The striking truth: video games do not make you violent
When I was nine,I was lucky enough to borrow Grand Theft Auto: III from an extendedcousin without my usually eagle-eyed mother noticing the dreaded 18 onthe front of the box. Within the hour I had parked my car on the head of alocal ‘businessman’ who’d had the temerity to pimp his hoes on my block and,having used the last of my Uzi rounds in a drive-by on an ice cream van, murderedhis associates in broad daylight with a baseball bat.
It’sunderstandable that parents of a nine-year-old might find this a bit much.
If my mother hadbeen aware of the two teenagers in Tennessee who killed a man that year, firingrifles at passing traffic “justlike in Grand Theft Auto,” video games would inevitably have led toviolence: I’d have gotten a clip round the ear for having the cheek to sneak itinto her house.
Like most of mymale peers, I revelled in video games as a child, and many of the industry’sbest games have focused on violence. Fortunately, just like the overwhelmingmajority of those who play video games, I could completely disassociate virtualreality from the real world, which seems an alien concept at present for bothmiddle-aged aunties and American politicians.
By the time Ihad picked up GTA I’d already landed on the D-Day beaches in Medal ofHonour: Frontline, spent most of my summer that year capturing North Koreanwar criminals in Mercenaries, and had guided an SAS unit out of combattheatres in Afghanistan, Colombia, and the Philippines in Conflict: GlobalStorm. I was battle-hardened.
In all thattime, I don’t remember enacting any violence more egregious than a kick in theshins. Video games didn’t make me aggressive, stop me spending hours at thepark or doing well in school, or introduce me to sins I didn’t yet understand.I wouldn’t discover what a pimp (or a hoe) was for years.
There’s anoverwhelming number of peer-reviewed scientific studies that suggest this isthe norm. The Universities of Oxfordand Yorkoffer recent newsworthy examples. So hopefully there shouldn’t be too muchargument, right?
Wrong. Just likevideonasties, or Dungeons andDragons, or popand rock music, or comicbooks, violent video games are being tarred with a brush that doesn’t applyto them.
The grimtragedies in Ohio and Texas have dragged video games back into the limelight asa potential catalyst for serious violence. Donald Trump claims that “thelevel of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.”House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has “alwaysfelt that is a problem for future generations and others… what it does toindividuals”; Kentucky’s governor, Matt Bevin, lambasts thegames “thatcelebrate the slaughtering of people.”
Theseattacks completely fail to explain why gun crime in the United States is farhigher than the countries that sell similar numbers of video games. Rather thaninvestigate the role of gun laws in gun crime, video games are a distractionfrom the difficult questions that many in the country do not want to beanswered. The statistics speak for themselves. Spot the country with the mostliberal gun laws:
Theseattacks tend to ignore both statistical and legal precedents in favour of acompelling narrative, because they’d fall flat if they had to rely on facts. Thecountry’s Supreme Court has ruled that there’sno clear correlation between violent video games and aggressivebehaviour. The only major study linking violence to video games, from theAmerican Psychological Association, has been refuted in anopen letter from 230 academics and accused of “misrepresent[ing]the actual research and misinform[ing] the public.”
Accordingto Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, “thedata on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive. Literally. The numberswork out about the same.” Trump’s relationship with the truth isaccidental at best, but the science here is clear; we cannot link the two.
Mistakenlyassociating bad behaviour, mental illness or ‘sin’ with a medium ofentertainment has been done to death. I’d challenge you to think of an examplewhere the accusers were proven right.
This is a debatewhere the science is as clear as it can be, with legal bodies and a plethora ofresearchers coming to the same conclusion. It’s a dead conversation being usedby people who ignore the evidence to distract from the truth: that banningvideo games is not going to stop the next high school massacre.