Mr. Bean and not Video Games Responsible for Youth Violence

Games are Good?

The flaws that were remarked upon in the large body of research and papers that link game violence with human violence only assessed study participants' game playing and aggressive behavior at a single point in time, measuring aggression not through their physical actions but through their aggressive thoughts, attitudes and feelings, which the report described as vague and not linked to actual violence.

In his paper Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked, MIT Professor Harry Jenkins points out that:

"According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population. It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers -- 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. It also misdirects energy away from eliminating the actual causes of youth violence and allows problems to continue to fester."

A look at the statistics in the chart above clearly shows that violence declined while game sales increased, and indeed some researchers are starting to wonder if in fact violent video games are actually linked to a decrease in violence among the children who play them.

Writing in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry, Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex, England, suggests that there is very little scientific evidence that video games are anything but harmless and that they do not lead to real world aggression. His research shows that the previous studies are biased towards the opposite conclusion. Kierkegaard emphasizes that there is no obvious link between real-world violence statistics and the advent of video games. If anything, the effect seems to be the exact opposite.

"Violent crime, particularly among the young, has decreased dramatically since the early 1990's," Kierkegaard says, "while video games have steadily increased in popularity and use. . . With millions of sales of violent games, the world should be seeing an epidemic of violence, instead, violence has declined," he points out.

In a piece written for the website Game Revolution, Duke Ferris points out that he grew weary of having to defend what he did for a living -- writing about video games -- whenever someone would lecture him on the impact of game violence on children, so he decided to sit down and research the issue, and discovered that contrary to the claims of news media and the "experts" it turned out that there was in fact no epidemic of youth violence in America!

After combing through statistics from the US Department of Justice as well as other sources, Ferris concluded that "the PlayStation era has, in fact, produced the most non-violent kids ever."

The Conclusion is. . .

Video games don't cause children to be violent, but the idea that they could has caused politicians to propose laws that would effectively deny game studios the same First Amendment protection that book publishers and newspapers enjoy, and that allow the movie studios to create films like Mr. Bean's Vacation, a decision I for one will never understand. In fact as a scientific study I asked my son why he yelled at his sister, and he told me Mr. Bean made him do it. There! Smoking Gun! It is my hypothesis that Mr. Bean is in fact the cause for all youth violence in the world -- come on news media, pick this trend up and run with it!

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Sources used for this article include:

Video Games: A Cause of Violence and Aggression http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/..

New Studies Confirm Games Do Not Cause Youth Violence, The Entertainment Software Association Newsletter http://esa.cmail3.com/t/ViewEmail/y/47158B1..

Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution..

CAUTION: Children at Play - The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games, Duke Ferris, Game Revolution, http://www.gamerevolution.com/features/viol..