How Does Video Game Violence Cause Violence?

Have you ever noticed the first thing the media or politicians wants to bring up during a mass murder are questions like “did the perpetrator use violent video games as a way to train for this massacre”? Since the late 1970’s video games have been subject to society’s finger pointing of controversy. Before that it was popular literature that held the reigns of the public’s pointer finger such as 1880’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was to blame for encouraging Jack the Ripper’s crimes. From observation and research presented in this paper, you will find that this is because the true motives of someone who commits mass murder is a much deeper issue than “Video games made me do it.” That we as a society want a quick black and white answer with the

In fact, the studies conducted on the link that video game violence influence real world violence are flawed. One of the many flaws of these studies are all down to definitions. As one article points out “Psychologists define violence or aggression as “the intentional injury of another person.” Yet, in video games, there is neither intent to injure nor a living victim” (Lowenstein, 2004). Another flaw would be in the way aggression is linked in these studies and how narrowed the studies are without any comparable sources outside the virtual world. Charles Herold, a video game critic for the New York Times sarcastically yet justifiably points out, in his article, that studies showing a short-term rise in aggressiveness in children after they played video gamers are meaningless if there was no comparable study on short-term aggressiveness after they had played football (2010). To sum up my point about the flaws of studies involved, not even the highest board of researchers can without a doubt tell us that there is a link. Author David Kushner goes on further by explaining that “At the end of the day, scientists-including those behind the studies, cited in the FCC report that they still aren’t sure if playing violent video games leads to real-life violence at all”

A media is a money making business and more times than not they bend or fabricate truths in order to lean to one extreme in order to gain and “entertain” viewers. They know they have a limited time with such a fast paced social construct, explaining a statistic like the complexity of mental health links to video games would take a long and boring time so they point their finger at something easy and fast to present to its viewers. It’s sad because society misses out on some major statistics that would open their mind to different viewpoints. For example. In a viewpoint by James Paul Gee states “The Japanese play video games more than Americans do, as, indeed, they watch more television, but their society is much less violent than America's” (2010). That statistic is never mentioned after a mass murder. Another issue with media is captured in a viewpoint by Christopher J. Ferguson in which he states the media’s portrayal of violence in video games exist because of a weak social science which has yet to escape from an obsession with deterministic learning models that view humans as passive programmed machines rather than active in determining their own behavior