Does violence in video games contribute to real life violence?

No

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by Budge Burgess

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Does the playing of violent video games contribute to real life violence? The unequivocal answer has to be 'probably no'. There is evidence that violent video games can arouse feelings of anger and desensitise gamers to real life violence, that they can increase the violent behaviour of those already habitually violent, but it has not been established that video games are linked to an increase in violent acts.

Interest in the potentially violent effects of television was pioneered by the psychologist, Bandura. Founder of the highly influential Social Learning Theory, Bandura argued that people learn through observation - they copy the behaviour and attitudes of others, they model themselves on a variety of role models.

Bandura felt that television companies were responsible for desensitising viewers to violence - they described violent drama as "action and adventure", in the process glamorising violence.

In this he echoed the Frankfurt School of social criticism which, in the 1950's, argued that entertainment had become the monopoly of major companies who cynically manipulated drama to produce happy endings where good triumphed, often violently, over evil.

Bandura demonstrated that viewers could learn aggressive conduct from television, which regularly presented the world as far more violent than it really was. He extended his analysis to the playing of video games - which further amplify the perception of the world and everyday life as excessively violent. Games, he felt, divorced players from appreciating the consequences of their actions in real life.

Numerous psychological studies have failed to fully substantiate Bandura's concerns - although many have suggested that a process of desensitisation can occur. The problem, of course, is that you cannot take the video game out of the equation and ask what the gamers might have been doing had they not been playing video games.

I grew up in post-Second World War Scotland, a country where resources were scarce and memories of war abundant. The country still bore the scars of the 1914-18 war - the crippled and shattered could be seen walking its streets alongside the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of men who never grew old.

Conscription meant that every adult male would be expected to serve two years in the Armed Forces. It was a country recovering from the Korean War and Suez; the military were still fighting armed insurgency in Africa and Asia. The USA, meanwhile, would become daily more embroiled in Vietnam - the first televised war.

When we kids weren't competing aggressively in ball games we were cowboys, chasing bandits or more often aping the genocide of the native American population; or we were British commandos fighting Germans, a nation with whom we were now formally allied. We watched war films on television, or westerns, we read war comics, or westerns.

By adolescence we entered a teenage culture where boys fought, often with knives, girls concealing our weapons about their person in order to evade police search. Rock music was blamed for teenage violence in the 1950's, but knives and the sword had been Scotland's heritage stretching back thousands of years into Celtic prehistory.

Young men had always been bred to blood themselves in battle, and if we couldn't fight the English, we'd fight with the youths in the next street. We'd fight for girls, for dominance, for prestige, for fun. Watching your fist smash into another youth's face is a far more satisfying adrenalin rush than zapping aliens on a computer screen.

Scotland is a country with a long military tradition and a history of struggle for survival against English invasion (and before them, the Romans, the Irish, the Vikings, the Saxons).

In the 1950's, we kids had little doubt that we'd serve in the military and put our lives on the line in some foreign field. Every parish had its war memorials, and we suspected that some of our names would feature on these in years to come.

And now our kids play video games, our military target the enemy on computer screens. Just before British troops in the first Iraqi war were killed in their personnel carrier by 'friendly fire', the crew of an American A-10 were heard on British radio explaining that zapping enemy tanks was just like playing a computer game.

A blip disappears off the computer screen and men die. The kids play computer games for fun, the military rigorously train their personnel to use exactly the same technology to make killing more efficient and longer ranged.

Television, the cinema, video games - you can test the physiological and psychological responses of young people engaged in watching and playing these, you can draw conclusions that they increase 'violence' - that they stimulate the fight or flight mechanism which we've evolved over millions of years.

Nobody tested us when we played cowboys, or ball sports, nobody tested us as we queued outside the dancehalls, eyeing up the girls and the boys we'd likely fight with sometime that night.

Nobody tested my ancestors when they grew up handling swords and bows and guns, and used them careless of any legal restraint.

You can't measure the violent contribution of video games because we have no baseline of violence. Are we supposed to be more civilised now? There's actually plenty of evidence that violent crime in the West has been decreasing for years - despite cinema, television, or video games.

Males have been bred to be dangerous, and it's impossible to reverse millions of years of evolution with a plea to the spirit of liberal democracy to make us more tolerant. It's a dangerous world and we remain dangerous people, with or without video games.

I cite the example of a small town in Scotland, but similar lessons could be drawn from virtually any nation in the world. Switzerland is one of the few which has escaped war for any real span of time. The rest of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, even the newest of worlds in Australia, have a significant history of warfare and civil conflict.

Video games replay real war and portray fantasy war. The fans of video games spend a lot of money buying the equipment, so it can be argued they're likely to be purposeful and motivated, that they invest a lot of energy and emotion in playing their games.

But their dominant motivation seems to be social. Gamers like to beat friends. And games offer a more level playing field than sport - you don't have to be over six foot tall to be a winner.

Game play appears to be highly social - it's not an isolating activity, it actually enables people to make friends and compete with friends. Perhaps they do become more aroused when playing - they certainly become more competitive - and there may be some desensitisation to violence in the immediate aftermath of playing a game, but you cannot make a direct leap from that evidence to claim that video games cause an increase in violent conduct.

To do so, you would have to prove that had they not been playing video games the gamers would have been involved in other activities which had fewer consequences for potential violence. Suppose, instead of sitting at home playing games they went out to hang around street corners and come into contact with other males?

Because we cannot create a blank slate, we cannot prove the effects of video games are any different from alternative activities. The media and entertainment industries sensationalise violence and feed us a constant diet of crime and war. But go back two thousand years and the popular traditions of storytelling, drama, poetry and song delivered a similar diet.

Little has changed in recorded history, save perhaps our expectations that we act in a more 'civilised' manner - and our 'civilised' nature can be called into account by the likes of Pinkville or Abu Graibh, the British experience in Ireland, never mind genocide in Nazi Germany.

Does the playing of violent video games contribute to real life violence? There can be no objective evidence to prove the case. Do video games lead to a more violent society? Unlikely.

Our expectations that we can live in peace and tranquillity have certainly increased over the last century. Medicine has reduced the toll of disease, most of us in the West have access to tapped drinking water and plentiful food, we seem to assume that we can produce a more rational society in which other dangers are minimised although drug use has increased dramatically.

Violenc e and aggression have been crucial for human survival since the dawn of mankind. They are not going to be eradicated simply by the aspirations of liberal democracies to create a tolerant and just society, and we do not create a more violent world by playing games.

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