Violent video games are a cause of real-world violence
IN THE wake of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, video games were blamed for helping to numb the shooters to the consequences of their actions.
Yet these allegations are much older than the age of mass violence: in the 1970s, journalists fretted about an arcade game called and in 1982, hosted a debate over whether games such as were too violent and taught children not to respect the value of human (not merely alien) life.
These concerns aren’t baseless. A review of the scientific literature, conducted by an American Psychological Association task force, found a “well established” link between violent video games and short-term increases in aggression. People who play violent games in laboratory settings are willing to administer, for example, more hot sauce to a stranger, or a louder blast of noise, than people who don’t play violent games.
Playing violent games also leads to higher levels of what psychologists call “aggressive cognition” – for example, completing a word with a missing letter by choosing a D for “explode” rather than an R for “explore”.
But many scholars dispute these findings, saying that at best they indicate an effect on thoughts rather than actions and at worst merely prove that looking at an image of an explosion makes you think about explosions. Many video games, including
could be called “violent” under the vague definitions psychologists often use. Frustration or competition, rather than violent imagery, might be leading to the heightened feelings of aggression, these researchers say.
Hundreds of scholars signed an open letter in 2013, when the task force began its work, to protest that media-effects research has wellknown methodological issues and that “responsible scholars” may conclude that violent media does not increase aggression. Youth violence is at a historic low, the letter pointed out, at the same time violent video games are more popular than ever.
Regardless, the task force did not find evidence that playing violent video games leads to criminal violence or delinquency. And the favourite game of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, was the non-violent