Do Video Games Really Cause Violence?

By Alex Desta

Stonehill College News Blog Journalist

EASTON—Oshika Jayasundara still remembers the day he got a brand new PlayStation 3, but his happiness was cut short after his dad saw one little letter on the back of a game.

“When I was in the seventh grade, I got a PlayStation 3. With the PlayStation came Assassin’s Creed 3, but I could not play it because my dad saw the M (Mature) rating on the back. Eventually, my dad traded it for Amazing Spider Man,” said Oshika Jayasundara, a 19-year-old student at Middlesex Community College.

Young Jayasundara knew that the things that occurred in video games were not possible in real life. 

“I knew that I could never do any of the stuff I saw in these games in real life. I don’t know why my parents would think I could kill people like they do in this game but I couldn’t voice that opinion because my parents would not listen to me,” said Jayasundara.

In “For Video Games, Bad News Is Good News: News Reporting of Violent Video Game Studies,” researchers Allen Copenhaver, Oana Mitrofan, and Christopher J. Ferguson said that because of the media focusing on bad studies, the public gets a warped sense that video games create violence in children.

The results of these hypotheses showed that there was identical deviation with news coverage and without news coverage, meaning that no matter the size of the study and who it was by it still had the same result on what news coverages used it for. The other hypothesis result was that people only paid attention to these studies if read in big newspapers. The final hypothesis result was like the previous one, the bigger the news outlet the more likely they are to believe the study.

Though video games have been said to cause violence you would have to factor in other sources of violence. Professor John McCoy talks about some of those other factors.

“Violence is not something that can just happen,” said Professor John McCoy, a psychology professor at Stonehill College.

 “Though media can be a big influence in this day in age, it is not going to cause your child/teen to do those things they see if you properly tell them that you cannot do this in the real world. Alongside media kids can be influenced by where they live, abuse or a bad event that occurred, not good parental supervision, and so on. So saying that video games alone cause violence is ridiculous,” said Professor McCoy.

 In the study “Violent Video Games Don’t Increase Hostility in Teens, but They Do Stress Girls Out” (by Christopher J. Ferguson, Benjamin Trigani, Steven Pilato, Stephanie Miller, Kimberly Foley, Hayley Barr. Published by Springer Science+Business Media) the group are testing whether or not video games really do make a person more violent. The results for the hypothesis were that video games did not cause an increase in violence in men or females, but it did cause an increase in stress among females and no increase in men.

Christopher Chow, a student at the University of Pittsburgh had experiences like Oshika did at his youth, though a bit different. Chow was originally able to play violent video games, but having his parents view how many people were saying it caused violence on the news made his parents take it away from him for a long time.

“This happened around when I was 14. I used to play violent video games as often as I played any other games,” said Chow. “One day my parents came to my room and told me that I could not play anymore violent games. Obviously, I was a bit mad at this. Why would I start becoming a violent person now and not when I began playing the violent games? Luckily my parents realized this a few months after the fact and let me play them again.”

In the article Violent Video Games and Aggression (by Lauren Goldbeck and Alex Pew. Published National Center for Health Research), it is said that video games can cause an increase in aggressive thoughts, behaviors, and feelings for a long term and for a short term in both boys and girls. Now when its coming to violence, few studies have officially concluded if there really was an increase or not. Studies like this are not easy to do and require many kids for it to be a successful study. Violent video games are just a factor in the factor of aggression and should not be considered the main cause as to why people could be violent.