Do Video Games Cause Violent Behaviour?
 

And, if not, what does?

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i belive that videogames can cause assholish behavior... which gets confused with "violent" quite a lot, bit it just isnt

I consider this very much the same as nature versus nurture. Is the violence inherent or is it something taught, enforced by the video games themselves?

Overall I'm of the opinion that the video games, while offering up a potential means by which to comprehend the nature of violence, does not FORCE people to become violent any more so than they already will be. If that were the case then violent crimes would be astronomical given the sheer volume of video game players out there.

All of the studies related to video games and violence that I'm familiar with either have methodology problems or incredibly small sample sizes. The evidence they give is inconclusive at best.

Technically speaking, in psychological terms, there should be no such thing as 'cause', especially if you cling to this notion of human sentience. You can't have free will and behavior controlled by external stimulus at the same time, it just doesn't work that way.

There is, however, something to be said about observational learning (especially the Bobo doll experiment), but generally speaking, most of these tests were done with very young children who I agree shouldn't be exposed to violent media. That is to say, an adolescent who plays video games isn't likely to be violent because he saw it there, but rather, an adolescent who is violent likely learned at young age that violence was a way of getting what he wanted.

Obviously that's not going to be true of every case. We can't forget that many school shootings end in suicide, which brings up an entirely different set of issues than just a spree of violence would. There's a phenomenon known as copicide (or suicide by cop) wherein a person wants to kill themselves but can't, and so they do something so horrible they expect the police to kill them for it.

What the news media and laymen don't understand is that the mind is separate, but connected, to the body. The sooner they realize this relative truth the sooner we can get rid of pointless scapegoating like this.

Video games don't cause violence. If that were true, then there wouldn't have been violence until Pong came out.

Do they glamourize violence, make it seem cooler, and thus encourage people to partake in it? That's the real issue.

I don't think that there's any guarantee of violence from playing the games, personally. There's no conceivable way I could be convinced that playing anything would reduce a person to a serial killer. If someone claimed that they had been so affected, I would still believe that the fault was more theirs for being unable to seperate a fiction from reality rather than the game itself.

Of course, I play lots of video games. Most of them have some form of violence in them. I use them as a release - a way to take out my frustrations. If I've had a bad day, it feels good to boot up GTA and see how many people I can take down. That doesn't mean I'm going to start killing people randomly at some point to relax, because I know that it's just a game.

But there are still those people out there who want to blame something. Comic books were blamed at one point. So was rock and roll. In both of those cases, people eventually realized that violence had been around long before both, and - despite how threatened they were by other people's forms of entertainment - stopped trying to pin the blame on them. I have no doubt that the idea that video games cause murderous rampages will also blow over at some point.

Violent behaviour is too large to be confined to one issue. People get pissed off and do stupid things for all sorts of reasons. It's naive to think that there's one sole cause which will explain everything.

I think people are blaming video games like they blame fate.
Its not there fault its fates fault for putting them in the situation.
Violence has been around for a long time for It's a natural part of nature.
How i see it is there are 3 people that blame video games for their (or their child's/friend's) violent behaviour

• The "not- there" parents
• the child that's in major trouble(as a crutch)
• and the crazy guy that cant tell the real world from the fake world(as previously said)

Video games do expose and desensitize people to violence. But don't automatically assume that when a gamer gets angry he would whip out a shotgun. We do have sense. We also have pride. We are gamers, and with that in a moment notice, we can relieve all our anger on something that's not in this world.
plus its cheaper then therapy

Violence is I believe a mix of nature and nurture and sometimes just one.

Violence can be caused by an upbringing that approves of it, ie a militaristic or barbaric culture(not so common these days though still present in some places), growing up in a family with domestic violence, a violent school or sometimes a few isolated traumatic events. Or sometimes it's just a chemical imbalance that reduces a person's ability to control themselves or just outright lack of a conscience and inability to comprehend another's pain (good ole APD) which from what I've seen is frequently inborn or caused by very early trauma.

Now as far as I'm concerned video games or indeed any media is not powerful enough to make someone violent. And even in the case of snuff films and the like they'd have to catch the kid early in order to have anything but a "FUCKING EWW" followed by turning the TV off, and if they're forced to watch or voluntarily watch, they're probably already messed up anyway.

These sort of things pop up every now and then, and it's usually the same response. No, they don't, they never have, never will, and (as it has been proven) more than likely you have either a really stupid kid who replicates exactly what it is that he sees on TV, or the kid decides to get out on an insanity plea variant.

I think it was Penny Arcade whom had some stupid kid kill some people and blame it on a video game, then one of the relatives of the kid basically said (by writing in) that the kid was fucked up to begin with and his older brother ended up completely different.

Doom came out in what, 92? Hell we had Contra in the mid-80s. So that's two decades we've had of violent videogames and you know, the massive nationwide murder-frenzy still hasn't happened.

I mean it's pretty straightforward, working from a sample size of millions of videogame players, if videogames encouraged violence to any meaningful degree its effects would be so societally widespread by now as to be unignorable.