Video Games Are Not Evil

I have a T-shirt that I like to wear from Jinx.com that says,

"Guns don't kill people. Kids who play video games kill people."

It's amazing how many people will laugh, but seriously believe that video games are responsible for an increase in violent crime by young people. I just ran across this article which is not the most professionally written but hits most of the high points. This is an issue that will not go away soon, and it bothers me because I happen to know a little something about video games. It's a guilty pleasure of mine. I've played video games ever since my parents got us an Atari 2600 when I was a kid and I used to play Frostbite on our small black and white TV set (A great game with a great premise -- you jump around on floating blocks of ice that change color when you touch them. Each ice block you change adds one brick to your igloo. Once complete, you need to avoid the bear and enter the igloo. I used to love it when the bear would bite my character on the butt and chase him off the screen. 100% logical, no?). But I digress...

Here's where I'm getting with this: Video games are an entertainment art form like a movie, and like a movie each one is tailored for a particular audience or range of audiences. There is no question that small children should not play violent or gory video games, and also that most high-grossing video games are not suitable for small children. Then again, exactly how many high-grossing movies would you take your six-year-old to? Twenty-five percent? If you see a six-year-old sitting in the audience of the latest slice-and-dice gore flick, do you think to yourself, "Damn Hollywood for making this gory slasher flick! Don't they care about the children?" Of course not. It's not a kids' movie, and unless they were advertising it during Saturday morning cartoons the only crime committed here is producing a tasteless movie.

That's why I grimace when I see politicians like Hillary Clinton speaking out against the dangers of video games in a knee-jerk reaction to the "Hot Coffee Mod" fiasco (for more information click here). I think most parents have come to accept that there are some movies (pictures, books, music, sculptures, finger puppets, etc.) that are inappropriate for their kids. Why is it that they will buy their kid a video game that says on the cover that it is inappropriate for children under 17?

Here is the most compelling evidence that the politicians that have decided to make violence in video gams an issue are full of juicy turds: youth violence, video game-induced or otherwise, is not on the rise, and the average consumer of these video games is a 33-year-old male.



Side Note: As I was researching this, I found this paragraph in a paper from the University of Chicago which didn't really fit into my posting but I found interesting nonetheless:

Measures of aggression

As noted before, very few of the studies even try to measure aggression, and many of the measures have almost nothing to do with aggression. The most distant are measures of thoughts or as they are sometimes called, aggressive cognitions. In some of the studies, if the people in the violent game condition have more thoughts of aggression than those playing the non-violent game, this is considered an indication that violent games cause aggression. This interpretation is not justified. After eating a huge meal, you probably are thinking about food - but you are less rather than more likely to want to eat. After watching a war movie, you probably have thoughts of war, but no one would suggest that you are more likely to wage war unless the movie promoted war. After Schindler’s List, I imagine that most people thought about war and torture and violence, but I hope that most people were less likely to be aggressive rather than more likely. Whatever stimulus you are exposed to, you are more likely to have thoughts related to that stimulus, but that does not mean that your behavior has been affected. Indeed, Graybill et al used aggressive thoughts as a manipulation check to see if the aggressive content of the game was salient, not as a measure of aggression.