered something to celebrate or not. It's not all deaths people celebrate just because video games do it.

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There Is NO Reason To Blame Video Games For Actual Violence

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The link between video games and violent behavior is unlikely but the link between video games and violent thoughts is more likely to occur. Even though its more likely for violent thoughts to be triggered through video games the thoughts are never pursued most of the time. Playing the bad guy killing the bad guy in a video game is proven to create less hostile feelings towards the frustration of violence in a video game.

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Video Games Don't Cause Violent Behavior