Do violent video games lead to real violence?

we miss you Fontane. Anyway, we wanted to talk today about violence and video games, violence in video games, and violence outside of video games that may have been caused by the violence that you find in video games. Now I want to shoot you. Well, my work here is done. So there's been a lot of talk of pretty much since video games really started turning pretty violent in the early nineties. I guess about whether or not the violence you find in these games has any correlation or causation

for violence in in everyday life. And um, we wanted to kind of address this and talk about it because it's it's a it's you know, it's definitely one of those hot button topics. And uh, I don't think it's been resolved one way or the other. Um, despite numerous studies. Yes,

I would say so. Actually I was doing research on the on the podcast, and uh went to the library online and there were literally, you know, at least a hundred articles you know about both sides, you know, um, scholarly journals even so, I mean they're people, people's opinions are are mixed, even among the experts. It's um something that yeah, it becomes a question of who do you want to believe rather than you know, who has the right answer, because as the jury, I guess is still out.

But before we get too far into this, we should talk a little bit about, you know, kind of the reasoning behind this. Um. You know, video games when they first came out there, the biggest concern was they would wrought your brain because you'd be sitting there for hours playing them, uh instead of doing things like reading or going outside, at least according to my parents outside. Yeah, apparently there is something that exists with you know, outside

of the realm of your living room where you was. Um. So yeah, that was the big concern for a while. But then once video games started reaching a certain level of sophistication, and I mean that in a sense of graphics and sound and and and user interface not necessarily in content. Once it reached that sophistication, people began to think, hey, this stuff might actually have an effect beyond just being a time waster. So we're talking about games like Mortal Kombat.

That was one of the big ones that got a lot of people upset because they had way over the violence. Uh. I wouldn't call it realistic because I've never seen a ninja shoot ice out of his hands for real. Um, you haven't. You haven't lived until you had. I gotta say I haven't lived then. Um, But yeah, Mortal Kombat got a lot of people upset, and uh are a lot of parents anyway, we're concerned about it because it

was over the top violence. And of course these are kids who are engaging in these games off and especially back in the arcade days, back when you could still go to an arcade and play against all these other kids. And you just watch a group playing around one of these games, and yeah, it seems like they get kind of not necessarily physically aggressive toward one another, but they definitely adopt a much more you know, aggressive kind of personality. And and there's a lot of smack talking and a

lot of that kind of piling around. And then the game's continued to get more sophisticated and you got into things like the first person shooters, which really started to concern some people, especially when you had it tie into other real, actual, real life horrible events like the Columbine shooting. UM. There was a connection between the people who who the students who committed that act and and the first person

shooters that they enjoyed playing. UM. And then people began to think, well, hey, could there possibly be something that is, you know, something about these games that's inspiring these kids to do these kind of things. And that's really where this this avalanche began. Yeah. M. According to David Walsh, who has a child psychologist and I still want of yours UM, he said that the National Institutes of Health

had done some some research into it, and uh. He co authored a study that connected the the playing of violent video games to physical aggression UM. But he cited that that information from the National Institutes of Health, and it basically said the teenage brain is not fully developed, so uh, you know, it's kids aren't ready for handling violence like this that can actually form an impression on them and you know, make a a normally docile kid

into a killing machine. And um, you know, there there have been some incidents like in June seven, two thousand three, Um Devon Moore in a town called Fayette, Alabama, killed two police officers in a dispatcher. Um he had been picked up for allegedly trying to steal a car, and uh, you know, at the police station, he jumped up. According according the information I read on CBS News, he uh jumped up and grabbed the gun and shot the police

officer who had him in the head. Then when another police officer come came to find what was going on, Uh, he shot More shot him too and in the head. And then a police dispatcher was at the end of the hall and More shot him in the head and grab the keys to a police cruiser and took off. Now they caught him. He was tried and convicted and

sentenced to the death penalty. Um. But um, a very famous attorney named Jack Thompson picked up this case and uh he wanted to sue the publishers of the game, which was Grand Theft Auto UM because apparently he uh evidence suggested that More played a lot of grand theft auto and which a lot of people. Basically, when the deal is you steal cars and you shoot people, you you commit mons and tons of crimes, yeah, among other things,

and can run people over and yeah. So uh so Jack Thompson said, you know this was obviously because the violent video game. Uh. And he sued Take two Interactive, the publishers, and rock Star Studios, the studio that creates the game. Um. And uh, you know, trying to bring him down for the for the obvious effects. You know that he claimed the game had on on Devin Moore. Sure, so, hey, what's what's the up to these days? Uh, Jack Thompson,

he's cooling his heels. Um. Apparently. Well, for one thing, he was a Florida lawyer and he tried to to get a waiver to basically a one time permit to try this case in Alabama. Um. However, the he has since been disbarred in Florida permanently because, according to the report on the Florida bar dot org website, UM, he engaged in a number of unprofessional behaviors in in this case, he couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Well, he's uh I'll let him suit you for saying. Um. But yeah,

he he is known to the video game industry. If you search for his name on sites that are known for gaming or technology, UM, you'll find his name popping up a lot of places. And he does not It's clear he does not like violent video games, right. And he still holds that position even though he's no longer

able to practice law. Yeah, and there, but there are, like we said, there are definitely uh, medical professional psychologists who are who also believe in this um, in this causality or at least correlation between violence and the violence you find in video games. Craig A. Anderson did a study and yes, Mr Anderson, actually Dr Anderson does study and and uh I believe it was two thousand one. Um.

He looked at a lot of other studies. So he did what is called in the science biz as a meta analysis, where you take the results of various studies and you combine those results to kind of get an overall big picture of whether or not a whether or not a certain theory holds any water. Um. Here's the thing about a meta analysis, It's it's tricky to do correctly. The problem with the meta analysis is that you take all these different studies and you some of them may

not be very good studies. They may not have they may have a bad methodology. Um, there may be a very small sample size, so the the data is not really reliable. UM. But you just lump it in with everything else, so you get the good along with the bad. And there's no real way of necessarily telling how much of one you have versus the other. And uh So he's received some criticism for his approach, uh to just to take all these different different studies and combine them

and and try and draw conclusions from that. Now his conclusions, he believes that there is a link between the violence

and video games and and real life violence. Um. He cited several studies that suggested that after playing violent video games, children showed more signs of aggression, um even if they had only played twenty minutes of a violent video game, whereas kids who played video games that didn't have violence in them, like say just a simple like a race card game or something Tetris tetris, anything like that did

not show this kind of level of aggression. UM. So things like that he cited, and and he uh He's written several Times about how he doesn't believe that the many that most of the studies were done very well. They he doesn't think that they were poorly designed or poorly executed. Um. So he's defended his position. But other people like Benjamin Radford, who's one of the managing editors of The Skeptical Enquirer, which is a journal about critical

thinking and skepticism. Really yeah, you wouldn't imagine it from that title. Huh see it? Yeah, sure you. Well, it's actually an excellent journal, but it's he He writes that the meta analysis alone is kind of questionable, and that the link between violence and video games is not at all apparent. It may exist, but it's not hasn't been proven. Um. And that also correlation and causation are two different things, which is a very important point. So here's here's the question,

video games make kids violent? Or do violent kids like violent video games? I am not an adequate judge to answer that question. Yeah, I would from from a common sense kind of perspective, which of course means that it's not at all scientific scientific, Yeah exactly. This is this is just based on my own sort of gut instinct, and I have nothing to back this up other than just my own personal experiences, and uh so it really doesn't hold any way. It's just my own personal opinion.

I think that violent kids do tend to enjoy violent video games. It's it's a way of acting out kind of a power fantasy, right. You're able to exert power over other individuals. Now granted these individuals may be completely virtual, they're just characters on the screen, but you're able to to, uh to, like I said, exert power over them. And so you're drawn to that because I mean, that's the kind of personality you have. Then you know you're gonna want to play those sort of games. And you may

also be violent in real life as well. But that's not because the video game. It's because of your the way, the way you are. UM, I don't necessarily think that a violent video game makes a person violent. And I this is anecdotal, so again not scientific. UM I play a lot of video games. You play some violent video I play some seriously violent video games. I have the Grand Theft Auto series. I've played the heck out of them.

I play first person shooters. I UM, I enjoy playing these violent video games, and I am not a violent person. It has been literally days since I punched someone. Um. No, seriously, I'm I haven't been a fight since I was thirteen years old, al decades, twenty years to it. And there you go. We know, Christopher Ferguson and wrote a report in Psychiatric Quarterly. UM, and he said that he actually did a study on on peer of view journals and

just to see the other literature that was out there. Um, he found you know, once he was he had stripped the bias away. According to what he said, you know, stripped the bias way. He didn't find any support for the idea that video games cause violence. And he actually believes that there are some positive benefits. Um. You know, visio spatial cognition. Um. Basically you know, getting your bearings in the virtual world. UM. So you know there may be there may be some benefits to it, I suppose.

But you know this, this really isn't a new concept, you know, talking about the violence and video games that are corrupting influences. I'm sure you may have heard of Dr Frederick Wortham or maybe the title Seduction of the Innocence. Yes, this was a book written many decades ago, almost a hundred years ago now I'm getting there anyway, I guess seven years ago, and um, it was about how violent

comic books were causing kids to commit crimes. And then there's the whole heavy metal music causes kids to commit suicide. You want to go even further back, talk about Victorian England, where there were some people who believed that the that a performance of the incredible case of Dr Jackal and Mr Hyde somehow managed to inspire Jack the Ripper. Yeah, So I mean this is something that goes way back,

talking about fan to see somehow impacting reality. Yeah. And and the reason why video games I think gets more attention than say I mean, obviously you've got parent counsels that are concerned about violence in all forms of media, not just video games. But the reason why video games I think get a lot of attention is because you take an active role. You're not just passively watching or reading your you are your actions are being translated into this video game world. So I think it's that extra

step that concerns some people. And I think to part of it is that some of the populace is just not into video games. They've never played them. Um, it's new for a lot of people. Um, you know, for example, ballroom dancing, uh, you know to to Uh. I won't admit to watching Dancing with the Stars, but I, you know, possibly may have been an earshot of a TV when they said that. I think it was. The waltz was considered risk. Ay at one time. Now we've all been alive.

Everyone you know on the planet now was alive. Sense the walls was a normal thing. So to think about it in that context, you think, what are you kidding? Well, yeah, we have violent video games. Now that's so much more corrupting. But you know, in a hundred years it may not be such a big deal. They'll find something else to be outraged about. You can hear the same thing about certain composers when some of their like Beethoven's, several Beethoven's

pieces got the same sort of attention. UM. Getting back to to the video games, I wanted to mention one other study UM, which was conducted by Patrick Kirkgard UH and it was published in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Inquiry. Kirkgard also decided that from his from his research, he decided that many of the claims that violence comes like people kids were becoming violent because of the violence of video games. Uh, he thought that those

conclusions were faulty. He didn't necessarily he didn't go so far as to say that they were completely wrong. He just said that you couldn't support that from the teas that were conducted. Um. So again, it's one of those the question is still up in the air. UM. I bring that one up because it was fairly recent. I had first heard about it. I think it was this past spring. So again, studies are still ongoing. I'm not sure that we're going to get to the bottom of

this anytime soon. For one thing, I think there are way too many variables and too many factors to take into consideration. It's hard to boil it down to hey, you know, a little billy just played Mortal Kombat and then he's gonna go and punch his sister and and I mean, it's there are too many things to take into consideration to just blame it on one factor. And I don't think that video games are completely innocent, to

be honest. Somebody who is going to commit a violent act like that may find inspiration, yeah, but they can find inspiration from anything. Though. Well, you know, it doesn't help when you hear things say. According to CBS News, UM, when the police brought in Devin Moore, he said the quote was life is like a video game. Everybody's got

to die sometime. So but that just adds fuel to the fire when people say that this is a result and then you see, you know, an act like I remember a report of a school shooting, um some time ago now where the kid shot out the mirrors in the bathroom, in the school bathroom. And at this point it's apocryphal because I had difficulty finding it in the

short amount of time I allotted to find that particular article. Um, but that actually is directly from what Duke nucam I believe, where their actual power ups behind the mirrors there may have been so this and this argument to me doesn't hold any water because you're talking about disturbed individuals who will take anything, latch onto anything, and that could fuel

their their power fantasies. I mean, we see the same thing with the arguments against role playing games, where parents were saying, hey, this role playing game is corrupting children. It's gonna convince them to become Satanists. They're gonna kill each other. And you're talking about saying that kids should not indulge in any kind of fantasy play at all because there's the danger that they're going to believe the

fantasy is reality. I think that's just ridiculous. I think really that you have certain individuals who are predisposed to that kind of psychosis. But you can't sit there and say that the fantasy was the cause of it. It's the cause. The cause is internal, it's not external. No. I actually I actually agree with you. What I meant was, um, for somebody who is already predisposed to that kind of an action, they can latch onto something they see in a comic book or in a movie, but then they

are on the street. A solution to that would then be eliminate all interesting stuff everywhere for fear that it could cause someone to go off the deep end, right, And I'm not advocating doing that, just saying that I was totally gonna punch you. Oh no, I've fallen into your Trapolette. I see what you did there. So no, I'm just saying it that, you know, it's just impossible to blame that one thing, but and you know, an event like that, it can definitely that's what that Yeah,

that's what link that people are looking for. UM. So you know, that's all I'm saying. Okay, that's all I'm saying. All Right, I'm calm now, all right, sure you are. Wow. Well this was a good conversation. We got we got heated in that argument a little bit. I'm just good because it's cold in here and it's a little chilly anyway. So I guess we can probably wrap this up. Did you have any any other interesting studies or anything you want to bring up? No, no additional studies that the

difference with you. You know, Yeah, the the question is still up in the air. I think it'll probably will be for quite some time. They'll they'll definitely be more studies. Um. Another thing to keep in mind I should have pointed this out earlier is if you're reading a study, find out who commissioned it, but because there may be bias. Uh. If it's a completely independent study, then you can you can feel a little more comfortable that there is no bias.

But if it's something where a parent teacher association has funded a specific study that brings into question the findings, I mean, you know, even if the scientists were trying to go straightforward and not not will make the results lean one way or the other. When you're receiving money from a specific interested party. I think it's a little complicated to keep that in mind. But if you want to learn more about this, we have a great article

on the side. Actually, it's called do Violent Video Games Lead to Real Violence? And that was written by Julia Layton and that was updated as as late as the spring, so it's it's up to date too, so I would recommend checking that out if you want to learn more. Also, I would play this podcast backwards for our secret message. Yeah, I hope. I hope you guys find it. If you do, write in and tell us what it was, and then we'll probably send somebody out and they won't run you over.

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