Do video games make us violent?

Is it true that violent-themed video games generate violent behavior in their players?

For many years, the media have fed the rumor that video games with a violent theme represent a very important risk factor in the development of behavior of the same kind in young people.

For a time, it was even alluded to that role-playing games were very dangerous tools because their players could come to believe that the character they were playing was real.

Video games: do they make us more violent or aggressive?

Back in the spring of 2000, a 16-year-old boy brutally murdered his parents and his nine-year-old sister with a katana and, after his actions, was named "The Katana Killer". Despite the seriousness of the crime, what made it tremendously mediatic was the fact that, for a long time, the media claimed that the murderer had committed his acts because he was strongly influenced by Squall, protagonist of the Final Fantasy VIII video game, which led many people to stigmatize video games and role-playing games.

This article will not focus on how the media misrepresents information or on society's reaction to the technological change brought about by video games. The text focuses on finding out the truth behind the binomial violence-video games in order to strip ourselves of social prejudices and show the true correlation.

The reality of the consequences of violent video games

The reality of the issue at present is uncertain due to the lack of studies on the subject. However, the evidence overwhelmingly supports that video games are not guilty of producing violent behavior in their players, beyond what a violent movie or a crime novel can produce.

The truth is that over the years, the number of video games with violent content has increased, the number of video games with violent content has been on the rise.and so has the explicitness and realism of them. But it is even more true that the level of violence among young people has been decreasing considerably, in turn (C. J. Ferguson, 2010). Despite this argument, which for many would be highly enlightening about the reality of the involvement of video games in youth violence, there are authors who strive to demonstrate the opposite, as is the case of Anderson (2004), who published a review of several articles in which he concluded that the more studies are conducted in relation to violence and video games, the clearer the relationship between them becomes.

Studies for all tastes

On the other hand, other studies conducted by the research community claim that the relationship between video games and violence is highly exaggerated on a daily level, as in the case of Tear and Nielsen (2003) who conducted three experiments attempting to demonstrate that video games decreased prosocial behavior or, in other words, the performance of socially accepted actions, obtaining results that denied their hypothesis. Another example of a similar study was by Parker et al. (2013) who attempted to prove their hypothesis that video games and television were strong predictors of behavioral problems and where they they found that this was not the case for video games..

As we can see, there is a strong polarity in terms of the violence generated by video games.. This polarization is built on the basis of the divergence of results shown by the different studies carried out on the violence-video game relationship, which to a large extent, could be explained by the limitations suffered by these studies, which we will discuss below.

Causes of polarity in the study of the violence-video game relationship

The main reason for the results of the studies that assess the relationship between violent video games and the violence shown by young people is the great difficulty in objectifying this type of research (C. J. Ferguson, 2010).

Measuring the level of violence is not an easy task and, in fact, many standardized measures of violence do not correlate positively with actual aggressive behavior, which means that in many cases, some of the results obtained are not one hundred percent accurate. In addition to this, lnfortunately, video games are not, for the moment, an object of study that interests large masses of researchers.The majority of these studies are detailed, low-resource studies, and therefore only a small number of them are published in journals or mass media. To this, it should be added that, in general, the effects of third variables such as gender, genetics, social context, etc., are not usually taken into account.

However, the most damaging and serious of these limitations is undoubtedly the apparent effort of many authors to aggravate the results obtained, exaggerating them or omitting those that are contradictory, in order to see their study published and doing a disservice to the research community and the development of video games.

Psycogaming's view on the matter

Our view on the relationship between violence and video games is clear. Our training and experience show us that this relationship does not correlate in a significant way.It is a factor of low impact and always taking into account the sum of other much more serious factors such as socio-cultural level or the presence of family violence.

In addition, we firmly believe, thanks to research such as that of Barlett et al. (2009) or the aforementioned Ferguson (2010) and experience, that video games are powerful educational tools that are capable, when used correctly, of improving and enhancing cognitive abilities such as creativity, attention, concentration and spatial-visual performance, among others. In addition, they are obviously very effective leisure tools and an alternative method to make young people read and think, who are currently strongly rooted in technology.

Bibliographical references:

• Anderson, C. A. (2004). An update on the effects of playing violent computer games. Journal of Adolescence, 27, 113–122.
• Barlett, P. C.; Vowels, L. C.; Shanteau, J.; Crow, J. & Miller, T. (2009). The effect of violent and non-violent computer games on cognitive performance. Computers in Human Behavior. Vol. 25, 96–102.
• Ferguson, C. J. (2010). Blazing Angels or Resident Evil? Can Violent Video Games Be a Force for Good?. Review of General Psychology. APA. Vol. 14 (2), 68–81.
• Parkes, A., Sweeting, H., Wight, D. & Henderson, M. (2013). Do television and electronic games predict children’s psychosocial adjustment? Longitudinal research using the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Arch Dis Child Vol. 98, 341–348.
• Tear, M. J. & Nielsen, M. (2013). Failure to demonstrate that playing violent video games diminishes prosocial behavior. PLOS ONE. Vol. 8 (7), 1-7.