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Do video games desensitize people from violence?

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Do video games desensitize people from violence?

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I do believe that video games are desensitizing people, but I also believe that it's an outlet for mild frustration. My first source, procon.org, gives a whole list of reasons for and against the theory of video games causing violence. If you take a look, cons outnumber pros by 2. Yes, studies have shown that people who have recently played violent games tend to react less when faced with violent photos, and yes, many violent people enjoy playing violent games, but so do most other adolescents, males in particular. In fact, a sizable number of teen boys say that playing violent games help them deal with stressors and irritants in their life. As Christopher Ferguson says in the CNN article I used as my second source, "by keeping young males busy with things they like, you keep them off the streets and out of trouble."

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Around 73% of American kids age 2-17 played video games in 2019, a 6% increase over 2018. Video games accounted for 17% of kids' entertainment time and 11% of their entertainment spending. The global video game industry was worth contributing $159.3 billion in 2020, a 9.3% increase of 9.3% from 2019.

Violent video games have been blamed for school shootings, increases in bullying, and violence towards women. Critics argue that these games desensitize players to violence, reward players for simulating violence, and teach children that violence is an acceptable way to resolve conflicts.

Video game advocates contend that a majority of the research on the topic is deeply flawed and that no causal relationship has been found between video games and social violence. They argue that violent video games may provide a safe outlet for aggressive and angry feelings and may reduce crime. Read more background...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1

Playing violent video games causes more aggression, bullying, and fighting.

60% of middle school boys and 40% of middle school girls who played at least one Mature-rated (M-rated) game hit or beat up someone, compared with 39% of boys and 14% of girls who did not play M-rated games.

Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that children who play M-rated games are more likely to bully and cyberbully their peers, get into physical fights, be hostile, argue with teachers, and show aggression towards their peers throughout the school year.
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Pro 2

Simulating violence such as shooting guns and hand-to-hand combat in video games can cause real-life violent behavior.

Video games often require players to simulate violent actions, such as stabbing, shooting, or dismembering someone with an ax, sword, chainsaw, or other weapons.

Game controllers are so sophisticated and the games are so realistic that simulating the violent acts enhances the learning of those violent behaviors.

A 2015 peer-reviewed study found "compelling evidence that the use of realistic controllers can have a significant effect on the level of cognitive aggression."

Bruce Bartholow, PhD, Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri, spoke about the effects of simulating violence: "More than any other media, these [violent] video games encourage active participation in violence. From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence."
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Pro 3

Many perpetrators of mass shootings played violent video games.

Kevin McCarthy, US Representative (R-CA), stated: "But the idea of these video games that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals and others - I've always felt that is a problem for future generations and others. We've watched from studies shown before of what it does to individuals. When you look at these photos of how it [mass shootings] took place, you can see the actions within video games and others."

An FBI school shooter threat assessment stated that a student who makes threats of violence should be considered more credible if he or she also spends "inordinate amounts of time playing video games with violent themes."

Dan Patrick, Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas, stated: "We've always had guns, always had evil, but I see a video game industry that teaches young people to kill."
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Pro 4

Violent video games desensitize players to real-life violence.

Desensitization to violence was defined in a Journal of Experimental Social Psychology peer-reviewed study as "a reduction in emotion-related physiological reactivity to real violence."

The study found that just 20 minutes of playing a violent video game "can cause people to become less physiologically aroused by real violence." People desensitized to violence are more likely to commit a violent act.

By age 18, American children will have seen 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence depicted in violent video games, movies, and television.

A Sep. 2011 peer-reviewed study found a causal link between violent video game exposure and an increase in aggression as a result of a reduction in the brain's response to depictions of real-life violence.

In a 2005 peer-reviewed study, violent video game exposure was linked to reduced P300 amplitudes in the brain, which is associated with desensitization to violence and increases in aggressive behavior.
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Pro 5

By inhabiting violent characters in video games, children are more likely to imitate the behaviors of those characters and have difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy.

US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his dissent in Brown v. ESA that "the closer a child's behavior comes, not to watching, but to acting out horrific violence, the greater the potential psychological harm."
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Pro 6

Exposure to violent video games is linked to lower empathy and decreased kindness.

Empathy, the ability to understand and enter into another's feelings is believed to inhibit aggressive behavior. In a study of 150 fourth and fifth graders by Jeanne Funk, PhD, Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Toledo, violent video games were the only type of media associated with lower empathy.

Eight independent tests measuring the impact of violent video games on prosocial behavior found a significant negative effect, leading to the conclusion that "exposure to violent video games is negatively correlated with helping in the real world."

A meta-analysis of 130 international studies with over 130,000 participants concluded that violent video games "increase aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and aggressive behaviors, and decrease empathic feelings and prosocial behaviors."
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Pro 7

Video games that portray violence against women lead to more harmful attitudes and sexually violent actions towards women.

A 1998 peer-reviewed study found that 21% of games sampled involved violence against women, while 28% portrayed them as sex objects.

Exposure to sexual violence in video games is linked to increases in violence towards women and false attitudes about rape, such as that women incite men to rape or that women secretly desire rape.

Carole Lieberman, MD, a media psychiatrist, stated, "The more video games a person plays that have violent sexual content, the more likely one is to become desensitized to violent sexual acts and commit them."
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Pro 8

Violent video games reinforce fighting as a means of dealing with conflict by rewarding the use of violent action with increased life force, more weapons, moving on to higher levels, and more.
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Pro 9

The US military uses violent video games to train soldiers to kill.

The US Marine Corps licensed Doom II in 1996 to create Marine Doom in order to train soldiers. In 2002, the US Army released first-person shooter game America's Army to recruit soldiers and prepare recruits for the battlefield.

While the military may benefit from training soldiers to kill using video games, kids who are exposed to these games lack the discipline and structure of the armed forces and may become more susceptible to being violent.

Dave Grossman, retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army and former West Point psychology professor, stated: "[T]hrough interactive point-and-shoot video games, modern nations are indiscriminately introducing to their children the same weapons technology that major armies and law enforcement agencies around the world use to 'turn off' the midbrain 'safety catch'" that prevents most people from killing.
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Con 1

Studies have shown violent video games may cause aggression, not violence. Further, any competitive video game or activity may cause aggression.

A peer-reviewed study in Psychology of Violence determined that the competitive nature of a video game was related to aggressive behavior, regardless of whether the game contained violent content. The researchers concluded: "Because past studies have failed to equate the violent and nonviolent video games on competitiveness, difficulty, and pace of action simultaneously, researchers may have attributed too much of the variability in aggression to the violent content." A follow-up study tracked high school students for four years and came to the same conclusion: the competitive nature of the games led to the increased hostile behavior.
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Con 2

Violent video games are a convenient scapegoat for those who would rather not deal with the actual causes of violence in the US.

Patrick Markey, PhD, Psychology Professor at Villanova University, stated: "The general story is people who play video games right after might be a little hopped up and jerky but it doesn't fundamentally alter who they are. It is like going to see a sad movie. It might make you cry but it doesn't make you clinically depressed... Politicians on both sides go after video games it is this weird unifying force. It makes them look like they are doing something... They [violent video games] look scary. But research just doesn't support that there's a link [to violent behavior]."

Markey also explained, "Because video games are disproportionately blamed as a culprit for mass shootings committed by White perpetrators, video game 'blaming' can be viewed as flagging a racial issue. This is because there is a stereotypical association between racial minorities and violent crime."

Andrew Przybylski, PhD, Associate Professor, and Senior Research Fellow and Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, stated: "Games have only become more realistic. The players of games and violent games have only become more diverse. And they're played all around the world now. But the only place where you see this kind of narrative still hold any water, that games and violence are related to each other, is in the United States. [And, by blaming video games for violence,] we reduce the value of the political discourse on the topic, because we're looking for easy answers instead of facing hard truths."

Hillary Clinton, JD, Former Secretary of State and First Lady, tweeted, "People suffer from mental illness in every other country on earth; people play video games in virtually every other country on earth. The difference is the guns."
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Con 3

Simple statistics do not support the claim that violent video games cause mass shootings or other violence.

Katherine Newman, PhD, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, explained: "Millions of young people play video games full of fistfights, blazing guns, and body slams... Yet only a minuscule fraction of the consumers become violent."

A report by the US Secret Service and US Department of Education examined 37 incidents of targeted school violence between 1974 and 2000. Of the 41 attackers studied, 27% had an interest in violent movies, 24% in violent books, and 37% exhibited interest in their own violent writings, while only 12% showed interest in violent video games. The report did not find a relationship between playing violent video games and school shootings.

Patrick M. Markey, PhD, Director of the Interpersonal Research Laboratory at Villanova University, stated, "90% of young males play video games. Finding that a young man who committed a violent crime also played a popular video game, such as Call of Duty, Halo, or Grand Theft Auto, is as pointless as pointing out that the criminal also wore socks."

Further, gun violence is less prevalent in countries with high video game use. A study of the countries representing the 10 largest video game markets internationally found no correlation between playing video games and gun-related killings. Even though US gun violence is high, the nine other countries with the highest video game usage have some of the lowest violent crime rates (and eight of those countries spend more per capita on video games than the United States).
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Con 4

As sales of violent video games have significantly increased, violent juvenile crime rates have significantly decreased.

Total US sales of video game hardware and software increased 204% from 1994 to 2014, reaching $13.1 billion in 2014, while violent crimes decreased 37% and murders by juveniles acting alone fell 76% in that same period.

An Aug. 2014 peer-reviewed study found that: "Monthly sales of video games were related to concurrent decreases in aggravated assaults."
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Con 5

Studies have shown that violent video games can have a positive effect on kindness, civic engagement, and prosocial behaviors.

Research shows that playing violent video games can induce a feeling of guilt that leads to increased prosocial behavior (positive actions that benefit others) in the real world.
Read More

Con 6

Many risk factors are associated with youth violence, but video games are not among them.

The US Surgeon General's list of risk factors for youth violence included abusive parents, poverty, neglect, neighborhood crime, being male, substance use, and mental health problems, but not video games.

A peer-reviewed study even found a "real and significant" effect of hot weather on homicides and aggravated assaults, showing that heat is a risk factor for violence.
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Con 7

Violent video game players know the difference between virtual violence in the context of a game and appropriate behavior in the real world.

By age seven, children can distinguish fantasy from reality, and can tell the difference between video game violence and real-world violence. Video game players understand they are playing a game. Kids see fantasy violence all the time, from Harry Potter and the Minions to Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry. Their ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality prevents them from emulating video game violence in real life. Exposure to fantasy is important for kids. Fisher-Price toy company stated: "Pretending is more than play: it's a major part of a child's development. Fantasy not only develops creative thinking, it's also a way for children to deal with situations and problems that concern them."
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Con 8

Violent video games provide opportunities for children to explore consequences of violent actions, develop their moral compasses and release their stress and anger (catharsis) in the game, leading to less real world aggression.

A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that children, especially boys, play video games as a means of managing their emotions: "61.9% of boys played to 'help me relax,' 47.8% because 'it helps me forget my problems,' and 45.4% because 'it helps me get my anger out."

Researchers point to the cathartic effect of video games as a possible reason for why higher game sales have been associated with lower crime rates. [84] A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Adolescent Research concluded that "Boys use games to experience fantasies of power and fame, to explore and master what they perceive as exciting and realistic environments (but distinct from real life), to work through angry feelings or relieve stress, and as social tools." The games serve as a substitute for rough-and-tumble play.
Read More

Con 9

Studies claiming a causal link between video game violence and real life violence are flawed.
Read More

Did You Know?

1.

Video game sales set a record in Mar. 2020, with Americans spending $5.6 billion on hardware, accessories, and content, a continuation of a years-long upward trend.

2.

The global video game industry was worth contributing $159.3 billion in 2020, a 9.3% increase of 9.3% from 2019.

3.

Around 73% of American kids age 2-17 played video games in 2019, a 6% increase over 2018 and a continuation of a years-long upward trend.

4.

An Aug. 2015 report from the American Psychological Association determined that playing violent video games is linked to increased aggression, but it did not find sufficient evidence of a link between the games and increased violence.

5.

Video games accounted for 17% of kids' entertainment time and 11% of their entertainment spending in 2019.

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Do Video Games Cause Violence? 9 Pros and Cons

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Around 73% of American kids age 2-17 played video games in 2019, a 6% increase over 2018. Video games accounted for 17% of kids' entertainment time and 11% of their entertainment spending. The global video game industry was worth contributing $159.3 billion in 2020, a 9.3% increase of 9.3% from 2019.

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Story highlights

President Donald Trump said Thursday during a White House meeting on school safety that the nation needs to address what young people are seeing.

"I'm hearing more and more people saying the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts," he said. "And then you go the further step, and that's the movies. You see these movies - they're so violent, and yet a kid is able to see the movie if sex isn't involved." Killing, though, is involved, he said.

His remarks were dismissed by Chris Grady, a survivor of the February 14 shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida: "I grew up playing video games ... first-person shooter games, and I would never, ever dream of taking the lives of any of my peers."

In Munich, Germany, an 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people in July 2016 was a fan of first-person shooter video games, according to reports. This detail led many to worry that violent video games may be negatively affecting their own children.

What is the truth?

Both the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics take a firm stance against children and teens playing violent video games.

The psychological group reports that more than 90% of children in the United States play video games. Among kids between the ages of 12 and 17, the number rises to 97%. More important, 85% or more of video games on the market contain some form of violence. The titles seem to say it all: "Manhunt," "Thrill Kill," "Gears of War" and "Mortal Kombat." However, even the seemingly benign "Pokemon Go" requires players to go to battle.

The American Psychological Association observed in an August 2015 policy statement that research demonstrated a link "between violent video game use and both increases in aggressive behavior ... and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral engagement."

In its July 2016 guideline on media violence,the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that violent media set a poor example for kids. Video games, the academy noted, "should not use human or other living targets or award points for killing, because this teaches children to associate pleasure and success with their ability to cause pain and suffering to others."

Overall, the academy's summary of the results from more than 400 studies revealed a "significant" link between being exposed to violent media (in general) and aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts and angry feelings.

These clear, no-nonsense arguments appeal to many parents. However, they may not represent the views of the entire field. Some social scientists have come up with more unexpected results.

Whitney DeCamp, an associate professor of sociology at Western Michigan University, says the evidence points to either no relationship between playing video games and violent behavior or an "insignificant" link between the two.

Sure, he said, some studies have revealed a connection between kids playing violent video games and violent behavior. But there is a problem with "looking at those two things in a vacuum": Kids who like to play brutal video games may have a predisposition toward aggression, he said.

The real question, he said: Does playing violent games cause a person to act violently?

In his own study, he examined that question using data from the 2008 Delaware School Survey, which included responses from 6,567 eighth-graders. Among the questions, students were asked whether they had played violent video games in the past year. DeCamp factored out the propensity to play violent video games (due to a natural attraction to brutality) along with other factors, such as gender and family relations.

He discovered that playing video games, no matter how bloody, did not predict violent behavior.

Christopher Ferguson, associate professor and co-chairman of the Department of Psychology at Stetson University, supports this view. In fact, he goes so far as to suggest that violent video games may help reduce societal violence rather than increase it.

"Basically, by keeping young males busy with things they like" - and this would include everything from playing sports and collecting stamps to playing first-person shooter video games - "you keep them off the streets and out of trouble," he said.

He added that newer studies "with better methods" have typically failed to find much evidence of a connection between brutal games and even minor aggressive acts, let alone violence.

Persuasive evidence comes from an economic study published in February 2016, which looked at violent criminal offenses in the weeks after the release of popular video games. Tracking both sales and crime rates, the authors discovered that general societal violence decreased in the weeks after the appearance of a new edition of a popular title.

Obviously, this does not rule out longer-term effects, the authors admit. Still, they make a bid for the games offering "cathartic" effects, allowing players to safely release their aggression.

While the debate rages on, Ferguson believes the tide has turned against linking video games to violence. There's more skepticism these days, he said, and a group of 238 scholars asked the American Psychological Association to retire its "outdated and problematic statements on video game violence."

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When asked about the teen shooter in Munich, DeCamp said, "we need to take a lot of caution before we place the blame on any one particular thing." Meanwhile, Ferguson noted that "almost all young males play violent video games," and yet the majority are not committing crimes.

Both the psychological association and the American Academy of Pediatrics suggest that parents take an active interest in and monitor the games played by their children. This simple bit of practical advice - and not an all-out prohibition - may be the best solution.

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computer science and information technology

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President Donald Trump said Thursday during a White House meeting on school safety that the nation needs to address what young people are seeing. "I'm hearing more and more people saying the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts," he said.

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Bloodborne - Cut You Down Trailer | The Hunt Begins | PS4

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Bloodborne is the latest Action RPG from renowned Japanese developer FromSoftware, in collaboration with SCE Japan Studio, available exclusively for the PlayStation®4 system. Game Details: Face your fears as you search for answers in the ancient city of Yharnam, now cursed with a strange endemic illness spreading through the streets like wildfire.

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Grand Theft Auto V Official Trailer #2 with subtitles (English, Français, Deutsch, Italiano & Español - Click on the Closed Captions "CC" Button) Watch the Trailer Analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlw67LttprM Follow the GTA V Show for more news: http://www.youtube.com/show/gtafive The second official trailer for Grand Theft Auto V.