9/27/19
Do video games actually cause violence?
In recent years, people claimed that violent video games (VVGs) increased violence and aggression in children and that they were presumed to be one of the leading causes of violent acts, such as mass shootings and increased crime rates in adolescents. You might have heard something similar along these lines in current news. To put this in perspective, there have been twenty four school shootings in 2018, this is only counting shootings where people have been injured or killed (Education Week 1.) In most of these cases the first blame often is directed toward the culture of violent video games. More specifically, a major school shooting that took place in Parkland, Florida in 2018 had evoked a presidential response in which President Trump said, “The level of violence (in) video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts” (Fishman 1.) We often end up relying on our instincts and common sense to justify the effects of certain actions, but in reality this same common sense and intuition can be misleading and in this case the pseudo-science behind it is even more misleading, dangerous, and ambiguous to protect a hidden agenda.
In the article “Do Violent Games make kids more violent”, by The Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research attempt to inform worried parents in a solely scientific tone that, in fact, video games do not cause violence and any claim that says they do is backed by pseudo evidence. Prior to this article in 2015, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) determined that they had “…enough research leading to this conclusion…that playing violent video games leads to more aggressive moods and behaviors and detracts from the players’ feelings of empathy and sensitivity to aggression.” which lead them to publish a public policy statement (BCTR 1.) This “misleading and alarmist” stance was responded to by a group of two hundred and thirty pediatric and adolescent health researchers, who in 2015 created an open letter addressing the issue. Later the APA created their own response in which they advised government and news organizations not to refer to violent video games as a cause of aggression due to new evidence and relationships that were uncovered. Such as, researchers discovered a negative correlation with violence in youth and video games, meaning as video game sales increases violence in youth decreases (BCTR, 1.) But the false research still does not do the average person any justice, since when searching for information on this topic you are more likely to encounter websites supporting the point of view that video games cause violence. This is because these articles are more likely to be published compared to the opposition due to the blind support of the public. In The New York Times Article “Video Games Aren’t Why Shootings happen. Politicians Still Blame Them” the author, Kevin Draper, maintains a respective manner to the victims of the shootings that took place in August of 2019 while retaining his stance that video games do not cause violence and politicians only say they do to support their own agenda. He does this by exposing the previous studies, providing detailed new studies with evidence, and through quotes. Dr. Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University ridiculed that “The data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive,” through the use of this analogy it was clear that the intial research on video games was not a reliable conclusion (Draper 1.)
Globally, the United States has some of the highest numbers of gun violence cases compared to other countries with higher video game revenue relative to their population. This is the point of view presented by Philip Bump in his social media post titled “If video games spur gun violence, it’s only in the United States. He retains a confident tone to convince the readers that politicians, such as Trump, are manipulating information to draw attention away from another cause similar to the point of view of Draper. A prime example of this in action is in China, which in 2016 had spent almost 7 billion U.S. dollars more in the video game industry than the United States and have lower gun violence cases, but President Trump still considers VVGs as a major catalyst for gun violence. This can be explained by President Trump political views since, “He sought to explain what link there might be between these shootings incidents besides ready access to firearms” (Bump 1.) Due to President Trump being an obvious Republican intends to cover up a very highly controversial topic discussed in politics about gun control with the VVGs. In Japan and South Korea, where access to firearms is extremely strict and limited, there is lower gun violence and death while receiving almost two-thirds more video game revenue, than the United States. If we look at this picture as a whole we can see that countries with high access to firearms and low video game revenue have a drastically greater number of mass shootings compared to even the United States, thus continuing to support that VVG’s do not have an effect on gun violence, however access to firearms does.
Nonetheless the misconceptions about video games are heavily derived from authoritative figures, news, and media which is often backed up by pseudo-science. In the article “Blame Game: Violent Video Games Do Not Cause Violence” , Andrew Fishman. The author, argues with the stance that video games cause violence and convinced the audience by presenting newer reliable tests that prove his claim and by refuting pseudo science evidence presented. For instance, on one of Jimmy Kimmel shows Jimmy, “…challenged parents to turn off their children’s TVs while they were playing the popular game Fortnite” (Fishman 1.) Not surprisingly, the youth lashed out, some cursing while others striking their parents. This can be explained by the fact that Fornite is a high skill curve game (high difficulty) and it is not as violent as some of the other more violent games, such as Grand Theft Auto. However, while responding to the two mass shootings during August of 2019, many “powerful republicans, including the president (Donald Trump), blamed an old bogeyman: video games” (Draper 1.) There may be some exceptions in which a shooter specifically mentions games as a catalyst because games “shaped his thoughts” (Bump 1.) For example, on August 3rd, 2019, a 2,300 word manifesto showed up online minutes before the mass shooting in El Paso Texas, it was full of anti-immigrant hate speech and says that the attack is a response to the hipsanic invasion of Texas. Later on in the manifesto it says “Don’t attack heavily guarded areas to fulfill your super soldier COD fantasy”, referencing the popular game, Call of Duty (COD). This can lead to a conclusion that the school shooter played video games since he mentions some knowledge of a video game. But even with that one exception, the “United States is the only place where people play a lot of video games and frequently shoot each other to death” (Bump 1.)
The main game constantly used in all if not most articles was Wolfenstein 3D, since it is one of the goriest games and should cause the most aggression. A study conducted to show aggressive behavior used this game as part of its experiment, since it’s gameplay is fast paced and involves shootings. It was compared to a slow paced methodical game called Myst. The results were fairly conclusive that patients who played Wolfenstein where more prone to getting aggressive, but they also had aggressive thoughts when they lost. When the test was reviewed it was concluded that the violent nature of a game, such as gore and heavy blood effects, does not cause antagonistic behavior, but the difficulty of a game does. After these results, the researchers decided to replicate the test with a custom game to control all the variables, mainly the pace of the game. They created two first person shooters to maintain the same pace, in the first game an opponent’s death would be bloody and gruesome, whereas the other game had opponents that when killed will simply disappear. If we were supporting that video games cause violence then the games with more gory and bloody deaths should provoke the players to be more violent, but when the results were reviewed “they found no differences between the groups” (Fishman 1.) Two similar studies were conducted with different games by the same researchers to test if difficulty really was the cause of the slight violence. They used the famous game we all know by Tetris, to two groups, one version of the game remained the default, while the other one one was heavily modified to be harder, such as harder controls and odder shapes. The group that was playing the complicated version of the game depicted much more frustration compared to the group that was playing the regular version, furthermore concluding that VVGs are not the cause of violence in teens. Overall, the violence in VVGs does not impact how aggressive a player would turn out to be, but it was decided by the difficulty of the content.
To wrap it all up yes, video games may be violent in some cases, but there is little to no correlation between VVGs and the increased rates of mass shootings in the past decades. This statement does not only apply to games, but to most accessible violent media as well. The Entertainment Software Association established the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), to put ratings on games preventing the wrong audience from accessing it. Games such as Wolfenstein 3D has a Mature 17+ rating, meaning it should only be accessible to teens above the age of 17, while a game such as Fortnite has a rating of Teen. Often times if children are playing games that are not for their age group its not their fault, its their parents fault for not placing limitations and control. Many gaming communities have also banded together after President Trump’s claims, creating the hashtag, #VideoGamesAreNotToBlame to spread awareness and to mock the claim that video games had anything to do with the two shootings that occurred in August of 2019 (Draper 1.) Accessibility to information is a cause for misinformation and can be manipulated for hidden agendas. People who are ambiguous to the situation are common targets to misleading information. All in all, people need to be cautious of where they get their information from and how it is presented.
Works Cited
BCTR, “Do violent video games make kids more violent?”, Psychology Today, LCC, July 17, 2019
Bump Philip, “If video games spur gun violence, it’s only in the united states”, The Washington Post, Fred Ryan, March 8, 2018
Draper Kevin, “Video games aren’t why shootings happen. Politicians still blame them.”, The New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, Aug 5, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/sports/trump-violent-video-games-studies.html
Education Week, “The School Shootings of 2018: What’s behind the numbers”, Education Week, Editorial Projects in Education, Dec 19, 2018
https://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/the-school-shootings-of-2018-whats-behind.html
Fishman Andrew, “Blame Game: Violent Video Games Do Not Cause Violence”, Psychology Today, LLC, July 16, 2019
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication license.
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