"Doesn't Seem So Bad These Days, Does It?"

There is a lot of talk and confusion about the impact of violence in video games. It seems like every six months some moron will commit an act of violence and people in government and in the media are quick to blame it all on video games.

They cite questionable studies that supposedly show that playing video games causes children to be more aggressive and violent. No one seems to take the time to try to accurately explain what these studies are telling us. No one ever seems to talk about the numerous other studies that show no link at all between the two.

One of the major problems is people have trouble understanding the difference between a correlation and causation. A correlation simply means that as levels of A change, levels of B change. If there is a correlation between A and B, that does not mean that A caused B or B caused A. Both could be caused by C or D or something else entirely.

Causation means that A is causing B.

They seem like fairly simple concepts, but people get them wrong all the time. The most common example used to illustrate this in freshman Sociology or Psychology classes refers to taverns and churches.  There tends to be about the same number of taverns as there are churches in any given community. If you were to look at this you might suggest that taverns make people more religious or religion makes drink. In fact neither is being suggested by this relationship. There are more taverns and churches as the population increases, one is not causing the other. They are both related to another external factor.

The media reports that you hear all the time are referring to correlations, not causation. The most commonly cited studies show that subjects that spent more hours playing violent games showed higher levels of aggression. They claim that this demonstrates that this proves that violent video games cause children to be more violent.

Unfortunately, in order to show causation you cannot just take 2 bits of data from the real world. You have to run an actual experiment. Then you have to control for external factors that might interfere with what you are examining. You can not really control the real world in such a way that you could run an experiment to test this.

One other issue that no one seems to address, are all the studies that find no significant links between violent video game playing and violent tendencies. For just about every study that seems to suggest that a link exists, there is another study from someone else that shows no link. We never hear about these studies.

All this gets back to the relationship the media has with the scientific community. The news media is all about sound bites and quick fixes. Science is all about a slow meticulous build up of data. Researchers want piles of information, a reporter wants a sound bite. Which do you think is more likely to get people to tune in a story all about how video games are turning kids into killers, or a story that suggests violent video games have no impact?

Video games are an easy scapegoat. It is hard to watch kids shooting cops in a game like Grand Theft Auto and not believe that there is some kind of impact. Just like it was easy 50 years ago to blame comics or rock music. The impact of video games on children pales in comparison to the impact of parents and peer groups. A child’s friends have way more to do with their growth and development than Master Chief and Mario. Study after study demonstrates the powerful effects of a child’s peers.

There are real issues at stake here. There are real acts of violence that are carried out in the real world. Instead of focusing on real issues at the heart of these problems, it is much easier to hold a press conference condemning video games. Instead of dealing with the slowly self destructing public education system it is much easier to blame it all on Doom. This is politics at its worst.

It would be great if we could point to something like video games as the cause of these tragedies, but the data is at best inconclusive. If video games were really responsible, then we could simply remove them and the world would be all shiny and happy. The real causes for these tragedies are far more difficult to remedy, and blaming video games is just pushing the real problems to the side.

Tags: Comics, Doom, Grand Theft Auto, Mario, Master Chief, rock music, violence, violent games

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.