Do video games cause violence? This question has been asked and debated since 1978 with the release of Death Race, an 8-bit video game where you run people over turning them into tombstones to get points. Many people have researched the effects of violent video games on kids and throughout numerous studies the findings are still not clear. I believe that video games don’t cause violence, but that people cause violence.
A lot of people say video games play apart in school shootings and increasing crime in teens when statistically crime in people below the age of 21 has decreased dramatically. If video games had an effect on crime then wouldn’t have it at least slightly affected crime statistically? If anything video games are doing the opposite. …show more content…
In an article published by TIME an Associate Professor and Chair of Psychology at Stetson University, Christopher Ferguson, weighs in on how poorly research has been done, “Quite simply the research just hasn’t panned out… it has been increasingly recognized that much of the early research on violent video games linking them to increased aggression was problematic: most studies used outcome measures that had nothing to do with real-life aggression and failed to control carefully for other important variables such as family violence, mental health issues or even gender in many studies (boys play more violent video games and are more aggressive).” Another shot at how bad experiments “proving” that violent media leads to real world behavior was in a Supreme Court case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, where Edmund G. Brown was fighting to remove the restriction of the sale or rental of video games to minors in California. In this court case Brown completely destroyed Anderson’s experiments saying that the California nor any psychologists, including Anderson can provide any link between violence in video games and harm to minors. He went on to scrutinize how the experiments were done saying that the studies have been rejected by every court to consider them and that all experiments that “proved” violence in video games cause real world violence has been made purely on correlation and not causation, he then went on to show how flawed the methodology of the experiments were. Edmund G. Brown won his court case, overturning the Californian law that restricted sale and rental to a minor, with the United States Supreme Court ruling in a 7-2
A lot of people say video games play apart in school shootings and increasing crime in teens when statistically crime in people below the age of 21 has decreased dramatically. If video games had an effect on crime then wouldn’t have it at least slightly affected crime statistically? If anything video games are doing the opposite. …show more content…
In an article published by TIME an Associate Professor and Chair of Psychology at Stetson University, Christopher Ferguson, weighs in on how poorly research has been done, “Quite simply the research just hasn’t panned out… it has been increasingly recognized that much of the early research on violent video games linking them to increased aggression was problematic: most studies used outcome measures that had nothing to do with real-life aggression and failed to control carefully for other important variables such as family violence, mental health issues or even gender in many studies (boys play more violent video games and are more aggressive).” Another shot at how bad experiments “proving” that violent media leads to real world behavior was in a Supreme Court case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, where Edmund G. Brown was fighting to remove the restriction of the sale or rental of video games to minors in California. In this court case Brown completely destroyed Anderson’s experiments saying that the California nor any psychologists, including Anderson can provide any link between violence in video games and harm to minors. He went on to scrutinize how the experiments were done saying that the studies have been rejected by every court to consider them and that all experiments that “proved” violence in video games cause real world violence has been made purely on correlation and not causation, he then went on to show how flawed the methodology of the experiments were. Edmund G. Brown won his court case, overturning the Californian law that restricted sale and rental to a minor, with the United States Supreme Court ruling in a 7-2