President reopens debate on video games

In the wake of the Florida school shooting, President Donald Trump is reviving a debate over whether violent video games can trigger violent behavior. But two decades of research has failed to uncover any such link.

Trump plans to meet Thursday with representatives from the video game industry. Trump's recent comments referencing the “vicious” level of game and movie violence in the context of school safety show that he is eager to explore the issue.

The Entertainment Software Association, the biggest video game trade group, said this week that it will attend the meeting at the White House.

Some studies have shown a connection between gaming and emotional arousal, but there's no evidence this heightened emotional state leads to physical violence.

Patrick Markey, a psychology professor at Villanova University who focuses on video games, found in his research that men who commit severe acts of violence actually play violent video games less than the average male. About 20 percent were interested in violent video games, compared with 70 percent of the general population, he said in his 2017 book “Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong.”

Another study by Markey showed violence tends to dip when a new violent movie or video game comes out, possibility because people are at home playing the game or in theaters watching the movie.

“Everything kind of suggests no link, or if anything, it goes in the opposite direction,” Markey said in an interview.

In 2013, after the shooting at Sandy Hook school in Newton, Conn., Vice President Joe Biden held talks on gun violence prevention including a meeting with video game executives. At that meeting the Entertainment Software Association gave a statement similar to the one it issued this week.

“Like all Americans, we are deeply concerned about the level of gun violence” in the U.S., the organization said Monday. “Video games are plainly not the issue: entertainment is … consumed globally, but the U.S. has an exponentially higher level of gun violence than any other nation.”

In 2013, the White House called on research on the effect of media and video games on gun violence, but nothing substantial came out of that.