Do Video Games Cause Violence?

It seems to be a persistent question nowadays “Do video games cause violence?” and the debate regarding violent video games and their psychological effect on people continues to pop up after every mass shooting. For some reason, the media flocks towards the friends and family of shooters the second that they bring up the shooter’s love of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty.

Despite the media’s interest, the question still remains as we try to figure out if video games cause or deter violence (or maybe have no effect at all.)

Video Game Violence Studies

Even though there is a significant amount of public interest in the connection between video games and real world violence, there is not a whole lot in the way of scientific evidence.

A study in 2001, which looked at 35 different research papers concluded that children playing video games do experience physiological signs of aggression. However, the evidence to back this up could be used to back up a connection between sports and violence as well.

The conclusion provided by the researchers simply came from the fact that when children are playing violent video games, hormones such as adrenaline begin pumping and therefore, “flight or flight” reactions kick in (nerd rage anyone?)

In the study, there was another conclusion drawn which tried to suggest a connection between “violence” and video games. Researchers put test subjects in a head-to-head competition, whomever won the competition was allowed to punish the loser with audio blasts.

When the researchers looked at the results, they found that gamers delivered longer and louder audio blasts than the non-gamers.

GTA Violence Makes People Aggressive?

The debate over whether or not video games cause real world violence became prevalent once again with the release of Grand Theft Auto 5. Between the consistent beatings and even a “torture” scene in the game, the media began blaming the piece of entertainment for various crimes.

Unfortunately for the mainstream media, there is no connection between video games such as Grand Theft Auto 5 and actual real world violence.

Let’s Do Some Thinking

So, as video games have become more popular (or even come into existence for that matter), the rate of violent crime in the US should have increased, right? Well, if video games cause violence then yes, as video games become more popular there should be more violence.

However, that is not the case.

In 1960–before Grand Theft Auto was even an idea–there were 3.3 million violent crimes in the US. As time went on, violence became more prevalent and in 1991, violence hit a high-point with 14.8 million violent crimes. Guess what, in 1997 (when GTA first came out) there were nearly 1 million less violent crimes in the US despite a population increase.

Since 1997, violence in America has continued to decrease in a very significant way. Therefore, the only “logical” conclusion to draw from the data is that Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty make people less violent.

Not to mention the fact that there have been less violent crimes since GTA was released, even with the population increasing by more than 50 million.

But that’s silly…

See, I’m just throwing around facts and numbers, there is no reason to think that these violent video games actually cause violence nor does it make sense to say that they deter it.

In reality, there is no strong scientific evidence to backup the idea that violent video games result in violence (especially in children) and if you really wanted to just look at the data, there is definitely no connection.