For many years, the media has fueled the rumor that violent-themed video games represent a very important risk factor in the development of behaviors of the same nature in young people.
Even for a time, it was alluded to that role-playing games were very dangerous tools because their players could come to believe the character they embodied was real.
Video games: do they make us more violent or aggressive?
Back in the spring of 2000, a 16-year-old boy brutally murdered his parents and nine-year-old sister with a katana and, after his actions, was named “The Katana Killer.” Despite the seriousness of the crime, what made it tremendously popular in the media was the fact that, for a long time, the media claimed that the murderer had committed his acts since he was strongly influenced by Squall, protagonist of the video game Final Fantasy VIII, which which led many people to stigmatize video games and role-playing games.
This article will not focus on how the media distorts information or on the reactance that society shows to the technological change that video games have brought about. The text focuses on find out the truth behind the violence-video games binomial in order to get rid of social prejudices and show the true correlation.
The reality of the consequences of violent video games
The reality of the matter at present is uncertain due to the lack of studies on the matter. However, the evidence mostly supports that video games are not guilty of producing violent behavior in their players, beyond what a violent movie or a crime novel can produce.
The truth is, that with the passing of the years, The number of video games with violent content has been increasing , as well as their explicitness and realism. But it is even more true that the level of violence among young people has been reducing considerably, in turn (CJ Ferguson, 2010). Despite this argument, which for many would be highly illuminating about the reality of the involvement of video games in youth violence, there are authors who strive to demonstrate the opposite, as is the case of Anderson (2004), who published a review of several articles in which he concluded that the more studies are carried out in relation to violence and video games, the clearer the relationship between them becomes.
Studios for all tastes
On the other hand, other studies carried out by the research community ensure that the relationship between video games and violence is highly exaggerated at an everyday level, as is the case of Tear and Nielsen (2003) who carried out three experiments trying to demonstrate that video games They decreased prosocial behavior or, in other words, the performance of socially accepted actions, obtaining results that denied their hypothesis. Another example of a similar study was carried out by Parker et al. (2013) who tried to demonstrate their hypothesis that video games and television were strong predictors of behavioral problems and where They discovered that this is not the case in the case of video games
As we see, There is a strong polarity when it comes to the violence generated by video games This polarization is built based on the divergence of results shown by the different studies carried out on the violence-video game relationship, which to a large extent could be explained by the limitations suffered by said studies and which we will comment on below.
Causes of polarity in the study of the violence-video game relationship
The main reason for the results of the studies that assess the relationship between video games with violent content and the violence shown by young people is, for the most part, the great difficulty in objectifying this type of research (CJ Ferguson, 2010).
Measuring the level of violence is not an easy task and in fact, many standardized measures of violence, when push comes to shove, do not correlate positively with real aggressive behavior, which often means that part of the results obtained are not one hundred percent true. In addition to this, lFortunately, video games are not at the moment an object of study that interests large masses of researchers , so that a large part of these studies are detailed studies, with low resources and therefore, only a small part of them manage to be published in magazines or widely distributed media. To this, we should add that in general, the effects of third variables such as gender, genetics, social context, etc. are not taken into account.
However, the most harmful and serious of these limitations is undoubtedly the apparent effort of many authors to aggravate the results obtained, exaggerating them or omitting those that are contradictory, in order to see their study published and doing a disservice to the community of researchers and the development of video games.
Psycogaming’s view on the matter
Our vision of the relationship between violence and video games is clear. Our training and experience shows us that this relationship does not correlate significantly being a low impact factor and always taking into account the sum of other much more serious factors such as socio-cultural level or the presence of family violence.
Additionally, we firmly believe thanks to research such as that of Bartlett et al. (2009) or the aforementioned Ferguson (2010) already experience that video games are powerful educational tools that are capable, when used correctly, of improving and enhancing cognitive abilities such as creativity, attention, concentration and spatial-visual performance, among others. Furthermore, they are obviously very effective leisure tools and an alternative method of making young people who, currently, are deeply rooted in technology read and think.
