9 Reasons Video Games Don't Cause Violence
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9 REASONS VIDEO GAMES DON’T CAUSE VIOLENCE By Rob Ager, June 2019 Oh my God folks, you’ll never guess what. Those video games are making people become violent and murderous! … Makes for a nice easy alarmist headline doesn’t it. There have been quite a few half-baked theories to that effect quoted from psychologists and other behavioural “experts” who very rarely express actual knowledge of what it’s like to play a video game. The impression I get from such alarmists is that to them video games are a mysterious thing that other people do. So because they have little in the way of personal experience in the matter, they make lazy assumptions on the subject and rely on their vaguely related academic credentials to lend credibility to those assumptions. Not that they all do this. There have been lots of “experts” who have claimed that video games don’t cause players to become violent or murderous. And I agree with the latter group, not just for the reasons they say, but also for a handful of other reasons that will be included in this article. So here goes … ONE LACK OF CASE EVIDENCE Presently there are hundreds of millions of people who play video games. Many individual game titles have sold tens of millions of copies. The biggest selling game of all time, GTA V (Grand Theft Auto V), was recently reported as having sold over 110 million copies. Being that it’s also a game that has been subject to controversy over its violence, let’s do some very basic math to find out how many violent crimes this game ought to have incited if video games can actually cause violence. If we conservatively assume that 1 out of 10000 players of GTA V will be inspired to commit a violent act then 110 million divided by 10000 = 11000. Yes, if 1 in 10000 players of GTA V were inspired to an actual act of violence then there would be 11000 such cases to report. For argument’s sake let’s assume that just 1% of those 11000 GTA V inspired violent acts would be recognized and publicly reported for their video game influence. 1% of 11000 would be 110. To summarize, if 1 in 10000 players of GTA V was inspired to commit violence and only 1% of those violent acts were reported as being influenced by GTA V then there should be 110 documented cases of violence attributed to that game alone. But I can’t even find 10 proven instances of video game induced violence spanning the entire video games industry since its birth in the 1970’s. So the number of case studies out there really doesn’t support the theory. But for the sake of being thorough let’s look at the cases that are on record. A quick search engine query for sample cases of video games causing violence brings up a handful of compilation articles. But on closer inspection the articles are sensationalist because many of the “cases” involve violent crimes where video game influence has only been theorized as being the central facto, not proven. The supposed cases often involve other mitigating factors such as poverty, drugs, parental abuse, mental ill health, bullying and so on – factors which, in combination have historically caused countless violent crimes without video games being a factor at all. www.collativelearning.com - 9 reasons video games don’t cause violence © by Rob Ager June 2019 1 There also tends to be a lack of specific publicly available detail about the cases. Often the news media narrative is based on little more than a police investigator stating that video games might be a factor. But hey, when a reporter is trying to bait an audience with shock value the finer details hinting at a more standard narrative get ignored. Let’s take an infamous example, the gang of six teenagers who went on a crime spree in New Hyde Park has been reported widely as being the teens attempting to emulate the video game GTA IV. I’ve looked at lots of the media reports on this case and there’s very little information about the personal backgrounds of the six teens, whether they had a previous history of delinquency, violence, car theft, whether they were from broken homes or subject to poverty. Without this info I find it hard to buy into the narrative. Sure, it’s reported that the police said the kids claimed they were imitating the video game, but did the kids just say that to try and get leniency? Had they already decided that they were going to commit a series of crimes anyway and then came up with the idea of enacting the GTA IV game? Did they all view their crime spree as a GTA IV simulation or did just one of them bring that up. And were all six of them actually familiar with the game? There’s a lot of questions and not enough answers, but one statement I did find which goes against the “it was GTA IV” narrative is that in this report (https://web.archive.org/web/20080630075011/http:/www.newsday.com/news/local/crime/ny- lirob275743162jun27%2C0%2C4494415.story) it’s stated there were initially just four youths engaged in the crime spree, but they bumped into a couple of other teens they knew and those teens joined them on the spree. So this sounds more like peer influence than video game induction. This information was easy for me to find and yet most of the news reports on the case don’t mention that factor. Here’s another case. An 8 yr old boy reportedly shot his grandmother right after playing GTA IV. Only an idiot would conclude cause and effect without further detailed information. How did the boy get hold of a loaded handgun? It must have been left out in the open and within easy reach, which should be much more of an issue than what video game he’d played. And did the kid know it was a real gun and that it was loaded? If he thought it was a toy gun or not loaded then it wouldn’t be an act of violence. It would be an accident. That must have been the case because, unless the kid was mentally impaired, he would have known at 8 years of age that shooting his grandmother with a real gun would kill her and get him into a lot of trouble. Another case is the Bethel Regional High School shooter Evan Ramsay. Some have tried to cite him as being influenced by video games to kill. Look at the title of this forum post (https://www.cheapassgamer.com/topic/127847-evan-ramsey-blames-video-games-specifically- doom-for-school-shootings/), which mismatches the actual interview text quoted in support of that title. Ramsay very clearly says that his act was a response to excessive bullying. With regards video games he simply says that he assumed people he shot would get up and run away and thus need to be shot several times before they would die, like in the video game Doom, but he is not saying that the video game caused him to go and kill in the first place. These kinds of contradictions I’ve found over and over again in virtually every alleged instance of video game induced violence that I’ve explored. When a fair amount of detail is released about the perpetrator of the crime, there’s virtually always some collection of other, non-video game, causes www.collativelearning.com - 9 reasons video games don’t cause violence © by Rob Ager June 2019 2 that led to the violence. And being that near enough all boys and teenagers play violent video games today it is going to become harder and harder to find a violent criminal who hasn’t played a violent video game at some point, but that doesn’t mean it’s the cause. One other factor is that the parents of school shooting perpetrator Michael Carneal and the family of one of the Columbine school massacre victims began multimillion lawsuits against various entertainment media companies for supposedly inciting the school shootings through their products, but both cases were dismissed by courts for … lack of evidence. If we were going to be really cynical we could say that the families saw the entertainment media controversy as being a way to earn a fast buck, but I think more likely the issue is denial – denial from Carneal’s parents at their failure as parents and denial from the Columbine victim family that there was a complex history to the killers that can’t just be blamed on someone other than the killers themselves. TWO LACK OF EQUIVALENT BEHAVIOURAL EFFECTS This is an argument I’ve not heard talked about, but I think it has really strong merit. If playing violent video games can induce violent behaviour from the player in the real world then there should be a wide range of similar, non-violent influences on player behaviour. For example, the Tomb Raider video game series should cause some players to start climbing at dangerous heights and leaping across things at great height. If this was the case then we should be hearing about multiple Tomb Raider players falling to their deaths over the 20+ years the games have been on the market. Again, basic maths comes to our aid. Total number of Tombraider game sales is reported to be tens of millions.