day 25 - 26/11/20 : Video Games & Gun Violence

Starved of ideas and acting on a faint notion to do a blog post about video games, I thought I'd try to address the question, "Do Video Games Cause Violence?"

No.

Great blog today guys. Just superb, let's roll out.

Nah but in all seriousness, this has been a topic that comes and goes from relevancy every few years and has been going about since the early 90s. When I see it used by politicans, specifically US politicians, it's usually in the wake of a mass shooting perpetrated by a young person that happens to own a console. Not to sound insensitive about the topic of mass shootings but I always felt as if using video games as a scapegoat was reaching and often acts as a red herring to point attention away from their terminally underfunded and unstable social welfare systems. In fairness to them, this is a pretty safe excuse to use for their target audience of white boomers - that that thing that white middle-aged yanks don't really understand but takes up so much of their kids' spare time is a pretty safe bet when it comes to looking for something to blame.

My first reaction when I hear someone entertain the position that video games cause violence, my first port of call is to disparingly reply, "It's just a game, it's not real." Just for today though, I'm going to have a chat about it a bit more critically.

One of the things I can't really wrap my head around is how these non-epic noob anti-gamers believe that video games were the birth of violence. Violence has been encoded into our language, our mental lexicon, and our daily life for as long as we existed. A millennium ago, children were taught how to use weapons and how to kill and hunt as a matter of necessity. If you weren't taught, you would certainly be atleast aware of the multiple conflicts your country or tribe was raging at any given point in time. Even when this debate was first brought up, it was right off the back of the Gulf War, the Cold War and while we were cupping the neo-liberals's balls in our hands as we marched into Iraq. I can't help but feel that if you're arguing that video games cause violence, you have been either blind or sorely apathetic to the world of violence that these games were emulated from. I'm going to base a lot of what I talk about off of the US because they're the only country that matters anymore I guess. From around 1985, the video game industry really hit their stride and started establishing themselves as rising-star products as well as a mainstay in the market to come. With that, if video games were violent, we would expect crime statistics to go up in parallel with the release and popularisation of video games, correct? Ye-No. The major crime rate hits its peak in 1980 and has been on a comfortable decline since then. The outlier to this trend is mass shootings. With mass shootings being any shooting resulting in the deaths of 4 or more people, this is where the US is at.

Number of mass shootings in the US between 1982 and February 2020 - statista

It seems that just as the major crime rate goes down, the amount of mass shootings per year goes up. While the flawless idiom, 'corelation equals causation' would be a fair criticism for video game critics in this example, the identical case could be made for guns in America. The amount of of gun-related killings as a percentage of all homicides has similarly been climbing steadily, reaching its peak as of 2017, where gun-related killings made up 73% of all homicides. The same story can be told with the link between suicide and accessibility to guns. Across the globe, the percentage of population with depression remains roughly the same between countries and yet, suicide rates in the US rocket up. Why might that be? With homicide or suicide, the death of yourself or others requires some 'preparation' (to be morbid) where the person can think through their actions and find some clarity. Guns remove this obstacle. It provides immediate consequences and to a much greater degree of harm than that of a knife.

I've been derailed from video games, apologies. I just find it difficult to seriously talk about video games causing violence without bringing up these instruments of violence i.e. guns. Yes, yes, "guns don't kill people, people do" - very poignant. Guns have not become sentient and exacted a plan of revenge against their human overlords. Guns require a person willing to use them and if this person is already willing to use a gun, they're probably just as willing to use a knife or a bomb or whatever is to hand. My point here is how guns empower people to take their own lives or the lives of others. Guns have industrialised murder, offering the accessibility and an efficiency in wreaking death and harm to the public like never before. That is precisely my problem with this tirade of video games and more specifically, gun laws in general. We're all aware that people can be thick-as-shit deluded when they want to be, and you're trying to eliminate any barriers between them and committing murder?

I'm fully off the tracks now so let's get back to video games. This question of video games causing violence is actually well documented to a certain extent. However, the problem comes when you try to figure out how to quantify violence and aggressive behaviour. One study had its subjects play a violent video game and then test the participants willingness to put hot sauce in a cup and have someone else (who did not enjoy spicy food) drink it. Although this study concluded that there was little to no correlation between video games and aggressive behaviour, I would further point out that there is little to no correlation between hot sauce and aggressive behaviour.

Maybe it is that video games have some long-term unforeseen consequences on a young adaptive mind that could be easily shaped from witnessing and partaking in virtual acts of violence and we're just playing the waiting game until the full impact of video games can be seen. Maybe it is that video games, through the habitual and addictive activities of experiencing and enacting violence in-game become gradually becoming de-sensitised to real world acts of violence and suffering. Maybe. But realistically, how can you separate video games as the determining factor before going so far as to have a subject play GTA for an hour and asking them to shoot someone. I don't see how you can isolate video games as a cause when you could point at one of a million examples as to why mass shootings have increased and be just as valid.

I believe that's me. The real conclusion here is that this question of video games is inconclusive. I'm away to play some Call of Duty here, thanks for playing.