Video Games Don’t Make People Violent
The Claim
Violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto or Mortal Kombat, cause people to have violent tendencies.
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Emerging story
The claim has been around for years but has recently been revived, likely due to the pandemic causing people to play video games more than usual.
Misbar’s Analysis
Many video games are violent, some especially so. Due to the interactive nature of video games, a few people have declared games to be “murder simulators” and claimed that they can make gamers more violent, especially teenagers. They have since argued that video games are the cause of school shootings ever since the Columbine High School massacre of 1999.
These arguments have since been revived by President Donald Trump, who argued that the growing prevalence of video games have caused the surge in mass shootings.
However, there are several studies out there that disprove this claim. One recent study tracked 10 years of its subjects’ lives and found that there is no difference between the violent tendencies of video-game-playing children and non-video-game-playing children.
Another study with 275 participants came to a similar conclusion. After video games with various levels of violence, none of the participants had any shift in volent tendencies. Furthermore, as this article points out, societies that play more video games than Americans – such as Japan – have much less mass shootings, if any.
