by A. P. Littleton

Created on: May 26, 2007

If a person has a propensity for violence he or she will engage in violent behavior at some point, regardless of whether they excessively play violent themed video games or not. Video games have been used to justify violent male behavior in the past several years, yet there is no evidence to substantiate such a theory. Despite various studies conducted on this issue, there is no empirical evidence that video games alone cause people to act in a violent manner. Researchers have continued to "speculate" that violent video games lead to violent behavior, but the results of testing has yielded varying results.

In video games depicting violent or aggressive physical acts (e.g. shooting, karate, boxing and wrestling games, etc.) and video games which depict criminal or inherently dangerous activities (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Icon, war games, etc.) there has been much public debate over whether such video games lead to gratuitous violence. A video game cannot force anyone into committing a violent or illegal act, if the person has a foundation of what it right and wrong. If an individual commits a violent act without provocation, that act is being committed for no other reason than the person simply has no regard for law or human life. It has more to do with how they person was raised, than the video game. Blaming video games for violence is an easy excuse and fails to address the larger issue, which is the violent culture that we live in and the reasons for the violence. Those who play video games with a violent theme and then go out and commit a violent act are already predisposed to engage in violent behavior.

Many would argue that environmental influences (such as video games) cause people, particularly teenagers, to commit acts that they would not otherwise commit. This is nothing more than an excuse for a lack of individual morals and discipline. Although adolescents may be more impressionable than adults, and sometimes want to emulate behavior they see, if they are instilled with a sense of social values and morals they would know the difference between video game violence (which is fantasy-based) and real life violence, which can lead to severe injury and death. There are plenty of people who play video games, even to an unhealthy point, yet never commit a violent act.

The argument that video games "causes" violence in real life has been rejected in many courtrooms where defendants argued that watching a violent video game lead to them committing a violent act or killing someone. In addition, several mental health experts have conducted studies and found that there is no correlation between video games and real life violence. As aforementioned, there are no known studies that have scientifically concluded that video games lead to violent behavior. Only those who wish to justify certain anti-social behavior or those who do not want to address the real root causes of violence would make the argument that video games lead to violence.

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