Can we stop with the conjecture and speculation please! There seem to be as many theories about gaming impact on specific incidents and tenuous causal links as there are people that believe there is an intuitive link. The latest is discussed in Cognitive Daily which looks at a study that measures the difference in heart-rate and galvanic skin response when watching a violent video between two groups. The first has played violent video games immediately prior and the second hasn’t. The results are used to insinuate a desensitisation to violence from violent video games. To say that this linkage does not hold up to scientific rigour is a gross understatement.
I see no point in deconstructing their argument however, there is data out there that gives a powerful inferred relationship between video games and real world violence. What annoys me greatly about every argument I see about video games causing violence is that they NEVER directly address broad based violence directly in their study. They either look at links between games and specific acts, or (as in the study mentioned above) they look at violent games link to some factor that they then conject means there is a link to actual violence. So why do none of these studies look at or even mention the statistical impact on real world violence of the violent video game age? Anyone care to make a guess?
I wrote an article on businessgeek about these statistics recently, in that article I was discussing how statistical results can be manipulated to give false information but they are very relevant to this topic as well. The actual trend from the US department of justice is that over the 10 years from 1995 to 2005 actual violence has measurably declined in the US from around 50 violent crimes per 1000 citizens to around 20. This is a significant decline and occurs over the exact same period that the violent video games increased in number, use and explicitness.
Considering that prior to Doom’s release in 1994 the violent crime rate had been flat or climbing since the begining of the dataset in 1973, the only causal relationship that can be made between violent games and actual violence is an inverse one.
While this may seem counter-intuitive to some there is a reasonable hypothesis that could explain this trend. All humans have violent tendencies to some extent. Violent video games allow people to vent these in a safe way. It is possible there are pathologies where the in game actions can cause people to be more violent in real life, but the very distinct trend shows that the majority effect (if any) is towards lower violence from game playing. The other statistic I show in the businessgeek article also shows that children that play violent video games are LESS likely to be involved in actual violent incidents.
So let me summarise, on one side we have conjecture and speculative links between findings and links to violence. On the other side we have a 60% decline in real world violence over the period of time when violent video games have been around, which is a change in the trend prior to 1994. Coupled with this a study that shows that children that play violent games are less likely to get involved in physical fights. Easy decision.
Let me be clear that this is not proof but the only logical conclusion from the evidence available. If you see an argument that games cause violence it needs to be at least as compelling as a 60% decline in violence with one direct link to video games (timescale) to give it any credence. What I would like to see is demographic segmentation of the violence statistics compared to those demographics consumption of violent video games. This would give evidence of the extent of the correlation between games and violence.