argumentative essay video games and violence

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

Pro and Con: Violent Video Games

To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, and discussion questions about whether violent video games contribute to youth violence, go to ProCon.org .

Around 73% of American kids age 2-17 played video games in 2019, a 6% increase over 2018. Video games accounted for 17% of kids’ entertainment time and 11% of their entertainment spending. The global video game industry was worth contributing $159.3 billion in 2020, a 9.3% increase of 9.3% from 2019.

The debate over violent video games can be traced back to the 1976 release of the game Death Race. The object of the game was to run over screaming “gremlins” with a car, at which point they would turn into tombstones. Controversy erupted because the “gremlins” resembled stick-figure humans, and it was reported that the working title of the game was Pedestrian. After protestors dragged Death Race machines out of arcades and burned them in parking lots, production of the game ceased.

In 1993, public outcry following the release of violent video games Mortal Kombat and Night Trap prompted Congress to hold hearings on regulating the sale of video games. During the hearings, California Attorney General Dan Lungren testified that violent video games have “a desensitizing impact on young, impressionable minds.” Threatened with the creation of a federal regulatory commission, the video game industry voluntarily established the  Entertainment Software Rating Board  (ESRB) on Sep. 1, 1994 to create a ratings system. Based on the video game’s content, the ESRB assigns one of the following ratings: “Early Childhood,” “Everyone,” “Everyone 10+,” “Teen,” “Mature,” “Adults Only,” or “Rating Pending” (only for use in advertising for games not yet rated). In a Pew Research Center 2008 survey, 50% of boys and 14% of girls aged 12-17 listed a game with a “Mature” or “Adults Only” rating in their current top three favorite games.

An Aug. 2015 report from the American Psychological Association determined that playing violent video games is linked to increased aggression, but it did not find sufficient evidence of a link between the games and increased violence. The organization reaffirmed this position in 2020: “There is insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior… [T]he new task force report reaffirms that there is a small, reliable association between violent video game use and aggressive outcomes, such as yelling and pushing. However, these research findings are difficult to extend to more violent outcomes.” 

• Playing violent video games causes more aggression, bullying, and fighting.
• Simulating violence such as shooting guns and hand-to-hand combat in video games can cause real-life violent behavior.
• Many perpetrators of mass shootings played violent video games.
• Violent video games desensitize players to real-life violence.
• By inhabiting violent characters in video games, children are more likely to imitate the behaviors of those characters and have difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy.
• Exposure to violent video games is linked to lower empathy and decreased kindness.
• Video games that portray violence against women lead to more harmful attitudes and sexually violent actions towards women.
• Violent video games reinforce fighting as a means of dealing with conflict by rewarding the use of violent action with increased life force, more weapons, moving on to higher levels, and more.
• The US military uses violent video games to train soldiers to kill.
• Studies have shown violent video games may cause aggression, not violence. Further, any competitive video game or activity may cause aggression.
• Violent video games are a convenient scapegoat for those who would rather not deal with the actual causes of violence in the US.
• Simple statistics do not support the claim that violent video games cause mass shootings or other violence.
• As sales of violent video games have significantly increased, violent juvenile crime rates have significantly decreased.
• Studies have shown that violent video games can have a positive effect on kindness, civic engagement, and prosocial behaviors.
• Many risk factors are associated with youth violence, but video games are not among them.
• Violent video game players know the difference between virtual violence in the context of a game and appropriate behavior in the real world.
• Violent video games provide opportunities for children to explore consequences of violent actions, develop their moral compasses and release their stress and anger (catharsis) in the game, leading to less real world aggression.
• Studies claiming a causal link between video game violence and real life violence are flawed.

This article was published on June 8, 2021, at Britannica’s ProCon.org , a nonpartisan issue-information source.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Open access
• Published: 13 March 2018

Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study

• Simone Kühn 1 , 2 ,
• Dimitrij Tycho Kugler 2 ,
• Katharina Schmalen 1 ,
• Markus Weichenberger 1 ,
• Charlotte Witt 1 &
• Jürgen Gallinat 2  

Molecular Psychiatry volume  24 ,  pages 1220–1234 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

555k Accesses

108 Citations

2335 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Neuroscience

It is a widespread concern that violent video games promote aggression, reduce pro-social behaviour, increase impulsivity and interfere with cognition as well as mood in its players. Previous experimental studies have focussed on short-term effects of violent video gameplay on aggression, yet there are reasons to believe that these effects are mostly the result of priming. In contrast, the present study is the first to investigate the effects of long-term violent video gameplay using a large battery of tests spanning questionnaires, behavioural measures of aggression, sexist attitudes, empathy and interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs (such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness, risk taking, delay discounting), mental health (depressivity, anxiety) as well as executive control functions, before and after 2 months of gameplay. Our participants played the violent video game Grand Theft Auto V, the non-violent video game The Sims 3 or no game at all for 2 months on a daily basis. No significant changes were observed, neither when comparing the group playing a violent video game to a group playing a non-violent game, nor to a passive control group. Also, no effects were observed between baseline and posttest directly after the intervention, nor between baseline and a follow-up assessment 2 months after the intervention period had ended. The present results thus provide strong evidence against the frequently debated negative effects of playing violent video games in adults and will therefore help to communicate a more realistic scientific perspective on the effects of violent video gaming.

Similar content being viewed by others

The associations between autistic characteristics and microtransaction spending

No effect of short term exposure to gambling like reward systems on post game risk taking

Increasing prosocial behavior and decreasing selfishness in the lab and everyday life

The concern that violent video games may promote aggression or reduce empathy in its players is pervasive and given the popularity of these games their psychological impact is an urgent issue for society at large. Contrary to the custom, this topic has also been passionately debated in the scientific literature. One research camp has strongly argued that violent video games increase aggression in its players [ 1 , 2 ], whereas the other camp [ 3 , 4 ] repeatedly concluded that the effects are minimal at best, if not absent. Importantly, it appears that these fundamental inconsistencies cannot be attributed to differences in research methodology since even meta-analyses, with the goal to integrate the results of all prior studies on the topic of aggression caused by video games led to disparate conclusions [ 2 , 3 ]. These meta-analyses had a strong focus on children, and one of them [ 2 ] reported a marginal age effect suggesting that children might be even more susceptible to violent video game effects.

To unravel this topic of research, we designed a randomised controlled trial on adults to draw causal conclusions on the influence of video games on aggression. At present, almost all experimental studies targeting the effects of violent video games on aggression and/or empathy focussed on the effects of short-term video gameplay. In these studies the duration for which participants were instructed to play the games ranged from 4 min to maximally 2 h (mean = 22 min, median = 15 min, when considering all experimental studies reviewed in two of the recent major meta-analyses in the field [ 3 , 5 ]) and most frequently the effects of video gaming have been tested directly after gameplay.

It has been suggested that the effects of studies focussing on consequences of short-term video gameplay (mostly conducted on college student populations) are mainly the result of priming effects, meaning that exposure to violent content increases the accessibility of aggressive thoughts and affect when participants are in the immediate situation [ 6 ]. However, above and beyond this the General Aggression Model (GAM, [ 7 ]) assumes that repeatedly primed thoughts and feelings influence the perception of ongoing events and therewith elicits aggressive behaviour as a long-term effect. We think that priming effects are interesting and worthwhile exploring, but in contrast to the notion of the GAM our reading of the literature is that priming effects are short-lived (suggested to only last for <5 min and may potentially reverse after that time [ 8 ]). Priming effects should therefore only play a role in very close temporal proximity to gameplay. Moreover, there are a multitude of studies on college students that have failed to replicate priming effects [ 9 , 10 , 11 ] and associated predictions of the so-called GAM such as a desensitisation against violent content [ 12 , 13 , 14 ] in adolescents and college students or a decrease of empathy [ 15 ] and pro-social behaviour [ 16 , 17 ] as a result of playing violent video games.

However, in our view the question that society is actually interested in is not: “Are people more aggressive after having played violent video games for a few minutes? And are these people more aggressive minutes after gameplay ended?”, but rather “What are the effects of frequent, habitual violent video game playing? And for how long do these effects persist (not in the range of minutes but rather weeks and months)?” For this reason studies are needed in which participants are trained over longer periods of time, tested after a longer delay after acute playing and tested with broader batteries assessing aggression but also other relevant domains such as empathy as well as mood and cognition. Moreover, long-term follow-up assessments are needed to demonstrate long-term effects of frequent violent video gameplay. To fill this gap, we set out to expose adult participants to two different types of video games for a period of 2 months and investigate changes in measures of various constructs of interest at least one day after the last gaming session and test them once more 2 months after the end of the gameplay intervention. In contrast to the GAM, we hypothesised no increases of aggression or decreases in pro-social behaviour even after long-term exposure to a violent video game due to our reasoning that priming effects of violent video games are short-lived and should therefore not influence measures of aggression if they are not measured directly after acute gaming. In the present study, we assessed potential changes in the following domains: behavioural as well as questionnaire measures of aggression, empathy and interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs (such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness, risk taking, delay discounting), and depressivity and anxiety as well as executive control functions. As the effects on aggression and pro-social behaviour were the core targets of the present study, we implemented multiple tests for these domains. This broad range of domains with its wide coverage and the longitudinal nature of the study design enabled us to draw more general conclusions regarding the causal effects of violent video games.

Materials and methods

Participants.

Ninety healthy participants (mean age = 28 years, SD = 7.3, range: 18–45, 48 females) were recruited by means of flyers and internet advertisements. The sample consisted of college students as well as of participants from the general community. The advertisement mentioned that we were recruiting for a longitudinal study on video gaming, but did not mention that we would offer an intervention or that we were expecting training effects. Participants were randomly assigned to the three groups ruling out self-selection effects. The sample size was based on estimates from a previous study with a similar design [ 18 ]. After complete description of the study, the participants’ informed written consent was obtained. The local ethics committee of the Charité University Clinic, Germany, approved of the study. We included participants that reported little, preferably no video game usage in the past 6 months (none of the participants ever played the game Grand Theft Auto V (GTA) or Sims 3 in any of its versions before). We excluded participants with psychological or neurological problems. The participants received financial compensation for the testing sessions (200 Euros) and performance-dependent additional payment for two behavioural tasks detailed below, but received no money for the training itself.

Training procedure

The violent video game group (5 participants dropped out between pre- and posttest, resulting in a group of n  = 25, mean age = 26.6 years, SD = 6.0, 14 females) played the game Grand Theft Auto V on a Playstation 3 console over a period of 8 weeks. The active control group played the non-violent video game Sims 3 on the same console (6 participants dropped out, resulting in a group of n  = 24, mean age = 25.8 years, SD = 6.8, 12 females). The passive control group (2 participants dropped out, resulting in a group of n  = 28, mean age = 30.9 years, SD = 8.4, 12 females) was not given a gaming console and had no task but underwent the same testing procedure as the two other groups. The passive control group was not aware of the fact that they were part of a control group to prevent self-training attempts. The experimenters testing the participants were blind to group membership, but we were unable to prevent participants from talking about the game during testing, which in some cases lead to an unblinding of experimental condition. Both training groups were instructed to play the game for at least 30 min a day. Participants were only reimbursed for the sessions in which they came to the lab. Our previous research suggests that the perceived fun in gaming was positively associated with training outcome [ 18 ] and we speculated that enforcing training sessions through payment would impair motivation and thus diminish the potential effect of the intervention. Participants underwent a testing session before (baseline) and after the training period of 2 months (posttest 1) as well as a follow-up testing sessions 2 months after the training period (posttest 2).

Grand Theft Auto V (GTA)

GTA is an action-adventure video game situated in a fictional highly violent game world in which players are rewarded for their use of violence as a means to advance in the game. The single-player story follows three criminals and their efforts to commit heists while under pressure from a government agency. The gameplay focuses on an open world (sandbox game) where the player can choose between different behaviours. The game also allows the player to engage in various side activities, such as action-adventure, driving, third-person shooting, occasional role-playing, stealth and racing elements. The open world design lets players freely roam around the fictional world so that gamers could in principle decide not to commit violent acts.

The Sims 3 (Sims)

Sims is a life simulation game and also classified as a sandbox game because it lacks clearly defined goals. The player creates virtual individuals called “Sims”, and customises their appearance, their personalities and places them in a home, directs their moods, satisfies their desires and accompanies them in their daily activities and by becoming part of a social network. It offers opportunities, which the player may choose to pursue or to refuse, similar as GTA but is generally considered as a pro-social and clearly non-violent game.

Assessment battery

To assess aggression and associated constructs we used the following questionnaires: Buss–Perry Aggression Questionnaire [ 19 ], State Hostility Scale [ 20 ], Updated Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale [ 21 , 22 ], Moral Disengagement Scale [ 23 , 24 ], the Rosenzweig Picture Frustration Test [ 25 , 26 ] and a so-called World View Measure [ 27 ]. All of these measures have previously been used in research investigating the effects of violent video gameplay, however, the first two most prominently. Additionally, behavioural measures of aggression were used: a Word Completion Task, a Lexical Decision Task [ 28 ] and the Delay frustration task [ 29 ] (an inter-correlation matrix is depicted in Supplementary Figure 1 1). From these behavioural measures, the first two were previously used in research on the effects of violent video gameplay. To assess variables that have been related to the construct of impulsivity, we used the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale [ 30 ] and the Boredom Propensity Scale [ 31 ] as well as tasks assessing risk taking and delay discounting behaviourally, namely the Balloon Analogue Risk Task [ 32 ] and a Delay-Discounting Task [ 33 ]. To quantify pro-social behaviour, we employed: Interpersonal Reactivity Index [ 34 ] (frequently used in research on the effects of violent video gameplay), Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale [ 35 ], Reading the Mind in the Eyes test [ 36 ], Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire [ 37 ] and Richardson Conflict Response Questionnaire [ 38 ]. To assess depressivity and anxiety, which has previously been associated with intense video game playing [ 39 ], we used Beck Depression Inventory [ 40 ] and State Trait Anxiety Inventory [ 41 ]. To characterise executive control function, we used a Stop Signal Task [ 42 ], a Multi-Source Interference Task [ 43 ] and a Task Switching Task [ 44 ] which have all been previously used to assess effects of video gameplay. More details on all instruments used can be found in the Supplementary Material.

Data analysis

On the basis of the research question whether violent video game playing enhances aggression and reduces empathy, the focus of the present analysis was on time by group interactions. We conducted these interaction analyses separately, comparing the violent video game group against the active control group (GTA vs. Sims) and separately against the passive control group (GTA vs. Controls) that did not receive any intervention and separately for the potential changes during the intervention period (baseline vs. posttest 1) and to test for potential long-term changes (baseline vs. posttest 2). We employed classical frequentist statistics running a repeated-measures ANOVA controlling for the covariates sex and age.

Since we collected 52 separate outcome variables and conduced four different tests with each (GTA vs. Sims, GTA vs. Controls, crossed with baseline vs. posttest 1, baseline vs. posttest 2), we had to conduct 52 × 4 = 208 frequentist statistical tests. Setting the alpha value to 0.05 means that by pure chance about 10.4 analyses should become significant. To account for this multiple testing problem and the associated alpha inflation, we conducted a Bonferroni correction. According to Bonferroni, the critical value for the entire set of n tests is set to an alpha value of 0.05 by taking alpha/ n  = 0.00024.

Since the Bonferroni correction has sometimes been criticised as overly conservative, we conducted false discovery rate (FDR) correction [ 45 ]. FDR correction also determines adjusted p -values for each test, however, it controls only for the number of false discoveries in those tests that result in a discovery (namely a significant result).

Moreover, we tested for group differences at the baseline assessment using independent t -tests, since those may hamper the interpretation of significant interactions between group and time that we were primarily interested in.

Since the frequentist framework does not enable to evaluate whether the observed null effect of the hypothesised interaction is indicative of the absence of a relation between violent video gaming and our dependent variables, the amount of evidence in favour of the null hypothesis has been tested using a Bayesian framework. Within the Bayesian framework both the evidence in favour of the null and the alternative hypothesis are directly computed based on the observed data, giving rise to the possibility of comparing the two. We conducted Bayesian repeated-measures ANOVAs comparing the model in favour of the null and the model in favour of the alternative hypothesis resulting in a Bayes factor (BF) using Bayesian Information criteria [ 46 ]. The BF 01 suggests how much more likely the data is to occur under the null hypothesis. All analyses were performed using the JASP software package ( https://jasp-stats.org ).

Sex distribution in the present study did not differ across the groups ( χ 2 p -value > 0.414). However, due to the fact that differences between males and females have been observed in terms of aggression and empathy [ 47 ], we present analyses controlling for sex. Since our random assignment to the three groups did result in significant age differences between groups, with the passive control group being significantly older than the GTA ( t (51) = −2.10, p  = 0.041) and the Sims group ( t (50) = −2.38, p  = 0.021), we also controlled for age.

The participants in the violent video game group played on average 35 h and the non-violent video game group 32 h spread out across the 8 weeks interval (with no significant group difference p  = 0.48).

To test whether participants assigned to the violent GTA game show emotional, cognitive and behavioural changes, we present the results of repeated-measure ANOVA time x group interaction analyses separately for GTA vs. Sims and GTA vs. Controls (Tables  1 – 3 ). Moreover, we split the analyses according to the time domain into effects from baseline assessment to posttest 1 (Table  2 ) and effects from baseline assessment to posttest 2 (Table  3 ) to capture more long-lasting or evolving effects. In addition to the statistical test values, we report partial omega squared ( ω 2 ) as an effect size measure. Next to the classical frequentist statistics, we report the results of a Bayesian statistical approach, namely BF 01 , the likelihood with which the data is to occur under the null hypothesis that there is no significant time × group interaction. In Table  2 , we report the presence of significant group differences at baseline in the right most column.

Since we conducted 208 separate frequentist tests we expected 10.4 significant effects simply by chance when setting the alpha value to 0.05. In fact we found only eight significant time × group interactions (these are marked with an asterisk in Tables  2 and 3 ).

When applying a conservative Bonferroni correction, none of those tests survive the corrected threshold of p  < 0.00024. Neither does any test survive the more lenient FDR correction. The arithmetic mean of the frequentist test statistics likewise shows that on average no significant effect was found (bottom rows in Tables  2 and 3 ).

In line with the findings from a frequentist approach, the harmonic mean of the Bayesian factor BF 01 is consistently above one but not very far from one. This likewise suggests that there is very likely no interaction between group × time and therewith no detrimental effects of the violent video game GTA in the domains tested. The evidence in favour of the null hypothesis based on the Bayes factor is not massive, but clearly above 1. Some of the harmonic means are above 1.6 and constitute substantial evidence [ 48 ]. However, the harmonic mean has been criticised as unstable. Owing to the fact that the sum is dominated by occasional small terms in the likelihood, one may underestimate the actual evidence in favour of the null hypothesis [ 49 ].

To test the sensitivity of the present study to detect relevant effects we computed the effect size that we would have been able to detect. The information we used consisted of alpha error probability = 0.05, power = 0.95, our sample size, number of groups and of measurement occasions and correlation between the repeated measures at posttest 1 and posttest 2 (average r  = 0.68). According to G*Power [ 50 ], we could detect small effect sizes of f  = 0.16 (equals η 2  = 0.025 and r  = 0.16) in each separate test. When accounting for the conservative Bonferroni-corrected p -value of 0.00024, still a medium effect size of f  = 0.23 (equals η 2  = 0.05 and r  = 0.22) would have been detectable. A meta-analysis by Anderson [ 2 ] reported an average effects size of r  = 0.18 for experimental studies testing for aggressive behaviour and another by Greitmeyer [ 5 ] reported average effect sizes of r  = 0.19, 0.25 and 0.17 for effects of violent games on aggressive behaviour, cognition and affect, all of which should have been detectable at least before multiple test correction.

Within the scope of the present study we tested the potential effects of playing the violent video game GTA V for 2 months against an active control group that played the non-violent, rather pro-social life simulation game The Sims 3 and a passive control group. Participants were tested before and after the long-term intervention and at a follow-up appointment 2 months later. Although we used a comprehensive test battery consisting of questionnaires and computerised behavioural tests assessing aggression, impulsivity-related constructs, mood, anxiety, empathy, interpersonal competencies and executive control functions, we did not find relevant negative effects in response to violent video game playing. In fact, only three tests of the 208 statistical tests performed showed a significant interaction pattern that would be in line with this hypothesis. Since at least ten significant effects would be expected purely by chance, we conclude that there were no detrimental effects of violent video gameplay.

This finding stands in contrast to some experimental studies, in which short-term effects of violent video game exposure have been investigated and where increases in aggressive thoughts and affect as well as decreases in helping behaviour have been observed [ 1 ]. However, these effects of violent video gaming on aggressiveness—if present at all (see above)—seem to be rather short-lived, potentially lasting <15 min [ 8 , 51 ]. In addition, these short-term effects of video gaming are far from consistent as multiple studies fail to demonstrate or replicate them [ 16 , 17 ]. This may in part be due to problems, that are very prominent in this field of research, namely that the outcome measures of aggression and pro-social behaviour, are poorly standardised, do not easily generalise to real-life behaviour and may have lead to selective reporting of the results [ 3 ]. We tried to address these concerns by including a large set of outcome measures that were mostly inspired by previous studies demonstrating effects of short-term violent video gameplay on aggressive behaviour and thoughts, that we report exhaustively.

Since effects observed only for a few minutes after short sessions of video gaming are not representative of what society at large is actually interested in, namely how habitual violent video gameplay affects behaviour on a more long-term basis, studies employing longer training intervals are highly relevant. Two previous studies have employed longer training intervals. In an online study, participants with a broad age range (14–68 years) have been trained in a violent video game for 4 weeks [ 52 ]. In comparison to a passive control group no changes were observed, neither in aggression-related beliefs, nor in aggressive social interactions assessed by means of two questions. In a more recent study, participants played a previous version of GTA for 12 h spread across 3 weeks [ 53 ]. Participants were compared to a passive control group using the Buss–Perry aggression questionnaire, a questionnaire assessing impulsive or reactive aggression, attitude towards violence, and empathy. The authors only report a limited increase in pro-violent attitude. Unfortunately, this study only assessed posttest measures, which precludes the assessment of actual changes caused by the game intervention.

The present study goes beyond these studies by showing that 2 months of violent video gameplay does neither lead to any significant negative effects in a broad assessment battery administered directly after the intervention nor at a follow-up assessment 2 months after the intervention. The fact that we assessed multiple domains, not finding an effect in any of them, makes the present study the most comprehensive in the field. Our battery included self-report instruments on aggression (Buss–Perry aggression questionnaire, State Hostility scale, Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance scale, Moral Disengagement scale, World View Measure and Rosenzweig Picture Frustration test) as well as computer-based tests measuring aggressive behaviour such as the delay frustration task and measuring the availability of aggressive words using the word completion test and a lexical decision task. Moreover, we assessed impulse-related concepts such as sensation seeking, boredom proneness and associated behavioural measures such as the computerised Balloon analogue risk task, and delay discounting. Four scales assessing empathy and interpersonal competence scales, including the reading the mind in the eyes test revealed no effects of violent video gameplay. Neither did we find any effects on depressivity (Becks depression inventory) nor anxiety measured as a state as well as a trait. This is an important point, since several studies reported higher rates of depressivity and anxiety in populations of habitual video gamers [ 54 , 55 ]. Last but not least, our results revealed also no substantial changes in executive control tasks performance, neither in the Stop signal task, the Multi-source interference task or a Task switching task. Previous studies have shown higher performance of habitual action video gamers in executive tasks such as task switching [ 56 , 57 , 58 ] and another study suggests that training with action video games improves task performance that relates to executive functions [ 59 ], however, these associations were not confirmed by a meta-analysis in the field [ 60 ]. The absence of changes in the stop signal task fits well with previous studies that likewise revealed no difference between in habitual action video gamers and controls in terms of action inhibition [ 61 , 62 ]. Although GTA does not qualify as a classical first-person shooter as most of the previously tested action video games, it is classified as an action-adventure game and shares multiple features with those action video games previously related to increases in executive function, including the need for hand–eye coordination and fast reaction times.

Taken together, the findings of the present study show that an extensive game intervention over the course of 2 months did not reveal any specific changes in aggression, empathy, interpersonal competencies, impulsivity-related constructs, depressivity, anxiety or executive control functions; neither in comparison to an active control group that played a non-violent video game nor to a passive control group. We observed no effects when comparing a baseline and a post-training assessment, nor when focussing on more long-term effects between baseline and a follow-up interval 2 months after the participants stopped training. To our knowledge, the present study employed the most comprehensive test battery spanning a multitude of domains in which changes due to violent video games may have been expected. Therefore the present results provide strong evidence against the frequently debated negative effects of playing violent video games. This debate has mostly been informed by studies showing short-term effects of violent video games when tests were administered immediately after a short playtime of a few minutes; effects that may in large be caused by short-lived priming effects that vanish after minutes. The presented results will therefore help to communicate a more realistic scientific perspective of the real-life effects of violent video gaming. However, future research is needed to demonstrate the absence of effects of violent video gameplay in children.

Anderson CA, Bushman BJ. Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: a meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychol Sci. 2001;12:353–9.

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Anderson CA, Shibuya A, Ihori N, Swing EL, Bushman BJ, Sakamoto A, et al. Violent video game effects on aggression, empathy, and prosocial behavior in eastern and western countries: a meta-analytic review. Psychol Bull. 2010;136:151–73.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ferguson CJ. Do angry birds make for angry children? A meta-analysis of video game influences on children’s and adolescents’ aggression, mental health, prosocial behavior, and academic performance. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2015;10:646–66.

Ferguson CJ, Kilburn J. Much ado about nothing: the misestimation and overinterpretation of violent video game effects in eastern and western nations: comment on Anderson et al. (2010). Psychol Bull. 2010;136:174–8.

Greitemeyer T, Mugge DO. Video games do affect social outcomes: a meta-analytic review of the effects of violent and prosocial video game play. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2014;40:578–89.

Anderson CA, Carnagey NL, Eubanks J. Exposure to violent media: The effects of songs with violent lyrics on aggressive thoughts and feelings. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2003;84:960–71.

DeWall CN, Anderson CA, Bushman BJ. The general aggression model: theoretical extensions to violence. Psychol Violence. 2011;1:245–58.

Sestire MA, Bartholow BD. Violent and non-violent video games produce opposing effects on aggressive and prosocial outcomes. J Exp Soc Psychol. 2010;46:934–42.

Kneer J, Elson M, Knapp F. Fight fire with rainbows: The effects of displayed violence, difficulty, and performance in digital games on affect, aggression, and physiological arousal. Comput Hum Behav. 2016;54:142–8.

Kneer J, Glock S, Beskes S, Bente G. Are digital games perceived as fun or danger? Supporting and suppressing different game-related concepts. Cyber Beh Soc N. 2012;15:604–9.

Sauer JD, Drummond A, Nova N. Violent video games: the effects of narrative context and reward structure on in-game and postgame aggression. J Exp Psychol Appl. 2015;21:205–14.

Ballard M, Visser K, Jocoy K. Social context and video game play: impact on cardiovascular and affective responses. Mass Commun Soc. 2012;15:875–98.

Read GL, Ballard M, Emery LJ, Bazzini DG. Examining desensitization using facial electromyography: violent video games, gender, and affective responding. Comput Hum Behav. 2016;62:201–11.

Szycik GR, Mohammadi B, Hake M, Kneer J, Samii A, Munte TF, et al. Excessive users of violent video games do not show emotional desensitization: an fMRI study. Brain Imaging Behav. 2017;11:736–43.

Szycik GR, Mohammadi B, Munte TF, Te Wildt BT. Lack of evidence that neural empathic responses are blunted in excessive users of violent video games: an fMRI study. Front Psychol. 2017;8:174.

Tear MJ, Nielsen M. Failure to demonstrate that playing violent video games diminishes prosocial behavior. PLoS ONE. 2013;8:e68382.

Tear MJ, Nielsen M. Video games and prosocial behavior: a study of the effects of non-violent, violent and ultra-violent gameplay. Comput Hum Behav. 2014;41:8–13.

Kühn S, Gleich T, Lorenz RC, Lindenberger U, Gallinat J. Playing super Mario induces structural brain plasticity: gray matter changes resulting from training with a commercial video game. Mol Psychiatry. 2014;19:265–71.

Buss AH, Perry M. The aggression questionnaire. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1992;63:452.

Anderson CA, Deuser WE, DeNeve KM. Hot temperatures, hostile affect, hostile cognition, and arousal: Tests of a general model of affective aggression. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 1995;21:434–48.

Payne DL, Lonsway KA, Fitzgerald LF. Rape myth acceptance: exploration of its structure and its measurement using the illinois rape myth acceptance scale. J Res Pers. 1999;33:27–68.

McMahon S, Farmer GL. An updated measure for assessing subtle rape myths. Social Work Res. 2011; 35:71–81.

Detert JR, Trevino LK, Sweitzer VL. Moral disengagement in ethical decision making: a study of antecedents and outcomes. J Appl Psychol. 2008;93:374–91.

Bandura A, Barbaranelli C, Caprara G, Pastorelli C. Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1996;71:364–74.

Rosenzweig S. The picture-association method and its application in a study of reactions to frustration. J Pers. 1945;14:23.

Hörmann H, Moog W, Der Rosenzweig P-F. Test für Erwachsene deutsche Bearbeitung. Göttingen: Hogrefe; 1957.

Anderson CA, Dill KE. Video games and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the laboratory and in life. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2000;78:772–90.

Przybylski AK, Deci EL, Rigby CS, Ryan RM. Competence-impeding electronic games and players’ aggressive feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2014;106:441.

Bitsakou P, Antrop I, Wiersema JR, Sonuga-Barke EJ. Probing the limits of delay intolerance: preliminary young adult data from the Delay Frustration Task (DeFT). J Neurosci Methods. 2006;151:38–44.

Hoyle RH, Stephenson MT, Palmgreen P, Lorch EP, Donohew RL. Reliability and validity of a brief measure of sensation seeking. Pers Individ Dif. 2002;32:401–14.

Farmer R, Sundberg ND. Boredom proneness: the development and correlates of a new scale. J Pers Assess. 1986;50:4–17.

Lejuez CW, Read JP, Kahler CW, Richards JB, Ramsey SE, Stuart GL, et al. Evaluation of a behavioral measure of risk taking: the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). J Exp Psychol Appl. 2002;8:75–84.

Richards JB, Zhang L, Mitchell SH, de Wit H. Delay or probability discounting in a model of impulsive behavior: effect of alcohol. J Exp Anal Behav. 1999;71:121–43.

Davis MH. A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. JSAS Cat Sel Doc Psychol. 1980;10:85.

Google Scholar  

Mehrabian A. Manual for the Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (BEES). (Available from Albert Mehrabian, 1130 Alta Mesa Road, Monterey, CA, USA 93940); 1996.

Baron-Cohen S, Wheelwright S, Hill J, Raste Y, Plumb I. The “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test revised version: A study with normal adults, and adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2001;42:241–51.

Buhrmester D, Furman W, Reis H, Wittenberg MT. Five domains of interpersonal competence in peer relations. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1988;55:991–1008.

Richardson DR, Green LR, Lago T. The relationship between perspective-taking and non-aggressive responding in the face of an attack. J Pers. 1998;66:235–56.

Maras D, Flament MF, Murray M, Buchholz A, Henderson KA, Obeid N, et al. Screen time is associated with depression and anxiety in Canadian youth. Prev Med. 2015;73:133–8.

Hautzinger M, Bailer M, Worall H, Keller F. Beck-Depressions-Inventar (BDI). Beck-Depressions-Inventar (BDI): Testhandbuch der deutschen Ausgabe. Bern: Huber; 1995.

Spielberger CD, Spielberger CD, Sydeman SJ, Sydeman SJ, Owen AE, Owen AE, et al. Measuring anxiety and anger with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers; 1999.

Lorenz RC, Gleich T, Buchert R, Schlagenhauf F, Kuhn S, Gallinat J. Interactions between glutamate, dopamine, and the neuronal signature of response inhibition in the human striatum. Hum Brain Mapp. 2015;36:4031–40.

Bush G, Shin LM. The multi-source interference task: an fMRI task that reliably activates the cingulo-frontal-parietal cognitive/attention network. Nat Protoc. 2006;1:308–13.

King JA, Colla M, Brass M, Heuser I, von Cramon D. Inefficient cognitive control in adult ADHD: evidence from trial-by-trial Stroop test and cued task switching performance. Behav Brain Funct. 2007;3:42.

Benjamini Y, Hochberg Y. Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. J R Stat Soc. 1995;57:289–300.

Wagenmakers E-J. A practical solution to the pervasive problems of p values. Psychon Bull Rev. 2007;14:779–804.

Hay DF. The gradual emergence of sex differences in aggression: alternative hypotheses. Psychol Med. 2007;37:1527–37.

Jeffreys H. The Theory of Probability. Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1961.

Raftery AE, Newton MA, Satagopan YM, Krivitsky PN. Estimating the integrated likelihood via posterior simulation using the harmonic mean identity. In: Bernardo JM, Bayarri MJ, Berger JO, Dawid AP, Heckerman D, Smith AFM, et al., editors. Bayesian statistics. Oxford: University Press; 2007.

Faul F, Erdfelder E, Lang A-G, Buchner A. G*Power3: a flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behav Res Methods. 2007;39:175–91.

Barlett C, Branch O, Rodeheffer C, Harris R. How long do the short-term violent video game effects last? Aggress Behav. 2009;35:225–36.

Williams D, Skoric M. Internet fantasy violence: a test of aggression in an online game. Commun Monogr. 2005;72:217–33.

Teng SK, Chong GY, Siew AS, Skoric MM. Grand theft auto IV comes to Singapore: effects of repeated exposure to violent video games on aggression. Cyber Behav Soc Netw. 2011;14:597–602.

van Rooij AJ, Kuss DJ, Griffiths MD, Shorter GW, Schoenmakers TM, Van, de Mheen D. The (co-)occurrence of problematic video gaming, substance use, and psychosocial problems in adolescents. J Behav Addict. 2014;3:157–65.

Brunborg GS, Mentzoni RA, Froyland LR. Is video gaming, or video game addiction, associated with depression, academic achievement, heavy episodic drinking, or conduct problems? J Behav Addict. 2014;3:27–32.

Green CS, Sugarman MA, Medford K, Klobusicky E, Bavelier D. The effect of action video game experience on task switching. Comput Hum Behav. 2012;28:984–94.

Strobach T, Frensch PA, Schubert T. Video game practice optimizes executive control skills in dual-task and task switching situations. Acta Psychol. 2012;140:13–24.

Colzato LS, van Leeuwen PJ, van den Wildenberg WP, Hommel B. DOOM’d to switch: superior cognitive flexibility in players of first person shooter games. Front Psychol. 2010;1:8.

PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Hutchinson CV, Barrett DJK, Nitka A, Raynes K. Action video game training reduces the Simon effect. Psychon B Rev. 2016;23:587–92.

Powers KL, Brooks PJ, Aldrich NJ, Palladino MA, Alfieri L. Effects of video-game play on information processing: a meta-analytic investigation. Psychon Bull Rev. 2013;20:1055–79.

Colzato LS, van den Wildenberg WP, Zmigrod S, Hommel B. Action video gaming and cognitive control: playing first person shooter games is associated with improvement in working memory but not action inhibition. Psychol Res. 2013;77:234–9.

Steenbergen L, Sellaro R, Stock AK, Beste C, Colzato LS. Action video gaming and cognitive control: playing first person shooter games is associated with improved action cascading but not inhibition. PLoS ONE. 2015;10:e0144364.

Download references

Acknowledgements

SK has been funded by a Heisenberg grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG KU 3322/1-1, SFB 936/C7), the European Union (ERC-2016-StG-Self-Control-677804) and a Fellowship from the Jacobs Foundation (JRF 2016–2018).

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Lifespan Psychology, Lentzeallee 94, 14195, Berlin, Germany

Simone Kühn, Katharina Schmalen, Markus Weichenberger & Charlotte Witt

Clinic and Policlinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf, Martinistraße 52, 20246, Hamburg, Germany

Simone Kühn, Dimitrij Tycho Kugler & Jürgen Gallinat

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simone Kühn .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary material, rights and permissions.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Kühn, S., Kugler, D., Schmalen, K. et al. Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study. Mol Psychiatry 24 , 1220–1234 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-018-0031-7

Download citation

Received : 19 August 2017

Revised : 03 January 2018

Accepted : 15 January 2018

Published : 13 March 2018

Issue Date : August 2019

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-018-0031-7

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

This article is cited by

Far from the future: internet addiction association with delay discounting among adolescence.

• Huaiyuan Qi

International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction (2024)

The effect of competitive context in nonviolent video games on aggression: The mediating role of frustration and the moderating role of gender

• Jinqian Liao
• Yanling Liu

Current Psychology (2024)

Geeks versus climate change: understanding American video gamers’ engagement with global warming

• Jennifer P. Carman
• Marina Psaros
• Anthony Leiserowitz

Climatic Change (2024)

Exposure to hate speech deteriorates neurocognitive mechanisms of the ability to understand others’ pain

• Agnieszka Pluta
• Joanna Mazurek
• Michał Bilewicz

Scientific Reports (2023)

The effects of violent video games on reactive-proactive aggression and cyberbullying

• Yunus Emre Dönmez

Current Psychology (2023)

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

What do you think? Leave a respectful comment.

Christopher J. Ferguson, The Conversation Christopher J. Ferguson, The Conversation

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-why-its-time-to-stop-blaming-video-games-for-real-world-violence

Analysis: Why it’s time to stop blaming video games for real-world violence

In the wake of the El Paso shooting on Aug. 3 that left 21 dead and dozens injured, a familiar trope has reemerged: Often, when a young man is the shooter, people try to blame the tragedy on violent video games and other forms of media.

This time around, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick placed some of the blame on a video game industry that “ teaches young people to kill .” Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California went on to condemn video games that “dehumanize individuals” as a “problem for future generations.” And President Trump pointed to society’s “glorification of violence,” including “ gruesome and grisly video games .”

These are the same connections a Florida lawmaker made after the Parkland shooting in February 2018, suggesting that the gunman in that case “was prepared to pick off students like it’s a video game .”

Kevin McCarthy, the GOP House minority leader, also tells Fox News that video games are the problem following the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. pic.twitter.com/w7DmlJ9O1K — John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) August 4, 2019

But, speaking as a researcher who has studied violent video games for almost 15 years, I can state that there is no evidence to support these claims that violent media and real-world violence are connected. As far back as 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that research did not find a clear connection between violent video games and aggressive behavior.

Criminologists who study mass shootings specifically refer to those sorts of connections as a “ myth .” And in 2017, the Media Psychology and Technology division of the American Psychological Association released a statement I helped craft, suggesting reporters and policymakers cease linking mass shootings to violent media, given the lack of evidence for a link.

A history of a moral panic

So why are so many policymakers inclined to blame violent video games for violence? There are two main reasons.

The first is the psychological research community’s efforts to market itself as strictly scientific. This led to a replication crisis instead, with researchers often unable to repeat the results of their studies. Now, psychology researchers are reassessing their analyses of a wide range of issues – not just violent video games, but implicit racism , power poses and more.

The other part of the answer lies in the troubled history of violent video game research specifically.

An attendee dressed as a Fortnite character poses for a picture in a costume at Comic Con International in San Diego, California, U.S., July 19, 2019. Photo by REUTERS/Mike Blake

Beginning in the early 2000s, some scholars, anti-media advocates and professional groups like the APA began working to connect a methodologically messy and often contradictory set of results to public health concerns about violence. This echoed historical patterns of moral panic, such as 1950s concerns about comic books and Tipper Gore’s efforts to blame pop and rock music in the 1980s for violence, sex and satanism.

Particularly in the early 2000s, dubious evidence regarding violent video games was uncritically promoted . But over the years, confidence among scholars that violent video games influence aggression or violence has crumbled .

Reviewing all the scholarly literature

My own research has examined the degree to which violent video games can – or can’t – predict youth aggression and violence. In a 2015 meta-analysis , I examined 101 studies on the subject and found that violent video games had little impact on kids’ aggression, mood, helping behavior or grades.

Two years later, I found evidence that scholarly journals’ editorial biases had distorted the scientific record on violent video games. Experimental studies that found effects were more likely to be published than studies that had found none. This was consistent with others’ findings . As the Supreme Court noted, any impacts due to video games are nearly impossible to distinguish from the effects of other media, like cartoons and movies.

Any claims that there is consistent evidence that violent video games encourage aggression are simply false.

Spikes in violent video games’ popularity are well-known to correlate with substantial declines in youth violence – not increases. These correlations are very strong, stronger than most seen in behavioral research. More recent research suggests that the releases of highly popular violent video games are associated with immediate declines in violent crime, hinting that the releases may cause the drop-off.

The role of professional groups

With so little evidence, why are people like Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin still trying to blame violent video games for mass shootings by young men? Can groups like the National Rifle Association seriously blame imaginary guns for gun violence?

A key element of that problem is the willingness of professional guild organizations such as the APA to promote false beliefs about violent video games. (I’m a fellow of the APA.) These groups mainly exist to promote a profession among news media, the public and policymakers, influencing licensing and insurance laws . They also make it easier to get grants and newspaper headlines. Psychologists and psychology researchers like myself pay them yearly dues to increase the public profile of psychology. But there is a risk the general public may mistake promotional positions for objective science.

In 2005 the APA released its first policy statement linking violent video games to aggression. However, my recent analysis of internal APA documents with criminologist Allen Copenhaver found that the APA ignored inconsistencies and methodological problems in the research data.

The APA updated its statement in 2015, but that sparked controversy immediately: More than 230 scholars wrote to the group asking it to stop releasing policy statements altogether. I and others objected to perceived conflicts of interest and lack of transparency tainting the process.

It’s bad enough that these statements misrepresent the actual scholarly research and misinform the public. But it’s worse when those falsehoods give advocacy groups like the NRA cover to shift blame for violence onto non-issues like video games. The resulting misunderstanding hinders efforts to address mental illness and other issues, such as the need for gun control, that are actually related to gun violence.

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article . This story was updated from an earlier version to reflect the events surrounding the El Paso and Dayton shootings.

Christopher J. Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University. He's coauthor of " Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong ."

Support Provided By: Learn more

Educate your inbox

Subscribe to Here’s the Deal, our politics newsletter for analysis you won’t find anywhere else.

Thank you. Please check your inbox to confirm.

El Paso shooting is domestic terrorism, investigators say

Nation Aug 04

The frustrating, enduring debate over video games, violence, and guns

We asked players, parents, developers, and experts to weigh in on how to change the conversation around gaming.

by Aja Romano

In the wake of two mass shootings earlier this month in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, the societal role of video games grabbed a familiar media spotlight. The El Paso shooter briefly referenced Call of Duty , a wildly popular game in which players assume the roles of soldiers during historical and fictional wartime, in his “manifesto.” And just this small mention of the video game seemed to have prompted President Donald Trump to return to a theme he’s emphasized before when looking to assign greater blame for violent incidents.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society,” he said in an August 5 press conference. “This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence.”

Trump’s statement suggesting a link between video games and real-world violence echoed sentiments shared by other lawmakers following the back-to-back mass shootings. It’s a response that major media outlets and retailers have also adopted of late; ESPN recently chose to delay broadcasting an esports tournament because of the shootings — a decision that seems to imply the network believes in a link between gaming and real-world violence. And Walmart made a controversial decision to temporarily remove all video game displays from its stores, even as it continues to openly sell guns.

But many members of the public, as well as researchers and some politicians, have counterargued that blaming video games sidesteps the real issue at the root of America’s mass shooting problem: a need for stronger gun control . The frenzied debate over video games within the larger conversation around gun violence underscores both how intense the fight over gun control has become and how easily games can become mired in political rhetoric.

But this isn’t a new development; blaming video games for real-world violence — any kind of real-world violence — is a longstanding cultural and political habit whose origins date back to the 1970s. It’s also arguably part of a larger recurring wave of concern over any pop culture that’s been perceived as morally deviant, from rock ’n’ roll to the occult , depending on the era. But as mass shootings continue to occur nationwide and attempts to stop them by enacting gun control legislature remain divisive, video games have again become an easy target.

The most recent clamor arose from a clash among several familiar foes. In one corner: politicians like Trump who cite video games as evidence of immoral and violent media’s negative societal impact. In another: people who play video games and resist this reading, while also trying to lodge separate critiques of violence within gaming. In another: scientists at odds over whether there are factual and causal links between video games and real-world violence. And in still another: members of the general public who, upon receiving alarmist messages about games from politicians and the news media, react with yet more alarm.

Subscribe to Today, Explained

Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Ove r cast , or wherever you listen to podcasts.

What is new, however, is that recent criticism of the narrative that video games lead to real-world violence seems particularly intensified, and it’s coming not just from gamers but also from scientists , some media outlets , even mass shooting survivors: David Hogg, who became a gun control advocate after surviving the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, unveiled a new March for Our Lives gun control initiative in August, pointedly stating in his announcement on Twitter, “We know video games aren’t to blame.”

And on all sides is a sense that frustration is growing because so little has changed since the last time we had this debate — and since the time before that and the time before that.

There’s no science proving a link between video games and real-world violence. But that hasn’t quelled a debate that’s raged for decades.

Historically, video games have played a verifiable role in a handful of mass shootings, but the science linking video games to gun violence is murky . A vast body of psychology research, most of it conducted before 2015, argues strenuously that video games can contribute to increases in aggression . Yet much of this research has been contested by newer, contradictory findings from both psychologists and scholars in different academic fields. For example, Nickie Phillips , a criminologist whose research deals with violence in popular media, told me that “most criminologists are dismissive of a causal link between media and crime,” and that they’re instead interested in questions of violence as a social construct and how that contributes to political discourse.

That type of research, she stressed, is likely to be less flashy and headline-grabbing than psychology studies, which are more focused on pointing to direct behaviors and their causes. “Social meanings of crime are in transition,” Phillips said. “There’s not a single variable. As a public, we want a single concrete explanation as to why people commit atrocities, when the answers can be very complex.”

The debate over the science is easy to wade into, but it obscures just how preoccupied America is with dangerous media. The oldest moral panic over a video game may be the controversy over a 1976 game called Death Race , which awarded players points for driving over fleeing pedestrians dubbed “gremlins.” The game became mired in controversy, even sparking a segment on 60 Minutes . Interestingly, other games of the era that framed their mechanics through wartime violence, like the 1974 military game Tank , failed to cause as much public concern.

In his 2017 book Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong , psychologist Patrick Markey points out that before concerned citizens fixated on video games, many of them were worried about arcades — not because of the games they contained, but because they were licentious hangouts for teens. (Insert “ Ya Got Trouble ” here.) By the 1980s, “Arcades were being shut down across the nation by activist parents intent on protecting their children from the dangerous influences lurking within these neon-drenched dungeons,” Markey writes.

Then came the franchise that evolved arcade panic into gameplay panic: Midway Games’ Mortal Kombat , infamous for its gory “fatality” moves . With its 1992 arcade debut, Mortal Kombat sparked hysteria among concerned adults that led to a 1993 congressional hearing and the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB . The fighting game franchise still incites debate with every new release.

“Like people were really going to go out and rip people’s spines out,” Cypheroftyr , a gaming critic who typically goes by her internet handle, told me over the phone regarding the mainstream anxiety around Mortal Kombat in the 1990s. Cypheroftyr is an avid player of shooter games and other action games and the founder of the nonprofit I Need Diverse Games .

“I’m old enough to remember the whole Jack Thompson era of trying to say video games are violent and they should be banned,” she said, referencing the infamous disbarred obscenity lawyer known for a strident crusade against games and other media that has spanned decades .

Cypheroftyr pointed out that after the Columbine shooting in April 1999, politicians “were trying to blame both video games and Marilyn Manson. It just feels like this is too easy a scapegoat.”

Politicians have long seized on the idea that recreational fantasy and fictional media have an influence on real-world evil. In 2007, for example, Sen. Mitt Romney (R–UT) blamed “music and movies and TV and video games” for being full of “pornography and violence,” which he argued had influenced the Columbine shooters and, later, the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter.

Video games seem especially prone to garnering political attention in the wake of a tragedy — especially first-person shooters like Call of Duty. A stereotype of a mass shooter, isolated and perpetually consuming graphic violent content, seems to linger in the public’s consciousness. A neighbor of the 2018 Parkland shooter, for instance, told the Miami Herald that the shooter would play video games for up to 12 to 15 hours a day — and although that anecdotal report was unverified, it was still widely circulated.

A 2015 Pew study of 2,000 US adults found that even though 49 percent of adult Americans play video games, 40 percent of Americans also believe in a link between games and violence — specifically, that “people who play violent video games are more likely to be violent themselves.” Additionally, 32 percent of the people who told Pew they play video games also said they believe gaming contributes to an increase in aggression, even though their own experience as, presumably, nonviolent gamers would offer at least some evidence to the contrary.

“I find it more plausible that America’s long-standing culture of gun violence has affected video games ... than the other way around” —game developer Naomi Clark

One person who sees a correlation between violent games and a propensity for real-world violence is Tim Winter . Winter is the president of the Parents Television Council , a nonpartisan advocacy group that lobbies the entertainment industry against marketing graphic violence to children. He spent several years overseeing MGM’s former video game publishing division, MGM Interactive, and moved into advocacy when he became a parent. Growing up, his children played all kinds of video games, except for those he considered too graphic or violent.

In a phone interview, Winter told me his view aligns with the research supporting links between games and aggression.

“Anyone who uses the term ‘moral panic’ in my view is trying to diminish a bona fide conversation that needs to take place,” Winter said. “It’s a simple PR move to refute something that might actually have some value in the broader conversation.”

During our conversation, he compared the connection between violent media and harmful real-world effects to that between cigarettes and lung cancer. If you consume in moderation, he argues, you’ll probably be fine; but, over time, exposure to violent media can have “a cumulative negative effect.” (In fact, studies of infrequent smokers have shown that their risk of coronary disease is roughly equal to that of frequent smokers, and their risk of cancer is still significantly higher than that of nonsmokers.)

“What I believe to be true is that the media we consume has a very powerful impact on shaping our belief structure, our cognitive development, our values, and our opinions,” he said.

He added that it would be foolish to point to any one act of violence and say it was caused by any one video game — that, he argued, “would be like saying lung cancer was caused by that one specific cigarette I smoked.”

“But if you are likely to smoke packs a day over the course of many years, it has a cumulative negative effect on your health,” he continued. “I believe based on the research on both sides that that’s the prevailing truth.”

The debate endures because gun control isn’t being addressed — and games are an easy target

Like many people I spoke with for this story, Winter believes that the debate about gun violence has remained largely at a standstill since Columbine, while the number of mass shootings nationwide has continued to increase.

“If you look at the broader issue of gun violence in America, you have a number of organizations and constituencies pointing at different causes,” he said. “When you look back at what those arguments are, it’s the same arguments that have been made going back to Columbine. Whether it’s gun control, whether it’s mental illness, whether it’s violence in media culture — whatever the debate is about those three root causes, very little progress has been made on any of them.”

The glorification of violence is so culturally embedded in American media through TV, film, games, books, and practically every other available medium that there seems to be very little impetus to change anything about America’s gun culture. We can define “ gun culture ” here as the addition of an embrace of gun ownership and a nationwide oversupply of guns to what Phillips described as “ a culture of violence ” — one in which violence “becomes our go-to way of solving problems — whether that’s individual violence, police violence, state violence.”

“There’s a commodification of violence,” she said, “and we have to understand what that means.”

Naomi Clark , an independent game developer and co-chair of New York University’s Game Center program, agreed. “I find it more plausible that America’s long-standing culture of gun violence has affected video games, as a form of culture, than the other way around,” she told me in an email. “After all, this nation’s cultural traditions and attachments around guns are far older than video games.”

In light of incidents like Walmart’s removal of video game displays after the recent mass shootings while continuing to advertise guns, the connection between the shootings and America’s continued valorization of guns feels extremely stark. “We could ban video games tomorrow and mass shootings would still happen,” Cypheroftyr told me.

“What’s new about the current debate is that the scapegoat of videogaming has never been more nakedly exposed for what it is,” gaming sociologist Katherine Cross wrote in an email, “with Republicans and conservatives manifestly fearful of blaming systematic white supremacism, Trump’s rhetoric, or our nation’s permissive and freewheeling gun culture for the recent rash of terrorism.”

Because of the sensitivity around the issue of gun control, it’s easy for politicians to score points with constituents by focusing a conversation on games and sidestepping other action. “Politicians often blame video games because they are a safe target,” Moral Combat author Markey told me in an email. “There isn’t a giant video game lobby like other potential causes of mass shootings (like the NRA [National Rifle Association]). So [by targeting games], a politician can make it appear they are doing something without risking losing any votes.”

And the general public is often susceptible to this rhetoric, both because it’s emotional and because it may feed what they think they already know about games — even if that’s not a lot. “The narrative that violence in video games contributes to the gun violence in America is, I think, a good example of a bad idea that seems right to people who don’t look too closely at the facts,” Zak Garriss , a video game writer and designer who’s worked on a wide range of games, told me in an email.

“Video games are a global industry, dwarfing other entertainment industries in revenue in markets comprised of gamers from the UK, Germany, France, Japan, the US, and basically anywhere there’s electricity. Yet the spree shooting phenomenon seems to be seriously and uniquely a US issue right now. It’s also worth noting that the ratings systems across these countries vary, and in the case of Europe, are often more liberal in many regards than the US system,” Garriss said.

He also pointed out that this conversation frequently overshadows the important, innovative work that many games are engaged in. “Games like Stardew Valley , Minecraft , or Journey craft experiences that help people relax, detox after a day, bond with friends,” he said. “Games like Papers, Please , That Dragon Cancer , or Life Is Strange interrogate the harder and the darker elements of the human experience like love, grief, loneliness, and death.”

In other words, a conversation that focuses on games and guns alone dismisses the vital cultural role that video games play as art. “Play video games and you can jump on giant mushrooms, shoot a wizard on the moon, grow a farm, fall in love, experience nearly infinite worlds really,” Garriss told me. “If games have a unifying organizing principle, I’d say it’s to delight. The pursuit of fun.”

He continued: “To me, the tragedy, if there is one, in the current discourse around video games and violence, lies in failing to see the magic happening in the play. As devs, it’s a magic we’re chasing with every game. And as players, I think it’s a magic that has not just the potential but the actual power to bring people together, to aid mental health, to make us think, to help us heal. And to experience delight.”

But for some members of the public, games’ recreational, relaxational, and artistic values might be another thing that make them suspect. “If they don’t play games or ‘aged out of it,’ they might see them as frivolous or a waste of time,” Cypheroftyr says. “It’s easy to go, ‘Oh, you’re still playing video games? Why are you wasting your life?’”

That idea — that video games are a waste of time — is another longstanding element of cultural assumptions around games of all kinds, Clark, the game developer, told me. “Games have been an easy target in every era because there’s something inherently unproductive or even anti-productive about them, and so there’s also a long history of game designers trying to rehabilitate games and make them ‘do work’ or provide instruction.”

All of this makes it incredibly easy to fixate on video games instead of addressing difficult but more relevant targets, like NRA funding and easy access to guns. And that, in turn, makes it a complicated proposition to extricate video games from conversations about gun violence, let alone limit the conversation around violent games to people who might actually be in a position to create change, like the people who make the games in the first place.

Yet what’s striking when you drill down into the community around gaming is how many gamers agree with many of the arguments politicians are making. As a fan of shooter games, Cypheroftyr told me she routinely plays violent games like Call of Duty and the military action role-playing game (RPG) The Division . “I’m not out here trying to murder people,” she stressed. But like the Parents Television Council’s Winter, Cypheroftyr and many of the other people I spoke with agree that the gaming industry needs to do a lot more to examine the at times shocking imagery it perpetuates.

Many members of the gaming community are already discussing game violence

Multiple people I spoke with expressed frustration that the conversation about video games’ role in mass shootings is obscuring another, very important conversation to be had within the gaming community about violent games.

Clark told me that the public’s lack of nuance and an insistence on a binary reading of the issue is part of the problem. “Most people are capable of understanding that causes are complex,” she said, “that you can’t just point to one thing and say, ‘This is mostly or entirely to blame!’”

But she also cautioned that the gaming community’s reactionary defensiveness to this lack of nuance also prevents many video game fans from acknowledging that games do play a role within a violent culture. “That complexity cuts both ways,” she told me. “Even though it’s silly to say that ‘games cause violence,’ it’s also just as silly to say that games have nothing to do with a culture that has a violence problem.”

“Even though it’s silly to say that ‘games cause violence,’ it’s also just as silly to say that games have nothing to do with a culture that has a violence problem” —game developer Naomi Clark

That culture is endemic to the gaming industry, added Justin Carter, a freelance journalist whose work focuses on video games and culture.

“The industry does have a fetishization of guns and violence,” Carter said. “You look at games like Borderlands or Destiny and one of the selling points is how many guns there are.” The upcoming first-person shooter game Borderlands 3 , he pointed out, boasts “over a billion” different guns from its 12 fictional weapons manufacturers , all of which tout special perks to get players to try their guns. These perks serve as marketing both inside and outside the game; the game’s publisher, 2K Games, invites players to exult in violence using language that speaks for itself :

Deliver devastating critical hits to enemies’ soft-and-sensitives, then joy-puke as your bullets ricochet towards other targets. ... Step 1: Hit your enemies with tracker tags. Step 2: Unleash a hail of Smart Bullets that track towards your targets. Step 3: Loot! Deal guaranteed elemental damage with your finger glued to the trigger ...

“There are very few [action/adventure] games that give you options other than murdering people,” Cypheroftyr said. “Games don’t do enough to show the other side of it. You shoot someone, you die, they die, you reset, you reload, and nothing happens.”

“I know that if I shoot people in a game it’s not real,” she added. “99.9 percent of people don’t need to be told that. I’m not playing out a power fantasy or anything, but I’ve become more aware of how most games [that] use violence [do so] to solve problems.”

An insistence from game developers on blithely ignoring the potential political messages of their games is another frustration for her. “All these game makers are like, there’s no politics in the game. There’s no message. And I’m like ... did you just send me through a war museum and you’re telling me this?!”

The game Cypheroftyr is referencing is The Division 2 , which features a section where players can engage in enemy combat during a walkthrough of a Vietnam War memorial museum. While she loves the game, she told me the fact that players use weapons from the Vietnam War era while in a war museum belies game developers’ frequent arguments that such games are apolitical.

Another game Cypheroftyr has found disturbing in its attempt to background politics without any real self-reflection is the popular adventure game Detroit Become Human , which displays pacifist Martin Luther King Jr. quotes alongside gameplay that allows players to choose extreme violence as an option. “You can take a more pacifistic approach, but you may not get the ending you want,” she explained.

She noted, too, that the military uses video games for training as part of what’s been dubbed the “ military-entertainment complex ,” with tactics involving shooter games that some ex-soldiers have referred to as “more like brainwashing than anything.” The US Army began exploring virtual training in 1999 and began developing its first tactics game a year later. The result, Full Spectrum Command , was a military-only version of 2003’s Full Spectrum Warrior . Since then, the military has used video games to teach soldiers everything from how to deal with combat scenarios to how to interact with Iraqi civilians .

The close connection between games and sanctioned real-world violence, i.e., war, is hard to deny with any plausibility. “When someone insists that these two parts of culture have absolutely nothing to do with each other,” Clark said, “it smacks of denial, and many game developers are asking themselves, ‘Do I want to be part of this landscape?’ even if they have zero belief that video games are causing violence.”

For all the gaming industry’s faults when it comes to frankly addressing gaming’s role in a violent culture, however, many people are quick to point out that critiques of in-game violence can also come from the video games themselves. In Batman: Arkham Asylum , for example, researchers Christina Fawcett and Steven Kohm recently found that the game “directly implicate[s] the player in violence enacted upon the bodies of criminals and patients alike.” Other games shift the focus away from the perpetrators to the victims — for example, This War of Mine is a survival game inspired by the Bosnian War that focuses not on soldiers but on civilians dealing with the costs of wartime violence.

But acknowledging that critiques of violent games are coming from within the gaming community doesn’t play well as part of the gun control debate. “It’s far too easy to scapegoat video games as low-hanging fruit instead of addressing the real issues,” Cypheroftyr said, “like the ease with which we can get weapons in this country, and why we don’t do more to punish the perpetrators [of gun violence].” She also cites the cultural tendency to excuse masculine aggression early on with a “b“boys will be boys” mentality — which can breed the kind of entitlement that leads to more violence later on.

All these factors combine to make the conversation around violent video games inherently political and part of a larger ongoing debate that ultimately centers on which media messages are the most responsible for fueling real-world violence.

The conversation surrounding violent games implicates violent gaming culture itself — which, in turn, implicates politicians who rail against games

Games journalist Carter told me he feels the gaming community needs to, in essence, reject the whole debate entirely because at this point in its life cycle, it’s disingenuous.

“We’ve been through enough shootings that you know the playbook, and it’s annoying that gamers and people in the industry will take this as a position that needs defending,” he told me. “It’s not a conversation worth having anymore solely on post-traumatic terms.”

Discussions about video game violence need to be held mainly within the games community, Carter said, and held “with people who are actually interested in figuring out a solution instead of politicians looking to pass off the blame for their ineptitude and greed.”

But some gamers told me they don’t trust the gaming community to frame the conversation with appropriate nuance. All of them cited Gamergate’ s violent male entitlement and the effect that its subsequent bleed into the larger alt-right movement’s misogyny and white supremacy have had on mainstream culture at large.

“The framing of that rhetoric that began in Gamergate as part of the ‘low’ culture of niche internet forums became part of the mainstream political discourse,” criminologist Phillips pointed out. “The expression of their misogyny and the notion of being pushed out of their white male-dominated space was a microcosm of what was to come. We’re talking about 8chan now, but [the growth of the alt-right] was fueled by gaming culture.” She points to Gamergate as an example of the complicated interplay between gaming culture, online communities full of toxic, violent rhetoric, and the rise of online extremism that’s increasingly moving offline.

Gaming sociologist Cross agreed. “At this moment, there is urgent need to shine a light on video game culture , the fan spaces that have been infiltrated by white supremacists looking to recruit that minority of gamers who rage against ‘political correctness,’” she told me.

“We treat video games as unreal, as unserious play, and that creates a shadow over gaming forums and fan communities that has allowed toxicity to take root. It’s also allowed neo-Nazis to operate mostly unseen. That is what needs to change.”

The resulting shadow over gaming has spread far and wide — and found violent echoes in the rhetoric of Trump himself . “Look at what the person in the very highest office of the US is cultivating,” Cypheroftyr said. “Toxic masculinity, this idea that men, especially white men, have been fed that they’re losing ‘their’ country.”

“While video games do not influence us in a monkey-see-monkey-do manner, they do, like all media, shape how we see the world,” Cross argues. “Republicans, in broaching that possibility, open themselves up to the critique that their leader, who makes frequent use of both old media and social media, might also be influential in a toxic way.”

And this, ultimately, may be why the current debate around video games and violence feels particularly intense: The extremes of toxic gaming culture are fueling the attitudes of toxic alt-right culture , which in turn fuels the rhetoric of President Trump and many other right-wing politicians — the same rhetoric that many white supremacist mass shooters are using to justify their atrocities.

So when Trump rails against violence in video games, as he’s now done multiple times , he’s protesting a fictionalized version of the real-life violence that his own rhetoric seems to tacitly encourage. If we are to accept the argument that media violence as represented by games is capable of bringing about real-world violence, then surely no media influence is more powerful or full of dangerous potential than that wielded by the president of the United States.

In 2018, Vice’s gaming vertical Waypoint devoted a week to “ guns and games ”; in a moving piece outlining the intent of the project, editor Austin Walker observed that unlike real-world violence, “in big-budget action games, and especially games that give the player guns and plentiful ammunition, violence is cheap and endlessly repeatable.”

Yet now, barely a year later, mass shootings and other incidents of real-world violence have also begun to seem endlessly repeatable. Perhaps that is why, at last, the urgency of shifting our cultural focus from fixing violence in games to fixing violence in the real world feels like it is finally outstripping the incessant debate.

• Criminal Justice
• Gun Violence

Most Popular

Oil companies sold the public on a fake climate solution — and swindled taxpayers out of billions, trump proposed bombing mexico and it somehow wasn’t a big story, biden’s new supreme court reform proposals are mostly useless, j.d. vance didn’t have sex with a couch. but he’s still extremely weird., do bigger highways actually help reduce traffic, today, explained.

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

More in Culture

How Marvel managed to upset Palestinian — and Israeli — fans 

The art and science of swearing

Think like an Olympian

The good, the bad, and the weird of the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony

Arson attacks underscore the security and terror threats to the Paris Olympics

The controversy over Sabra, a new movie character, explained.

And why you feel bad swearing around your friends’ kids, according to a philosopher.

More of a mathlete than an athlete? A gold medal mindset can help you do almost anything better.

Four winners and six losers from the day.

Officials say Paris will be the “safest place in the world” for the Olympics. Here’s what they’re up against.

The rumors were easy to believe, especially when the potential VP has such terrible ideas about sex.

Venezuela’s Maduro just tightened his grip on power. What comes next?

Who is Noah Lyles? For this sprinter, the Paris Olympics could be everything.

The ugly calculus behind MAGA’s racist and sexist attacks on Harris

What if colon cancer screening didn’t involve poop?

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essay Examples >
• Essays Topics >
• Essay on Law

Free Argumentative Essay About Violence in Video Games

Type of paper: Argumentative Essay

Topic: Law , Violence , Criminal Justice , Children , Games , Video Games , Virtual Reality , Family

Words: 2000

Published: 05/12/2021

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

Introduction

Neither constitution nor any parents can stop children from playing video games, as children will find some or other way to play video games. Law Excessive amount of violence in Video games is one of many debated topics in our society. A number of people say that it affects behaviour of children in a substantial manner. These people advocate to ban the games that cater violence on the other hands, a huge number of people do not agree with such logic. They oppose any such step and argue in favour of games even if they portray violence. Court said that “ The negation of the ban itself will likely have minimal impact, as kids would have found their way to violent games in any case” (Tassi). Children should be given freedom to play video games as first ammendment protects the right of individuals, and particpaion of parents can protect them from playing violent vide games, terefore government should not put a ban on video games.

Thesis Statement: This paper intends to discuss the violence in video games and analyses whether violent video games affect children in a negative manner. The paper also discusses the legality of these games in perspective of the first amendment of the US constitution.

Gentile et al. mentioned that the majority of US teenagers play video games on a regular basis. Some of these games are extremely violent and may affect the behaviour of the children in a negative manner. It is difficult to believe that the children who are in constant touch of these video games are unaffected by their negative impacts. “most evidence suggests that amount of play affects school performance, whereas violent content affects aggressive outcomes” (Gentile et al., 6). Children have a tendency to learn, and they learn from these games too. If the characters of any game are involved in extremely violent activities, there are chances for a player to act accordingly.

Experts suggest that violent games adversely affect the children, and it is not very surprising if their behaviour is affected by these games. According to Tassi the voices to ban violent games are not new, and people have been raising their voices to ban violent games since a long time. Author mentioned “The ban was in place that would make it a crime to sell violent games to minors” (Tassi). Violent games like ‘Death Race’ and ‘Mortal Kombat’, Doom, Grand theft auto and ‘Night Trap’ have attracted huge public cries after they were released, and people witnessed their effects on their children. “Playing violent games increases aggressive behaviors, increases aggressive cognitions, increases aggressive emotions, increases physiological arousal, and decreases prosocial behaviors” (Gentile et al., 7).

Playing violent video game require a high amount of attention and intense participation. Liptak mentioned that modern games and controls also involve very active participation on mental as well physical level. Author mentioned that “The court has affirmed the constitutional rights of game developers, adults keep the right to decide what’s appropriate in their houses” (Liptak). In the light of these facts, it is difficult to say that violent games do not affect children in negative ways. Children participate in these games with very enthusiasm and act as their favourite actors who are usually very violent. When children see their favourite characters killing and hurting others, they feel amused. It may inspire children to act in a similar manner (Dill& Dill).

There are people who argue in favour of video games and suggest that video games are just a mean of entertainment, and they cannot affect the behaviour of children in negative ways. Tassi, in his article, advocates these video games by presenting a number of arguments in favour of video games and suggest that video games enhance the sharpness of the human brain. There are a number of people who argue that video games, including violent ones, enhance the fertility of the human brain. Bartholow & Anderson mentioned that “The results confirmed our hypothesis that playing the violent game would result in more aggression than would playing the nonviolent game” (Bartholow & Anderson, 283).

Saunders, in his study, analyses the subject and its relation with the first amendment. US Supreme Court ruled that these video games are protected by the provisions of the first amendment and it is not logical to put any kind of ban of them. The Supreme Court held that even if these games depict extreme violence, these games cannot be banned as they are protected by the first amendment of the US constitution. Author mentioned that “In Ashcroft v. ACLU" the Court addressed the community standards portion of the test for sexual obscenity and its extension to "harmful-to-minors" statutes" (Saunders, 260). It was held that these games are not different from the old books, cartoons or movies, and it will not be wise to ban only video games.

While deciding a popular case, US Supreme Court struck down a law of California state law that banned video games that were found catering violence and sex. The law advocated to prevent the sale of video games to children that portrayed violent attacks, killings and sexual attacks, “Because speech about violence is not obscene,” (Liptak). Lawmakers said that it was a necessary step to stop children from accessing the games that depict violence and sex. Author gave example by saying that “The details of the murderous spree of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High can be found at a variety of sources. The tie to video games is found in the fact that Harris and Klebold were said to play violent video games for hours and were fanatics with regard to the video game Doom” (Saunders, 52). It was said that such depictions affect the behaviour of children in an adverse manner.

Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court held while striking down the above said law that “Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas -- and even social messages -- through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player's interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection” (Tassi).

The Supreme Court respected the reasonable concern of California authorities but at the same time suggested the law making authority to act reasonably and in accordance with the law. The Supreme Court said that the entertainment rights of people cannot be oppressed merely on the context of protecting children. Justice Antonin Scalia said that protecting children “does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed” (Liptak).

Finally, I believe that video games do not impact children in negative manner. A number of people believe that children who play games are also better performers in their study and they do exceedingly well in sports as well as in extracurricular activities. I also observed that children who play video games have a better understanding of circumstances including odd ones. Video game player children are proved to be good drivers than non-players of the video games. Apart from this aspect, the issue involves the first amendment of the US constitution that ensures the right of entertainment and putting any ban on the violent video games amounts to violating this provision. The US Supreme Court has reiterated the constitution makers.

Annotated Bibliography

Bartholow, Bruce D., & Anderson, Craig A. "Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior: Potential Sex Differences." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 38 (3) (2002): 283–290. The article describes the impact of violence shown in the video games on different genders. The article is based on a research study conducted to analyze the impact of video games on behaviour of people. The study revealed that people who play violent video games show the aggressive behaviour. However, people who play non-violent video games do not shows aggressive behaviour. Dill, Karen E. & Dill, Jody C. "Video game violence: A review of the empirical literature." Aggression and Violent Behavior, Volume 3 (4) (1998): 407–428. Gentile, Douglas A., Lynchb, P. J., Linder, J. R., & Walsh, David A.z. "The effects of violent video game habits on adolescent hostility, aggressive behaviors, and school performance." Journal of Adolescence, Volume 27 (1) (2004): 5–22. The article is focused on the research study conducted to analyse the impact of violence presented in video games. The article covers various aspects associated with the subject such as video games habits, video game usage and impact of video game on children behaviour at home, in school and on education. Liptak, A. "Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children." 27 June 2011. The New York Times. 11 May 2014, <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/us/28scotus.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>. The article focuses on the removal of the ban from sales of video games in California. The article described the judgement given by the Supreme Court in favour of children who want to play with video games. The article focuses on various positive aspects associated with the video games, and how video games help children in improving their learning and overall personality. Saunders, Kevin W. "Regulating Youth Access to Violent Video Games: Three Responses to First Amendment Concerns." Law Review Michigan State University-Detroit College of Law, 51 (2003): 52-113. This report critically analyses first amendment with respect to restricting children access to the violent video games. The report provides detailed analysis on all major aspects of the subject. The report analyses violence presented in other media, and factors that cause violence in video games. The report also presents an analysis of evolution of video games. Saunders, Kevin W. "The Need for a Two (or More) Tiered First Amendment to Provide for the Protection of Children." Chicago-Kent Law Review, Vol. 79 (2004): 257-277. This article describes the possible legal and general ways to protect children from violence presented in different forms of media including video games. The author mentioned about limiting the access of children to the internet and other entertainment contents, especially when law can not limit the children. The focus is placed on parents, their willingness and steps they can take to protect their children. Tassi, P. "Supreme Court Strikes Down California's Violent Video Game Ban." 27 June 2011. Forbes. 11 May 2014 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/06/27/supreme-court-strikes-down-californias-violent-games-ban/>. The article emphasizes on how amendment one support videogames. The article also makes a comparison between video game and other learning materials. The article discusses how the new decision taken by the Supreme Court will change the general perception of people and reduce the lawsuits.

Works Cited

Bartholow, Bruce D., & Anderson, Craig A. "Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior: Potential Sex Differences." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 38 (3) (2002): 283–290. Dill, Karen E. & Dill, Jody C. "Video game violence: A review of the empirical literature." Aggression and Violent Behavior, Volume 3 (4) (1998): 407–428. Gentile, Douglas A., Lynchb, P. J., Linder, J. R., & Walsh, David A.z. "The effects of violent video game habits on adolescent hostility, aggressive behaviors, and school performance." Journal of Adolescence, Volume 27 (1) (2004): 5–22. Liptak, A. "Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children." 27 June 2011. The New York Times. 11 May 2014 <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/us/28scotus.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>. Saunders, Kevin W. "Regulating Youth Access to Violent Video Games: Three Responses to First Amendment Concerns." Law Review Michigan State University-Detroit College of Law, 51 (2003): 52-113. Saunders, Kevin W. "The Need for a Two (or More) Tiered First Amendment to Provide for the Protection of Children." Chicago-Kent Law Review, Vol. 79 (2004): 257-277. Tassi, P. "Supreme Court Strikes Down California's Violent Video Game Ban." 27 June 2011. Forbes. 11 May 2014 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/06/27/supreme-court-strikes-down-californias-violent-games-ban/>.

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 215

This paper is created by writer with

ID 283832471

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Pilgrimage literature reviews, comics book reviews, avatar book reviews, divergent book reviews, ebola virus book reviews, restaurants book reviews, pedagogy book reviews, watergate scandal book reviews, peer pressure book reviews, world economy book reviews, freakonomics book reviews, example of essay on religious studies 3, do polymorphisms of adrenergic receptor signaling pathways affect outcomes of patients report example, example of book review on supply chain management, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia research paper example, example of knowledge breadth and depth course work, free technology essay example 2, no mans land movie review, conceptual framework research papers examples, just war military ethics essay examples, good taking responsibility case study example, free meat industry essay sample, beliefs and practices of zen buddhism essay examples, gdp is not an appropriate measure of well essay, concussion in football annotated bibliographies example, free argumentative essay on synthesis analysis essay, good example of the problem of religious films essay, free essay on chm reflection, berry essays, colgate essays, colman essays, darrach essays, externalize essays, aerating essays, stephen v essays, pg e essays, detoxifying essays, dnase essays, chemoautotroph essays, fibrillin essays, constellation brands essays.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

Do Violent Video Games Contribute to Youth Violence?

Around 73% of American kids age 2-17 played  video games  in 2019, a 6% increase over 2018. Video games accounted for 17% of kids’ entertainment time and 11% of their entertainment spending. The global video game industry was worth contributing $159.3 billion in 2020, a 9.3% increase of 9.3% from 2019.

Violent video games have been blamed for school shootings , increases in bullying , and violence towards women. Critics argue that these games desensitize players to violence, reward players for simulating violence, and teach children that violence is an acceptable way to resolve conflicts.

Video game advocates contend that a majority of the research on the topic is deeply flawed and that no causal relationship has been found between video games and social violence. They argue that violent video games may provide a safe outlet for aggressive and angry feelings and may reduce crime. Read more background…

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1 Playing violent video games causes more aggression, bullying, and fighting. 60% of middle school boys and 40% of middle school girls who played at least one Mature-rated (M-rated) game hit or beat up someone, compared with 39% of boys and 14% of girls who did not play M-rated games. [ 2 ] A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that habitual violent video game playing had a causal link with increased, long-term, aggressive behavior. [ 63 ] Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that children who play M-rated games are more likely to bully and cyberbully their peers, get into physical fights, be hostile, argue with teachers, and show aggression towards their peers throughout the school year. [ 2 ] [ 31 ] [ 60 ] [ 61 ] [ 67 ] [ 73 ] [ 76 ] [ 80 ] Read More

Pro 2 Simulating violence such as shooting guns and hand-to-hand combat in video games can cause real-life violent behavior. Video games often require players to simulate violent actions, such as stabbing, shooting, or dismembering someone with an ax, sword, chainsaw, or other weapons. [ 23 ] Game controllers are so sophisticated and the games are so realistic that simulating the violent acts enhances the learning of those violent behaviors. [ 23 ] A peer-reviewed study found “compelling evidence that the use of realistic controllers can have a significant effect on the level of cognitive aggression.” [ 118 ] Two teenagers in Tennessee who shot at passing cars and killed one driver told police they got the idea from playing Grand Theft Auto III . [ 48 ] Bruce Bartholow, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, spoke about the effects of simulating violence: “More than any other media, these [violent] video games encourage active participation in violence. From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence.” [ 53 ] Read More

Pro 3 Many perpetrators of mass shootings played violent video games. Kevin McCarthy, former U.S. Representative (R-CA), states: “But the idea of these video games that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals and others – I’ve always felt that is a problem for future generations and others. We’ve watched from studies shown before of what it does to individuals. When you look at these photos of how it [mass shootings] took place, you can see the actions within video games and others.” [ 146 ] Many mass shootings have been carried out by avid video game players: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in the Columbine High School shooting (1999); James Holmes in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting (2012); Jared Lee Loughner in the Arizona shooting that injured Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others (2011); and Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway (2011) and admitted to using the game Modern Warfare 2 for training. [ 43 ] [ 53 ] An FBI school shooter threat assessment stated that a student who makes threats of violence should be considered more credible if he or she also spends “inordinate amounts of time playing video games with violent themes.” [ 25 ] Dan Patrick, Republican Lieutenant Governor of Texas, stated: “We’ve always had guns, always had evil, but I see a video game industry that teaches young people to kill.” [ 145 ] Read More

Pro 4 Violent video games desensitize players to real-life violence. Desensitization to violence was defined in a Journal of Experimental Social Psychology peer-reviewed study as “a reduction in emotion-related physiological reactivity to real violence.” [ 51 ] [ 111 ] [ 112 ] The study found that just 20 minutes of playing a violent video game “can cause people to become less physiologically aroused by real violence.” People desensitized to violence are more likely to commit a violent act. [ 51 ] [ 111 ] [ 112 ] By age 18, American children will have seen 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence depicted in violent video games, movies, and television. [ 110 ] A peer-reviewed study found a causal link between violent video game exposure and an increase in aggression as a result of a reduction in the brain’s response to depictions of real-life violence. [ 52 ] Studies have found reduced emotional and physiological responses to violence in both the long and short term. [ 55 ] [ 58 ] In a peer-reviewed study, violent video game exposure was linked to reduced P300 amplitudes in the brain, which is associated with desensitization to violence and increases in aggressive behavior. [ 24 ] Read More

Pro 5 By inhabiting violent characters in video games, children are more likely to imitate the behaviors of those characters and have difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy. Violent video games require active participation and identification with violent characters, which reinforces violent behavior. Young children are more likely to confuse fantasy violence with real world violence, and without a framework for ethical decision making, they may mimic the actions they see in violent video games. [ 59 ] [ 4 ] Child Development and Early Childhood Education expert Jane Katch stated in an interview with Education Week , “I found that young children often have difficulty separating fantasy from reality when they are playing and can temporarily believe they are the character they are pretending to be.” [ 124 ] U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his dissent in Brown v. ESA that “the closer a child’s behavior comes, not to watching, but to acting out horrific violence, the greater the potential psychological harm.” [ 124 ] Read More

Pro 6 Exposure to violent video games is linked to lower empathy and decreased kindness. Empathy, the ability to understand and enter into another’s feelings is believed to inhibit aggressive behavior. In a study of 150 fourth and fifth graders by Jeanne Funk, professor of psychology at the University of Toledo, violent video games were the only type of media associated with lower empathy. [ 32] A study published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin found that exposure to violent video games led to a lack of empathy and prosocial behavior (positive actions that benefit others). [ 65] [ 66] Eight independent tests measuring the impact of violent video games on prosocial behavior found a significant negative effect, leading to the conclusion that “exposure to violent video games is negatively correlated with helping in the real world.” [ 61] Several studies have found that children with high exposure to violent media display lower moral reasoning skills than their peers without that exposure. [ 32] [ 69] A meta-analysis of 130 international studies with over 130,000 participants concluded that violent video games “increase aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and aggressive behaviors, and decrease empathic feelings and prosocial behaviors.” [ 123] Read More

Pro 7 Video games that portray violence against women lead to more harmful attitudes and sexually violent actions towards women. A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that video games that sexually objectify women and feature violence against women led to a statistically significant increase in rape-supportive attitudes, which are attitudes that are hostile towards rape victims. [ 68 ] Another study found that 21% of games sampled involved violence against women, while 28% portrayed them as sex objects. [ 23 ] Exposure to sexual violence in video games is linked to increases in violence towards women and false attitudes about rape, such as that women incite men to rape or that women secretly desire rape. [ 30 ] Carole Lieberman, a media psychiatrist, stated, “The more video games a person plays that have violent sexual content, the more likely one is to become desensitized to violent sexual acts and commit them.” [ 64 ] Target Australia stopped selling Grand Theft Auto V in response to customer complaints about the game’s depiction of women, which includes the option to kill a prostitute to get your money back. [ 70 ] Read More

Pro 8 Violent video games reinforce fighting as a means of dealing with conflict by rewarding the use of violent action with increased life force, more weapons, moving on to higher levels, and more. Studies suggest that when violence is rewarded in video games, players exhibit increased aggressive behavior compared to players of video games where violence is punished. [ 23 ] [ 59 ] The reward structure is one distinguishing factor between violent video games and other violent media such as movies and television shows, which do not reward viewers nor allow them to actively participate in violence. [ 23 ] [ 59 ] An analysis of 81 video games rated for teens ages 13 and up found that 73 games (90%) rewarded injuring other characters, and 56 games (69%) rewarded killing. [ 71 ] [ 72 ] People who played a video game that rewarded violence showed higher levels of aggressive behavior and aggressive cognition as compared with people who played a version of the same game that was competitive but either did not contain violence or punished violence. [ 71 ] [ 72 ] Read More

Pro 9 The US military uses violent video games to train soldiers to kill. The U.S. Marine Corps licensed Doom II in 1996 to create Marine Doom in order to train soldiers. In 2002, the U.S. Army released first-person shooter game America’s Army to recruit soldiers and prepare recruits for the battlefield. [ 6 ] While the military may benefit from training soldiers to kill using video games, kids who are exposed to these games lack the discipline and structure of the armed forces and may become more susceptible to being violent. [ 79 ] Dave Grossman, retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army and former West Point psychology professor, stated: “[T]hrough interactive point-and-shoot video games, modern nations are indiscriminately introducing to their children the same weapons technology that major armies and law enforcement agencies around the world use to ‘turn off’ the midbrain ‘safety catch’” that prevents most people from killing. [ 77 ] Read More

Con 1 Studies have shown violent video games may cause aggression, not violence. Further, any competitive video game or activity may cause aggression. Lauren Farrar, producer for KQED Learning’s YouTube series Above the Noise , stated: “Often times after tragic mass shooting, we hear politicians turn the blame to violent video games, but the reality is that the research doesn’t really support that claim… In general, violence usually refers to physical harm or physical acts that hurt someone– like hitting, kicking, punching, and pushing. Aggression is a more broad term that refers to angry or hostile thoughts, feelings or behaviors. So everything that is violent is aggressive, but not everything that is aggressive is violent. For example, getting frustrated, yelling, talking back, arguing those are all aggressive behaviors, but they aren’t violent. The research on the effects of violent video games and behavior often looks at these milder forms of aggressive behavior.” [ 140 ] A peer-reviewed study in Psychology of Violence determined that the competitive nature of a video game was related to aggressive behavior, regardless of whether the game contained violent content. The researchers concluded: “Because past studies have failed to equate the violent and nonviolent video games on competitiveness, difficulty, and pace of action simultaneously, researchers may have attributed too much of the variability in aggression to the violent content.” [ 125 ] A follow-up study tracked high school students for four years and came to the same conclusion: the competitive nature of the games led to the increased hostile behavior. [ 126 ] Read More

Con 2 Violent video games are a convenient scapegoat for those who would rather not deal with the actual causes of violence in the US. Patrick Markey, psychology professor at Villanova University, stated: “The general story is people who play video games right after might be a little hopped up and jerky but it doesn’t fundamentally alter who they are. It is like going to see a sad movie. It might make you cry but it doesn’t make you clinically depressed… Politicians on both sides go after video games it is this weird unifying force. It makes them look like they are doing something… They [violent video games] look scary. But research just doesn’t support that there’s a link [to violent behavior].” [ 138 ] Markey also explained, “Because video games are disproportionately blamed as a culprit for mass shootings committed by White perpetrators, video game ‘blaming’ can be viewed as flagging a racial issue. This is because there is a stereotypical association between racial minorities and violent crime.” [ 141 ] Andrew Przybylski, associate professor, and director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, stated: “Games have only become more realistic. The players of games and violent games have only become more diverse. And they’re played all around the world now. But the only place where you see this kind of narrative still hold any water, that games and violence are related to each other, is in the United States. [And, by blaming video games for violence,] we reduce the value of the political discourse on the topic, because we’re looking for easy answers instead of facing hard truths.” [ 139 ] Hillary Clinton, Former Secretary of State and First Lady, tweeted, “People suffer from mental illness in every other country on earth; people play video games in virtually every other country on earth. The difference is the guns.” [ 142 ] Read More

Con 3 Simple statistics do not support the claim that violent video games cause mass shootings or other violence. Katherine Newman, dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins University, explained: “Millions of young people play video games full of fistfights, blazing guns, and body slams… Yet only a minuscule fraction of the consumers become violent.” [ 84 ] [ 86 ] [ 87 ] [ 91 ] [ 92 ] A report by the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education examined 37 incidents of targeted school violence between 1974 and 2000. Of the 41 attackers studied, 27% had an interest in violent movies, 24% in violent books, and 37% exhibited interest in their own violent writings, while only 12% showed interest in violent video games. The report did not find a relationship between playing violent video games and school shootings. [ 35 ] Patrick M. Markey, director of the Interpersonal Research Laboratory at Villanova University, stated, “90% of young males play video games. Finding that a young man who committed a violent crime also played a popular video game, such as Call of Duty, Halo, or Grand Theft Auto, is as pointless as pointing out that the criminal also wore socks.” [ 84 ] Further, gun violence is less prevalent in countries with high video game use. A study of the countries representing the 10 largest video game markets internationally found no correlation between playing video games and gun-related killings. Even though US gun violence is high, the nine other countries with the highest video game usage have some of the lowest violent crime rates (and eight of those countries spend more per capita on video games than the United States). [ 97 ] Read More

Con 4 As sales of violent video games have significantly increased, violent juvenile crime rates have significantly decreased. In 2019, juvenile arrests for violent crimes were at an all-time low, a decline of 50% since 2006. Meanwhile, video game sales set a record in Mar. 2020, with Americans spending $5.6 billion on video game hardware, accessories, and assorted content. Both statistics continue a years-long trend. [ 143 ] [ 144 ] Total U.S. sales of video game hardware and software increased 204% from 1994 to 2014, reaching $13.1 billion in 2014, while violent crimes decreased 37% and murders by juveniles acting alone fell 76% in that same period. [ 82 ] [ 83 ] [ 133 ] [ 134 ] [ 135 ] The number of high school students who had been in at least one physical fight decreased from 43% in 1991 to 25% in 2013, and student reports of criminal victimization at school dropped by more than half from 1995 to 2011. [ 106 ] [ 107 ] A peer-reviewed study found that: “Monthly sales of video games were related to concurrent decreases in aggravated assaults.” [ 84 ] Read More

Con 5 Studies have shown that violent video games can have a positive effect on kindness, civic engagement, and prosocial behaviors. Research shows that playing violent video games can induce a feeling of guilt that leads to increased prosocial behavior (positive actions that benefit others) in the real world. [ 104 ] A study published in Computers in Human Behavior discovered that youths exposed to violence in action games displayed more prosocial behavior and civic engagement, “possibly due to the team-oriented multiplayer options in many of these games.” [ 103 ] Read More

Con 6 Many risk factors are associated with youth violence, but video games are not among them. The U.S. Surgeon General’s list of risk factors for youth violence included abusive parents, poverty, neglect, neighborhood crime, being male, substance use, and mental health problems, but not video games. [ 118 ] A peer-reviewed study even found a “real and significant” effect of hot weather on homicides and aggravated assaults, showing that heat is a risk factor for violence. [ 124 ] Read More

Con 7 Violent video game players know the difference between virtual violence in the context of a game and appropriate behavior in the real world. By age seven, children can distinguish fantasy from reality, and can tell the difference between video game violence and real-world violence. [ 99 ] [ 100 ] Video game players understand they are playing a game. Kids see fantasy violence all the time, from Harry Potter and the Minions to Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry. Their ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality prevents them from emulating video game violence in real life. [ 9 ] Exposure to fantasy is important for kids. Fisher-Price toy company stated: “Pretending is more than play: it’s a major part of a child’s development. Fantasy not only develops creative thinking, it’s also a way for children to deal with situations and problems that concern them.” [108] Read More

Con 8 Violent video games provide opportunities for children to explore consequences of violent actions, develop their moral compasses and release their stress and anger (catharsis) in the game, leading to less real world aggression. Violent games allow youth to experiment with moral issues such as war, violence, and death without real world consequences. A researcher at the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media wrote about her research: “One unexpected theme that came up multiple times in our focus groups was a feeling among boys that violent games can teach moral lessons… Many war-themed video games allow or require players to take the roles of soldiers from different sides of a conflict, perhaps making players more aware of the costs of war.” [ 2 ] [ 38 ] A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that children, especially boys, play video games as a means of managing their emotions: “61.9% of boys played to ‘help me relax,’ 47.8% because ‘it helps me forget my problems,’ and 45.4% because ‘it helps me get my anger out.” [ 37 ] Researchers point to the cathartic effect of video games as a possible reason for why higher game sales have been associated with lower crime rates. [ 84 ] A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Adolescent Research concluded that “Boys use games to experience fantasies of power and fame, to explore and master what they perceive as exciting and realistic environments (but distinct from real life), to work through angry feelings or relieve stress, and as social tools.” The games serve as a substitute for rough-and-tumble play. [ 36 ] Read More

Con 9 Studies claiming a causal link between video game violence and real life violence are flawed. Many studies failed to control for factors that contribute to children becoming violent, such as family history and mental health, plus most studies do not follow children over long periods of time. [ 10 ] [ 95 ] Video game experiments often have people playing a game for as little as ten minutes, which is not representative of how games are played in real life. In many laboratory studies, especially those involving children, researchers must use artificial measures of violence and aggression that do not translate to real-world violence and aggression, such as whether someone would force another person eat hot sauce or listen to unpleasant noises. [ 84 ] [ 94 ] According to Christopher J. Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, “matching video game conditions more carefully in experimental studies with how they are played in real life makes VVG’s [violent video games] effects on aggression essentially vanish.” [ 95 ] [ 96 ] Read More

Our Latest Updates (archived after 30 days)

ProCon/Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. 325 N. LaSalle Street, Suite 200 Chicago, Illinois 60654 USA

Natalie Leppard Managing Editor [email protected]

© 2023 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved

• Video Games – Pros & Cons
• Pro & Con Quotes
• History of Video Games
• Did You Know?
• Entertainment Software Rating Board Categories

Cite This Page

• Artificial Intelligence
• Private Prisons
• Space Colonization
• Social Media
• Death Penalty
• School Uniforms
• Video Games
• Animal Testing
• Gun Control
• Banned Books
• Teachers’ Corner

ProCon.org is the institutional or organization author for all ProCon.org pages. Proper citation depends on your preferred or required style manual. Below are the proper citations for this page according to four style manuals (in alphabetical order): the Modern Language Association Style Manual (MLA), the Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago), the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), and Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (Turabian). Here are the proper bibliographic citations for this page according to four style manuals (in alphabetical order):

[Editor's Note: The APA citation style requires double spacing within entries.]

[Editor’s Note: The MLA citation style requires double spacing within entries.]

Essay Service Examples Social Issues Violence in Video Games

Argumentative Essay on Violence in Video Games: Whether Video Games Harmful or not

• Proper editing and formatting
• Free revision, title page, and bibliography
• Flexible prices and money-back guarantee

Addiction or Outlet

What is video gaming and its associated environments, video gaming overview., definition of gaming for the purpose of this research., definition of addiction and outlet., history of the influence of video games in the media., violence in video games., anti-social tendencies., the stereotypes., game development over time and its impacts., trends of popular gaming genres., statistics of average daily use., rise or fall of owning a game console, the “why” and “how”.

Our writers will provide you with an essay sample written from scratch: any topic, any deadline, any instructions.

Cite this paper

Related essay topics.

Get your paper done in as fast as 3 hours, 24/7.

Related articles

Most popular essays

• School Shooting
• Violence in Video Games

Since 1999 when the Columbine high school massacre happened there have been 68 school shootings in...

• Video Games

Video games have become their own industry that have revolutionized every part of entertainment...

• Moral Development

There must be a measuring which might help the society's comprehension regarding how video games...

Does it seem dull and boring waiting for time to pass by? Even though some have better plans to...

Have you heard that video games cause children to act violent or more aggressive? , It is clear...

Have you been watching stories about video games being blamed for school shootings in the news...

Contrary to what a lot of people think, violent video games don’t cause violent behaviour that...

With a few researches done it has been shown that many teens that play an aggressive game with a...

All video games are designed to give the player a choice. To a certain extent, it is an essential...

Join our 150k of happy users

• Get original paper written according to your instructions
• Save time for what matters most

Fair Use Policy

EduBirdie considers academic integrity to be the essential part of the learning process and does not support any violation of the academic standards. Should you have any questions regarding our Fair Use Policy or become aware of any violations, please do not hesitate to contact us via [email protected].

We are here 24/7 to write your paper in as fast as 3 hours.

Provide your email, and we'll send you this sample!

By providing your email, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy .

Say goodbye to copy-pasting!

Get custom-crafted papers for you.

Enter your email, and we'll promptly send you the full essay. No need to copy piece by piece. It's in your inbox!

• Press Clipping
• Legals & Privacy
• Transdisciplinarity
• Project Results
• International
• Head of Violence Lab
• Violence Lab Staff
• Heads of Regional Labs
• Research Group Members
• Expert Practitioners
• International Experts
• Scientific Advisory Board
• Volumes & Papers

The link between video game violence and real life violence

by Karlo Bojčić

Through several generations there has been an ongoing scientific debate that exposure to violent media could lead to violent individual’s behaviour. This includes diverse examples through history, such as cinema, comic, music and television. One of the debate elements was that video games have greater influence on individual’s behaviour. It is because video games provide players with an interactive process which could have greater impact on players via closer identification with the main character.

Video games are popular in Croatia.  Some evidence on the popularity of video games in Croatia could stem from the fact that the PlayStation logo is the most recognized symbol by Croatian children and adolescents, as reported in a study by Brandwatch in 2018. The aforementioned study analysed 50 million photos on Twitter, posted from September 1, 2018 to 28 February, 2019 worldwide. Using advanced logo recognition tools, the study concluded that in Croatia the Playstation brand surpasses all others, as can be seen on figure below.

A recent study conducted in Croatia, among 531 students aged between 11 and 24 years (Livazović et al., 2018, in press) showed that 57,8% of examined students play video games at least one to two hours a day, while 14,5% play video games more than 10 hours a day. The data is presented in Figure 2. shows that shooter video games were the most popular video game genre with 45,3% of examined students reporting playing shooter video games at least once a month, and 14% of examined students playing shooter video games every day. The data for playing shooter video games is presented in Figure 3.

As mentioned, Croatian children and adolescents often play video games, and a good portion of these games are violent. So, is there a danger that playing violent video games can result with violence in real life? According to governments in Nepal, Iraq, and India violence in video games can make people violent in real life. The governments of these countries have adopted or proposed laws prohibiting violent video games (Žalac, 2019a; 2019b). The state of Pennsylvania is on a similar track, as their lawmakers have published a bill that proposes an additional 10% tax on violent video games. The money from the “sin tax" would go into fund that aims to enhance security measures against shootings at schools (Makuch, 2019).

There are numerous studies showing that violent video games lead to violence in real life. In their meta-analysis, Anderson et al (2010) identified 74 studies and found that playing violent video games is associated with higher levels of aggressive behaviour, aggressive cognition and physiological arousal. There is also some evidence that the influence of violent video game on individual’s behaviour may be larger than the influence of violent television contents or films. Also, exposure to violent video games was associated with desensitization and lack of empathy. Studies carried by Wiegman & Van Schie, and Dill also confirm that violent video games cause violent behaviour (Ružić, 2011). According to some scholars, players get carried away by the video game so they transfer the violence from the virtual to the real world.

On the other hand, Ferguson and Kilburn (2010) found the opposite, in which increases of violence in video games were correlated with decreases of violence in real life. They suggested that when other risk factors (like depression, peers, family) are controlled, video game effects drop to near zero. Similarly, a study conducted in 2015 by DeCamp illustrates how the effect of playing violent video games on violent behaviour is reduced almost to zero when controlling for other violence risk factors. Ferguson quotes several studies that deny links between video game violence and real life violence (Ferguson, Konijn, 2015).

In 2015, Markey, Markey & French conducted a study in which they followed annual trends in video game sales from 1978 to 2011. No association was found between video game sales and violent crime in that period. Monthly sales of video games were associated with decrease in heavy assaults. They were not associated to homicides. There was also a tendency of decrease of homicides in the months following the release of popular M-rated video games (which may may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language and are generally suitable for ages 17 and older). A possible explanation for this decrease in violence is that playing violent video games leads to catharsis. Players who play violent video games can release their aggression in the virtual world, rather than in real life. Other explanations are that individuals predisposed to violent behaviour tend to seek out violent media, like video games. Because they play video games at home, there is less violence in real life.

The impact of video games on an individual’s behaviour may be overstated based on solely correlational research. Correlation does not imply causation. Also, causality is often seen as a one-to-one causality. Players won’t become violent just because they play violent video games. This is not how causality should be understood. There are many risk factors for violence. Some of the most significant are genes, having sensation-seeking personality, seeing or hearing domestic violence, lack of parental monitoring, lack of parental attachment, poverty, peer influences and depression (Ferguson, Kilburn, 2010; DeCamp, 2015). As the number of risk factors increases, so does the chance of violent acts by an individual.

In conclusion, there is some evidence that could relate video game violence to real life violence, as well as evidence that suggest video game violence may be harmless. Based on the presented research findings, it is implied that violent video games have negative influence on some individuals, especially those who are also affected by more significant risk factors. Therefore, it is implied that measures to reduce violence might be more effective if they were directed towards other, more significant risk factors rather than violent video games.

References :

Anderson, C. A., Akiko, S., Ihori, N., Swing, E. L.; Bushman, B. J.; Sakamoto, A., Rothstein, H. R., Muniba, S. (2010). Violent Video Game Effects on Aggression, Empathy, and Prosocial Behavior in Eastern and Western Countries: A Meta-Analytic Review.  Psychological Bulletin , 136(2), 151-173.

DeCamp, W. (2015). Impersonal Agencies of Communication: Comparing the Effects of Video Games and Other Risk Factors on Violence. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 4(4), 296–304

Ferguson, C.J., Kilburn, J. (2010). Much Ado About Nothing: The Misestimation and Overinterpretation of Violent Video Game Effects in Eastern and Western Nations: Comment on Anderson et al. (2010). Psychological Bulletin , 136(2), 174–178.

Ferguson, C. J., Konijn, E. A. (2015). She Said/He Said: A Peaceful Debate on Video Game Violence. Psychology of Popular Media Culture , 4(4), 397–411.

Makuch, E. (2019, February 6). Violent Video Game Tax Proposed In Pennsylvania. Retrieved from https://www.gamespot.com/articles/violent-video-game-tax-proposed-in-pennsylvania/1100-6464870/

Markey, P. M., Markey, C. N., French, J. E. (2015). Violent Video Games and Real-World Violence: Rhetoric Versus Data. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 4(4), 277–295

Ružić, N. (2011). The Internet and Video Games: Causes of Increased Aggressiveness Among Young People. Medijske studije , 2(3-4), 16-27.

The Brand Visibility Report 2019. Retrieved from https://www.brandwatch.com/reports/2019-brand-visibility/view/#block-65

Žalac, Z. (2019a, April 12 ). PUBG je zabranjen u jednoj državi jer djeca postaju nasilna od igranja . Retrieved from https://www.hcl.hr/vijest/pubg-je-zabranjen-u-nepalu-jer-djeca-postaju-nasilna-od-igranja-138549/

Žalac, Z. (2019b, April 19). Fortnite i PUBG su od sada službeno zabranjeni u Iraku. Retrieved from https://www.hcl.hr/vijest/fortnite-pubg-sada-sluzbeno-zabranjeni-iraku-138919/

Do Violent Video Games make People Violent? Research Paper

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Arguments proposing that video games cause violence, arguments opposing that video games cause violence, works cited.

Video games have exhibited exponential growth in the past few decades. They have advanced from their humble origins in the computer lab to a contemporary status as one of the leaders in the multibillion dollar global entertainment industry (Newman 1). Most of the popular video games in the present times are characterized by their ability to allow players to role-play in various scenarios.

Owing to the market appeal of violence, most of the scenarios involve acts of violence and destruction which are performed by the player on screen. Concerns have been raised as to the effect that this overexposure and subsequent desensitization to violence is having on people especially bearing in mind that video games are quickly becoming the most fashionable pass time activity for children in the developed world.

Arguments have been forwarded that the violence in video games is directly responsible for the rise in violence by young people. On the other hand, other arguments propose that personal responsibility takes precedence and as such video games do not result in any violent behavior.

As can be deduced from this, there are various opposing views on the effect that violent video games have on people. This paper shall examine several of the arguments raised so as to draw a conclusion as to whether video games actually do cause violence in people. The paper shall also discuss the various arguments advanced by proponents and opponents to consider their merit.

One of the factors that make video games especially prone to leading to violence in real life is the high level of engagement that video games have. Funk et al. theorizes that the intense engagement may increase the probability that game behaviors will generalize outside the game situation as a result of the active participation that video games require of the gamer (34).

Qualitative researches further on show that children who were exposed to violent video games engaged in fantasy play’s in which they copied the actions of the violent video characters. This effectively demonstrates that the high involvement of video games results in youths desiring to play out the violent actions in real life.

This inevitably leads to the perpetration of violence by people as a result of the influence of video games. Video game enthusiasts negate his point by arguing that people have the capability to differentiate simulations from real life. While this may be the case, it does not take into consideration the high impressionability of youths and the influence that media and in particular video games have on the lives of people.

The correlation between video-game violence and increased aggression amongst the youths is unnerving. Anderson and Bushman hypothesize that it is no coincidence that recent cases of high school and campus violence are in most cases perpetrated by individuals who habitually played violent video games (353).

Studies indicate that the reason for increased aggression with increased exposure to violence scenes is because aggression is largely based on the learning function of the brain and as such, each violent episode is in essence one more learning trial (Dill 83).

However, it may be argued that aggression is a function of nature and video games cannot influence a non-violent person into violence. While these assertions may be true, Anderson and Bushman demonstrate that video violence lead to the reinforcement of aggressive behavior which in some cases leads to full blown cases of violence and destruction (353).

One of the logical consequences of exposure to violence is desensitization; which implies the elimination of cognitive, emotional or even behavioral response to violence (Funk et al. 25). An interesting fact with regard to desensitization to violence is that it occurs in subtle and minute quantities and one is seldom aware of its occurrence. In other words, engaging in violent video games results in an increase for tolerance for violent behavior in real life.

Supporters of video games assert that video games are in no way the only source of violent material as media and even real-life experiences contain some episodes of violence. As such, it stands to reason that video games should not be held accountable for desensitization to violence as it is evident that there are many other avenues through which violence is presented to people.

However, research indicates that the high interaction levels of video games leads to blunted empathic responding and higher emotional desensitization that by any other media due to the active involvement of a person as they play. This subsequently results in stronger pro-violence attitudes which have been repeatedly blamed on the prevalence of violent videos.

While proponents of video games as a major cause of violence among youths point out that these games represent violence and murder as “cool and fashionable, it should be noted that video games are not the only media through which such notions are spread.

Ferguson highlights the fact that violence as entertainment has always been an aspect of mainstream media and as such, video games and their effects should not be viewed in isolation (13). As such, violence in youths should take into consideration the various TV and Newspaper presentations of violence and Hollywood films romanticizing of violence instead of laying the blame principally on video games.

Owing to the many studies which propose the negative effects of video games, it would logically follow that laws would be put in place to ensure that this social vice is controlled. However, this has not been the case and production of violent video games continues to be rife.

Ferguson documents that despite the research on the effects of media violence on children and the subsequent findings that media violence is mostly detrimental to children’s psychology, there are no enforcement mechanisms in place that deter the sale of violent games to children (13).

This lack of legislation is mostly because the various censorship laws proposed have been challenged in courts mostly on constitutional and scientific grounds. Ferguson highlights that some judges particularly criticized opponents of video games who were blamed for biased presentation of the existing research on effects of video game violence therefore greatly decreasing the objectivity and credibility of these anti-game scholars (14).

Opponents of media violence point to the rise in crime waves during the 1970’s and 1980’s which was largely assumed to be caused by violence in television. Subsequently, anti-game scholars indicate that the same could happen as a result of video violence.

Ferguson reiterates that this is a fallacy since records indicate that violent crimes in the U.S. population decreased in the 1990s, which is when the violent video games began to become popular and increasingly violent as the years progressed due to technological advances (13).

As such, the assertion that video games result in increased violence cannot be backed up by data therefore suggesting that violent video games may be more benign that is currently thought. However, opponents of video games point out that the mere fact that violent crimes decreased at the same time that video games came into the picture is hugely coincidental and does not indication that violent video games have no negative effect on people.

The prevalence of video games in the lives of younger age groups is evident and as such, the impact that this exposure may have on them is of great significance. It has been suggested that there is a correlation between violent video games and real life violence. Supporters of video games propose that this correlation is not causation but rather, they argue that the fact is that violent children prefer to play violent games.

As such, video games do not create violent people as opponents of video games suggest. While this argument may hold some truth, numerous research findings indicates that video games lead to an increase in the violent levels of the people who engage in the games. It is therefore plausible that while video games are played by violent children, the aggression level of such people is significantly increased as a result of the violence in the video games.

The effects of exposure to violent video games are also undoubtedly higher to the younger age groups since they are still developing their moral values and therefore are more impressionable. As such, a violent game which may have little effect on an adult can have lasting impact on children whose moral reasoning principles are still being molded (Funk 34).

However, despite the negative sentiments that are associated with video games, they present a great means of telling stories to the youth. As such, the socially responsible thing to do would be to endorse and encourage behaviors that are sociable through these games (Kahne, Middaugh & Evans 8).

In addition to the alleged increase in violence levels, video game violence has also been blamed for frequent reduction of pro-social behavior by the players. This greatly negates the civil potential of the games and leads to a prevalence of anti-social behavior. From this, it is clear that the negative effect of violent video games is far reaching and not only limited to aggressive behavior and an increase in violence by youths.

While there are many experts who criticize the existing violent video game research literature, their credibility is uncertain since most of this experts working with or for the video game industries. It would therefore be absurd to expect them to make declarations that would be detrimental to their industry.

On the other hand, anti-game experts are mostly psychologists and scholars who have no vested interest in the results. This greatly adds to the credibility of they studies, most of which indicate that there is a strong relationship between youth violence and video game violence.

Video games are an ever-present youth experience and they can offer wide ranges of experiences to the individual. As has been demonstrated by the arguments presented in this paper, video games can be used to promote certain notions.

This paper highlights the reality that violence can in fact be promoted by use of violent video games. From this paper, it is clear that the youth are the ones who are most susceptible to being made violent and it is therefore the obligation of parents to ensure that the exposure of their children to these harmful games is limited.

However, it should be remembered that games can also be used for nonviolent and even educational purposes. Game designers should therefore be urged to create less violent video games and rather focus on the benign and beneficial facet of video games. By doing this, the tremendous educative power that the games wield can be harnessed for the betterment of the society.

Anderson, A. Craig. “An Update on the Effects of Playing Violent Video Games.” Journal of Adolescence 27 (2004) 113–122.

Anderson, A. Craig and Brad J. Bushman. “Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior.” American Psychological Society. VOL. 12, NO. 5, 2001.

Dill, Karen, E. “How Fantasy Becomes Reality: Seeing Through Media Influence.” Oxford University Press US, 2009. Print.

Ferguson, Christopher. “Violent Video Games.” 2008. Web.

Funk, Jeanne, B., et al. “Violence Exposure in Real-life, Video Games, Television, Movies, and the Internet: is there Desensitization?” Journal of Adolescence 27 (2004) 23–39.

Kahne, Joseph., Middaugh, Ellen, and Evans, Chris. “The Civic Potential of Video Games.” 7 Sept 2008. Web. https://www.civicsurvey.org/publications/civic-potential-of-video-games

Newman, James. “Videogames.” Routeledge, 2004. Print.

• The Future of Psychology
• Motivation: Selfish Interests
• Urban Violence Case in Ferguson
• Ferguson Unrest's Causes and Response
• Alexander Chapman Ferguson as the Most Inspiring Leader
• The Personal Shopper in Marketing Strategy
• Motivation Evaluation: Martin Luther King Jr.
• Adolescents and Popular Culture: A Critical Analysis on Blogging Culture
• Contemporary Issues in Cultural & Cross-Cultural Psychology
• A Critical Evaluation of the Behavioural Outcomes of Failure of Mylination of the Prefrontal Lobe During Adolescence
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, July 10). Do Violent Video Games make People Violent? https://ivypanda.com/essays/do-violent-video-games-make-people-violent/

"Do Violent Video Games make People Violent?" IvyPanda , 10 July 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/do-violent-video-games-make-people-violent/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Do Violent Video Games make People Violent'. 10 July.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Do Violent Video Games make People Violent?" July 10, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/do-violent-video-games-make-people-violent/.

1. IvyPanda . "Do Violent Video Games make People Violent?" July 10, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/do-violent-video-games-make-people-violent/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Do Violent Video Games make People Violent?" July 10, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/do-violent-video-games-make-people-violent/.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

My Mother, the Gambler

“Give me three numbers, baby.” My mother made this request often—so often, in fact, that when I try to remember her voice this is what I hear. I can see her, too. She’s in the kitchen, sitting at the white Formica table, the green wall phone behind her, the phone she’ll soon pick up to place her bet. She’s smiling, because this moment is capacious: everything’s possible. It’s a moment in which—unless you’re a pessimist, and my mother is not—Fortune is on your side.

She’s dressed for the occasion, in a flower-print top and stretchy yellow slacks, as if to advertise her innocence before breaking the law. Of course, for a long time I didn’t know that what my mother was doing was illegal. She certainly didn’t look like a criminal, sitting there with her blond hair intricately coiffed. The stylist had made it look like a sfogliatella , a kind of Neapolitan pastry that we often had in the house. My mother’s hair possessed the same golden hue, the same artful construction of multilayered swoops. Plus, the glossy lacquer of Aqua Net was not unlike the sugar on the pastry. That this delectable human might want my advice made me feel giddy.

I don’t recall her ever asking my brother for numbers. My brother was older, more confident, more defined as a person. Perhaps, as such, he lacked mystery. So my mother looked to me, the quiet one.

Possibly my inwardness gave the impression I might be in contact with whatever invisible forces were responsible for luck. No doubt she’d also noted my fervent superstitions, which involved the need to arrange things perfectly or to perform an action a certain number of times. It was important, for instance, that the hanging bits of my shoelaces not touch the floor and that everything on my desk be an equal distance apart. When leaving for school, I made sure to touch three separate leaves on the maple tree just outside our door. These rituals, done correctly, could stave off doom—though perhaps my mother interpreted my behavior not as an attempt to avoid misfortune but as a spell to invoke success.

What would later be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder was, at this point, just another aspect of what was openly called my oddness. I had heard my father say to strangers that he had no idea where I’d come from. Sometimes he said he’d found me in a garbage can. I was also referred to as “the Polack,” since I was light-haired and fair-skinned, unlike my swarthy parents and my brother, who looked robustly Italian; the one-quarter Polish heritage from my paternal grandmother had staked its claim in me.

At least I had my mother’s nose, and, more important, I had inherited her belief in magic. Both of us understood that in order to survive it was necessary to arrange things in a certain way. You had to take life’s terrifying unpredictabilities and rally them, by ritual or formula, into an army that would do your bidding.

There was a period of several months when I kept suggesting my mother play the same three numbers. Seven, one, four. Something about that arrangement seemed friendly, not to mention that the numbers added up to twelve, which, when added again—one plus two—gave you three, meaning the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I saw no sacrilege in this reference to the Trinity. Gambling, I sensed, was a kind of prayer—though my mother didn’t always direct these prayers toward God. Sometimes she invoked the dead, playing the birth date of a deceased relative, often her grandmother. Such bets were akin to lighting candles in church, which you had to pay for, too. Both transactions were a request to be remembered by Heaven—to be helped, or saved.

And we needed help. We were poor—though this word was not one my family used back then. “Hardworking,” my mother might have said with a smirk, rightly indicating that the people who worked the hardest often had the least to show for it. “No pot to piss in,” as my father liked to put it. A waitress and a barber, they could get only so far.

Welfare, for which we likely would have qualified, was unthinkable. My parents, the descendants of immigrants who had never been naturalized, had inherited a residue of fear and shame when it came to the government. They didn’t want their names in the system or on a list .

Besides, we weren’t starving , and we’d recently moved to a house in the suburbs of New Jersey. The first time I suggested the numbers seven, one, four to my mother, she said, “Do you mean seven, one, two?” The address of the apartment building in Hoboken where we used to live was 712 Adams Street. “The penthouse,” my father called it—a tenth-floor walkup, with ill-lit stairwells reeking of urine. The tiny cold-water flat had no heating system other than the stove in the kitchen, which explains why in holiday photographs from that time my brother and I sit under an artificial Christmas tree as if dressed for an Arctic expedition.

Still, my mother occasionally played the old number—712. Her commitment to the past was baffling. Why look to that horrible apartment building for luck, especially now that we had a house of our own?

My mother’s parents had moved in with us, too, as had my father’s widowed mother, pale and skinny—the other Polack. At first, my grandmothers seemed less than happy. In Hoboken, they’d been able to walk everywhere. Now a car was required, and neither had ever learned to drive. In fact, neither had attended high school. They were quiet and humble women who, for many years, had worked as laborers—one in a laundry, the other as a housekeeper. But their real vocation appeared to be religion. My nonna and my babcia were so devout that they seemed like witches. When mumbling their prayers over rosary beads, their tongues turned thick and foreign. And, in their bedrooms, they kept a menagerie of plaster saints—figures that lived in a flickering garden of ever-blooming candles. To me, those tiny altars were the pilot lights of our house.

I loved my grandmothers with an intensity that was almost febrile; I flushed in their presence, greedy for attention, as well as in the knowledge that it would be given. They were the women who fed me, dressed me, put me to bed. To have both of them now under the same roof was the epitome of luck.

When I was feeling particularly anxious, I would sit beside my Polish grandmother; I’d take her hand and, using one of her fingers like a pen, trace circles on my palm. At a certain point, she would understand what I needed and begin to trace the circles herself. But eventually she’d toss my hand away and say, “Enough.”

Downstairs, in a separate apartment on the first floor, my Italian grandmother was always ready to receive me. Even if I wasn’t hungry, I’d claim that I was, and soon I’d be offered a piece of crusty bread with butter, or a bowl of steaming farina.

My mother had always taken a back seat in regard to child rearing, but now she had more freedom than ever and could focus more fully on her passions. In addition to playing her numbers, the so-called Italian lottery, she bet heavily on football. Watching the games on television, she would shout at the screen, gesticulating with her perfectly manicured hands. Shocking four-letter words emerged effortlessly through scarlet lips, in a voice deeper than my father’s.

Often, she watched with my uncles, and the shouting grew so loud that it terrified me. At the time, I didn’t understand how much money was riding on the outcome. I was aware only of the cheering that would lift my mother and the men from their seats or the swearing that would make my grandmothers retreat into the kitchen. I would escape, too, usually to the closet in my bedroom. It was around this time, when I was eight or nine, that I learned the comfort of tight spaces and the pleasure of rocking my body—both of which seemed to short-circuit the fear centers in my brain.

I also began to keep notebooks in which I wrote poems with tyrannical meters—another kind of rocking. I drew pictures, mostly animals, and kept lists, often mundane—the titles of all the movies I’d seen or the first names of the kids in my class. I might record an overheard conversation, one that had confused or upset me. Some days, all I could manage was to scribble endless spirals, or to write the word “win” over and over, doing my part to help my mother prosper.

My father wasn’t a gambler, though he had come from one. His father was a truck driver who’d once, in an all-night poker game, won enough to buy a vehicle and start his own short-haul delivery business. I was also told that he’d won a horse named Lollipop—a name he thought demeaning and quickly changed to Lady. My grandfather’s plan was to train her to race, illegally, on bush tracks. But Lady, kept at a cheap stable in Weehawken, died of colic. The following year, after another winning streak—this time on boxing matches—my grandfather died, too, of cirrhosis of the liver.

The cycle of the gambler—from despair and lack to hope and reward—was endless, both frustrating and beguiling. My father had experienced this long before he’d met my mother. He understood how her addiction could lead the family in one of two directions—either up the ladder or down.

Living in a new house seemed like a miracle to me; I didn’t understand how precarious our situation was, financially—the growing debts, the heavy burden of the mortgage. Nor did I understand the kinds of people my mother was involved with. My father has never been completely forthcoming about those years, but I do know that the down payment for the house was funded in part by gambling wins.

During those early days in the suburbs, my mother seemed as optimistic as ever. She’d managed to secure a number of credit cards, on which she could access cash advances. Perhaps it was these, along with the occasional windfall from the Italian lottery, that accounted for some of the over-the-top Christmases I experienced as a child—holidays in which my brother and I received a ridiculous amount of presents. There were Easters when, instead of dyed eggs, our egg hunts featured plastic eggshells stuffed with money. Certain years, the bills were singles, but other years there were fives and tens, even twenties.

In September, before school began, my mother would drive my brother and me to Schlesinger’s, a clothing store in West New York, where we were each allowed to pick out ten items. My mother was usually in a good mood and, for the most part, unconcerned with price or appropriate attire. She’d let my brother buy two pairs of sneakers or five football jerseys. But once, when I found a skintight shirt with a sparkly rose emblazoned across the chest, my mother seemed hesitant. “You’re skinny enough,” she said—focussing more on the fit than on the fact that I’d chosen something clearly meant for a disco queen. “It looks like diamonds,” I said. The comment was strategic. My mother had recently lost the stone in her engagement ring—or had she sold it? Anyway, I managed to sway her. “Just don’t wear it to school,” she said. I promised—a lie. When my brother scowled, I understood the reason. Kids in the neighborhood had started to call me “faggot.”

I knew the word, though in my mind then it meant something like “girl”—or, rather, a boy who was like a girl. And though the insult stung I could bear it by reminding myself that my favorite people were women, and these women had once been girls.

Every Friday, my parents went out to dinner. Sometimes they attended a concert or a Broadway show. Other activities my mother did alone. On a whim, she’d get dolled up and go to the track. Some weekends, she drove to a private club, where she liked the blackjack table. I remember my father, one day, accusing her of straying too far. After that, she did what she could to make her fun at home. Once or twice a month, she hosted late-night card parties. These parties were attended mostly by women, many of whom, like my mother, sported impressive confections of hair. Cigarettes dangled intrepidly from their lips—cigarettes they could inhale without the use of hands. All it took was a deft smirk, leaving their fingers free to focus on the cards.

The games were played around our kitchen table, after my brother and I had gone to bed. My father hovered at the periphery, watching TV in the living room until he fell asleep on the couch. Even from down the hall, I could smell the women’s perfume, my mother’s Opium coming through the strongest. As the night progressed, the scents grew wilder as they mingled with the women’s sweat. These gatherings, I later learned, were high-stakes affairs. Hundreds could be lost or gained.

The day after a card party, my mother would stay in bed later than usual. Before leaving for school, my brother and I would slip into her room to ask for money. She always allowed us to peel a few singles from the roll of bills she kept in her pocketbook. Sometimes that roll was skinny; other times it was as fat as a ball of mozzarella, and just as tempting. But, even as I could read my brother’s mind (“Why not take a little extra?”), my mother could read it, too. “Don’t even think about it,” she’d growl, her voice thick with slumber.

Not long after my eleventh birthday, the house began to hum with a new energy. The phone rang constantly. “Your mother’s friends,” my father called them. “Is Sophie there?” they’d ask, if I happened to pick up the phone.

By this point, she was not only playing her numbers but also taking bets for others. There was a pad beside the phone, on which she would write the caller’s name and a dollar amount, along with their hopeful chain of digits. Sometimes the word “box” or “straight” was included.

Since my mother was often out, she instructed my Polish grandmother to take down the information in her absence. When she asked what it was all about, my mother said she was doing someone a favor. Once, she said it was a game some girls were playing at work. No one questioned her, not even my father.

Now and then, the calls would come during dinner. My mother always sat closest to the wall where the phone was. Nearby, she had a tiny metal table on which she kept her pad. Mostly she’d finish these mealtime transactions quickly, but occasionally she’d get up, pulling the phone, which had an extra-long cord, all the way into the living room.

Whatever secrets she had seemed connected to our growing prosperity. During the summer, we were able to go to the shore for a week, stay at a hotel, eat three-course dinners in restaurants that looked like fishing boats. In the evenings, on the boardwalk, we’d play the wheels, shoot the guns, toss the balls. When the vacation was over, we drove home with the fruits of our good fortune—stuffed animals, cartons of cigarettes, goldfish in plastic bags. My brother and I put the fish in a water pitcher or a mixing bowl, hoping they wouldn’t die. Eventually, my father installed a pond in the yard, and the goldfish flashed around for years, reminding us of our luck.

That is, until the day my brother and I came home from school to find police cars parked in front of the house. My fear, always a trickster, convinced me that the police cars had something to do with me; I was not a normal person, and I knew that one day I’d be punished. My impulse was to get away, maybe hide in the woods near our house. But then my brother ran up the front steps and through the door, and I followed him.

Inside, all the lights were on—something my father never allowed. There were men everywhere, some in uniforms, some in suits. I rushed down to my nonna’s apartment, but neither she nor my grandfather was there. When I climbed the stairs again, a female neighbor was stationed in the kitchen, saying she’d take me and my brother to her place. I refused. “Where are my grandmothers?” I kept asking. Watching the men opening drawers and looking in closets, I felt a kind of nauseous outrage. When I saw the strangers in the hallway outside my bedroom, I thought of my notebooks. “You can’t go in there!” I screamed. My brother, in a moment of tenderness, touched my arm. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

For days after the raid, I worried that the police had read my notebooks—all that incriminating evidence. I felt certain they would return to fetch me.

Of course, the cops had no interest in the scribblings of an eleven-year-old boy. It turned out they had my Polish grandmother on tape, implicated in what I heard called a “numbers racket.” She was arrested, as was my mother. The two of them were booked, their photographs taken, their fingerprints. My grandmother was humiliated. I was told that she asked to remove the crucifix around her neck before they photographed her, but that this request was denied.

I prayed at her bedroom altar, kept her candles lit. My grandmother was released. The authorities believed her when she said she had no idea what she was doing. Besides, the police were after bigger fish—one of them being my big blond mother.

But she got off, too; I’m not sure how. “Friends in high places,” I recall my father saying, while my brother, using pulp-fiction logic, had the audacity to ask my mother if she’d turned other people in. I was sure she was going to slap him. But she fell into a stunned silence, and tears came to her eyes.

“I would never do that.”

Many years later, long after my mother died, I spoke with her brother, my uncle Frank, and asked him about the people my mother had worked for. My uncle tilted his head: “Let’s just say they weren’t people you wanted to screw with.” He mentioned some names and then immediately encouraged me to forget them. He was cagey and kept trying to change the subject.

But, in the end, he did tell me a little more about the nature of the business. “Your mother was a runner,” he said. “Like a salesman. She brought bets to the bookie, got a commission.”

“But what were the numbers?” I asked. “How did that work?”

My uncle explained that, every day, there’d be a notice in the newspaper which listed the previous day’s earnings at a New York racetrack, and that the game was to guess the last three numbers of that amount.

When I asked about the meaning of “box” and “straight,” he looked at me like I was an idiot.

“You could play the numbers in their exact order,” he said. “That’s straight. Or you could box them, which meant that if your numbers came out in any order you’d win something. It cost more, but you won less.”

I was curious if my mother had ever won big. My uncle shrugged. “What’s big? Sometimes it gave her a little extra. Your mother hated having no cash in her pocket. She said it made her feel naked.” He added that most of what she’d won had gone to the princes.

Link copied

I assumed my uncle was speaking about the men my mother had worked for. But when I asked, “Who were the princes?,” he said, “Don’t be stupid. You and your brother.”

For a while after my mother was arrested, she seemed to be a changed woman. At this point, she was working as a waitress in the skyboxes at Giants Stadium. She often pulled double shifts and came home exhausted. There were no more card parties. At night, she’d drink coffee and watch police procedurals on television. She slept very little. Sometimes she played electronic poker on a small device whose chirps and dings I could hear in my bedroom. In the mornings, I’d find her sitting at the kitchen table, paying our bills or figuring out the household budget.

Strangely, even with my mother’s propensity for gambling, my father had always let her take care of the finances; he claimed that she was better with numbers.

Now and then, my Italian grandmother would climb the stairs to check on her daughter. “ Tutto bene ?” she’d ask unsteadily, clearly out of breath. She’d started to speak more often in her native tongue. Curses? Prayers? Accusations? I comprehended none of it.

My other grandmother resumed her housekeeping duties with a demented vigor, as if the scrubbing and polishing could remove the stain of her sins. She rarely spoke to my mother, the tension between them palpable. The silence was toxic; I could feel it in my chest, like smog.

My mother was too proud, or perhaps too ashamed, to apologize; and my grandmother, I assume, was too aware that she lived in our house by the grace of my parents’ kindness.

After the arrest, my babcia was easily overcome by emotion. Sometimes the cause of a breakdown seemed trivial. Once, I heard my father ask her what was going on with the towels—why were they so rough, shouldn’t she be using fabric softener? My grandmother made a strange gulping sound and walked out of the kitchen. I found her downstairs, crying as she stood beside the washing machine. “He treats me like a servant,” she said. “Your mother, too.”

A moment after her outburst, she wiped her eyes and began to defend my father: “I know he works hard. I know he didn’t mean it.” She was petting my face now, in an effort to distract me from her brush with honesty.

I understood then that there was a warning here. It seemed that if you didn’t express yourself you ended up a prisoner. And, though you might blame others for this, in truth the jailer was yourself. I was a prisoner, too. There were many things I couldn’t bear to say; instead, I buried them in notebooks. I was a coward, and my silence, like my grandmother’s, had a lot to do with shame.

No one in the house was speaking honestly. We went about our days, as before, but all of us were just pretending things were fine. Every time the phone rang, I could see the worry on my father’s face.

But, as the months passed and nothing happened, life resumed its ease. My parents had even befriended a priest. My mother, who never cooked, once spent a whole afternoon making cream puffs before he came to visit. I watched, disgusted, as he ate five, then six, then seven. I counted, of course, and later wrote the number in my notebook.

The priest wasn’t from our church; I’m not sure where my parents met him—maybe at a party. In addition to having a sweet tooth, he drank a lot of wine, and his smile was often counterfeit; I could tell by the way his eyes failed to participate.

My grandmothers, however, seemed charmed by him. When my babcia asked him to bless the house, he happily obliged, using a tiny vial of holy water. I recall feeling upstaged; apparently my own rituals were no longer sufficient to insure our safety.

Sometimes I wondered why I was working so hard. The worst had happened and my family had survived. Perhaps I could learn to resist the tyranny of my compulsions. Slowly, I let down my guard. When I tapped the maple leaves now, it was out of habit rather than as an obsessive act of magic. My grandmothers became less vigilant, too. Every so often, I would notice that, in one of their bedrooms, no candle was burning. Even today, I blame this laxness for what was yet to happen.

About two years later, I was sitting at the dinner table with my family when suddenly my brother began to cry. The moment was disorienting because my brother rarely shed a tear.

My father seemed more annoyed than sympathetic. “What?” he said.

Finally, my brother looked up. “Are you selling the house?” he asked.

My father was scowling now. “What are you talking about?”

When my brother spoke again, his words came out in jagged, breathless shards—something about a kid at school, something the kid’s mother had read in the newspaper.

Apparently, there was a notice in the paper that our house was up for sale. “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said. My father added, “Your friend is full of shit.”

My father didn’t rush through dinner, which calmed us. But, afterward, he got up and went into the living room, sat in his easy chair, and unfolded the local paper, where he learned that what my brother had said was true. Our house was to be auctioned off at the end of the month—not by my father but by the county sheriff.

I’m not sure what happened next; there’s a gap in my memory. Certainly, there must have been an argument, accusations, apologies. I have a vague recollection of my mother saying something about “a mistake.” My memory wakes up a few days later. My parents are whispering in the kitchen. And then the whispering turns to shouting. My mother, defending herself, sounds like an unrepentant child: “It’s not my fault!”

I later came to understand that for nearly a year my mother had failed to make the mortgage payments. She’d also secured a line of credit against the equity, and it seemed that my father’s signature on this loan was forged.

The money, most likely, had gone toward more of my mother’s prayers—numbers and horses and blackjack. “I was almost there,” she said once, her martyred eyes looking toward the ceiling. If there was sadness, it didn’t appear to be about what she’d done; it seemed to be about the fact that her magic had failed her.

My father had a new voice now, hammering, unkind; he had no patience for any of us. I was often afraid to talk to him. My father says he doesn’t recall this part of our life; other times he actively denies his aggressive behavior. My brother denies it, too. But I clearly remember the way my father would suddenly turn violent. “Get on my bed!” he’d scream, marching us toward his room. I’d hear the jangle of buckles as he opened the door to his armoire, inside of which his belts hung. I knew my father was taking things out on us that he’d never take out on my mother. Although he yelled at her, he never struck her. Some days, I feared that if my father did not whip my brother and me he might end up killing our mother.

Discipline became the doctrine of the house. There were new rules, new lines my brother and I had to be careful not to cross. When my father saw me in a ripped T-shirt I’d let dangle off one shoulder, he said I looked like a pansy. I tried to defend myself, saying the shirt had come that way and the rips were part of the style.

“Are they?” my father said. He walked toward me, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and proceeded to rip it further. In my memory, this assault feels more terrible than the whippings. I am flayed, ridiculed, reduced.

Everything about my presence seemed to irritate him. Noise was a particular issue—the volume of the television, the way I closed a cabinet, the clamor of my laughter. Of course, my father’s voice wasn’t subject to such rules. During one particularly loud argument between my parents, my grandfather lumbered up the stairs—I assumed to defend his daughter. But, instead, he joined my father and began to shout at her: “What are we supposed to do, girl? Live on the fucking street?” As he turned to go back downstairs, his grumbled invectives descended, too, into his dark Neapolitan dialect.

Later that night, I heard my father crying. The sound jerked out of him in strange squeaks, as if someone were wiping a mirror. My grandmothers, in their rooms, were crying, too.

Despite the chaos of those weeks, my father came up with a plan. He talked to relatives, friends, colleagues, and, though it must have pained him to do so, he asked each of them for a loan, any amount they could spare. Some folks could offer only a few hundred bucks, but others gave more. My mother said she could borrow a little money, too, but my father, suspicious of her sources, said no.

My mother was no longer herself. A few days after we learned about the loss of the house, she cut her hair. She now had a short, dense bristle, almost mannish. She looked like a thug, or a Buddhist nun. It was hard to understand if her new style was an act of aggression or of renunciation. While my father made frantic telephone calls, my mother was often pacing in the back yard, smoking cigarettes.

Sometimes, through a window, I’d watch her; if she spotted me, she’d offer a little wave, shake her head. I always thought she was saying, “Leave me alone, go away.” But now I think perhaps she was trying to tell me something else, the same thing she kept saying to me when she lay dying: “I’m sorry, baby.”

My father kept track of his loans in a ledger, which he stored in the bottom drawer of his armoire. Before the auction was held, he managed to borrow enough to save the house—though what should have been a triumph felt more like a funeral. My father was pale, his features frozen.

As the years passed, he’d pay off what he could. At the end of every week, he’d place his hard-earned cash in envelopes, many of which he’d hand-deliver, in increments of ten or twenty dollars. All accounting went into the ledger. My father’s penmanship was like a child’s; he wrote in print, having never learned cursive. When I finally left for college, he was no longer the slim, fit man he’d been in his youth. His hair had thinned, then grayed. I didn’t recognize him.

It was the same with my mother. She was a mystery to me, her undeniable generosity chafing against the fact that she was willing to risk everything our family had.

Ultimately, my father made good on all his debts. When I asked him once how long it took, he said, “Years! I wanted to strangle your mother. But I always knew what I was getting into. Your mother was trouble from the start.” Even as he said this, though, I could see the smile held in check.

By the time my father had paid everyone back, he and my mother appeared to have made peace with each other. I’d moved to Arizona, but when I came to visit for the holidays I’d notice my parents laughing together, and sometimes I’d see them kiss. My father didn’t even seem to mind when my mother said she wanted to take a trip to Las Vegas with some of her cousins.

I flew out from Tucson to meet her. I wasn’t a gambler, but, still, I enjoyed watching her at the blackjack table, with her short blond perm, a Scotch-and-soda sweating in her hand. Whenever she won—not often—her shout was loud, and always directed upward, as if to the invisible ones who’d facilitated her good fortune.

My mother seemed happy again—but soon after turning sixty she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Once the treatments began, she had very little energy. There were no more visits to Las Vegas. My father told her to quit her waitressing job, but she said, “How can I?” The medical bills were piling up.

By then, I was determined to make my living as a writer—and though most of my family, especially my father, didn’t seem to understand my ambitions, I could tell my mother did. Now that she was no longer gambling, she began to put all her chips on me. When I won my first literary award, she threw a party that clearly cost more than the amount of the small cash prize I’d received.

“Risk everything” had always been her motto. And she seemed to understand that this was exactly what I was doing in choosing to become an artist.

Late into her illness, I began writing my first novel. After she learned I was dedicating it to her, she always referred to it as “our book.” “What’s going on with our book?” she’d say. “How much are they giving us?”

“It hasn’t sold yet,” I had to keep telling her.

“It will, baby.” I could feel her shaking the dice in her hands.

The book sold a month after she died, on her birthday. I didn’t get a fortune, but it was more money than I’d ever made in my life, and surely more than my mother had ever won at any of her games. It was hard not to feel superstitious—that my luck was somehow related to her.

Lately, I can see my mother clearly. I can see her sitting at the kitchen table with her shining tower of hair, playing cards or placing bets. Despite all the darkness and loss that was to come, I can glimpse the romance behind her schemes. And so I often think of my own work as a bet I’m placing for her.

Let’s do it , Mom. Let’s win . ♦

New Yorker Favorites

The hottest restaurant in France is an all-you-can-eat buffet .

How to die in good health .

Was Machiavelli misunderstood ?

A heat shield for the most important ice on Earth .

A major Black novelist made a remarkable début. Why did he disappear ?

Andy Warhol obsessively documented his life, but he also lied constantly, almost recreationally .

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Violence in Video Games — Impact Of Violence In Video Games

Impact of Violence in Video Games

• Categories: Video Games Violence in Video Games

About this sample

Words: 1909 |

10 min read

Published: Jun 5, 2019

Words: 1909 | Pages: 4 | 10 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Entertainment Social Issues

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 723 words

2 pages / 752 words

2 pages / 1132 words

5 pages / 2271 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Violence in Video Games

Video games have been a popular form of entertainment for children and teenagers for decades. However, studies have shown that excessive gaming can have negative effects on a child's physical health, social and emotional [...]

Video games have become increasingly popular in today's society, offering both positive and negative effects on consumers. This essay will focus on the negative effects of exposure to violent video games on children's behavior [...]

The world of video gaming has expanded rapidly over the past few decades, with millions of people of all ages engaging in this form of entertainment. While video games can be a source of fun and enjoyment, there is growing [...]

In his book "Fist Stick Knife Gun," Geoffrey Canada explores the cycle of violence that plagues many inner-city neighborhoods, particularly among young African American males. Canada draws from his own experiences growing up in [...]

Stop Blaming Video Games! According to the American Psychological Association (APA) more than 90% of children in the United States play video games. Among kids between the ages of 12 and 17, the number rises to 97%. More [...]

One of the ideas that the twenty-first century has brought to us is a new form of play and how often we as individuals associate it with technology. But why do we associate it with technology and what is that reason? Our [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free