Do Video Games Cause Violence in Real Life?

An estimated 85 percent of U.S. teens are playing video games, with many of the most popular ones featuring violent content. According to Pew Research, about 60 percent of U.S. teen boys play video games daily.

What appears to some to be a connection between violent gameplay and actual violence has many wondering about the effects of immersive violence on young minds.

Video games as we now know them have only existed since the mid-1970s, so there's nowhere near the amount of empirical evidence for or against their violent effects than there is surrounding, say, television violence (and even those effects remain a source of controversy).

But the rise in dramatically violent shootings by teenage gamers is bolstering the side of the argument that says video game violence translates in some way to the real world.

The media has connected violent video game use and killers since the 1990s.

Influences From Specific Games

In 1997, 16-year-old Evan Ramsey brought a shotgun to his Alaska high school and shot four people, killing two. He played the sci-fi horror game "Doom," in which you have to shoot a character many times before he dies. Ramsey later expressed his surprise that the rule did not apply in real life [source: Jaccarino].

Also in 1997, a 14-year-old killed multiple people at his high school in Paducah, Kentucky. He played a lot of "Doom," too, along with the fight-to-the-death game "Mortal Kombat" — two favorites of the Columbine teens, as well [source: Jaccarino].

Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people at a summer camp in Norway in 2011, said he trained for his attack using the war game "Call of Duty," one also favored by Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary[source: Jaccarino].

An even more direct case happened in 2006. Alabama teen Devin Moore was arrested on suspicion of car theft. The police officers easily brought him into the station and started to book him when Moore suddenly attacked one police officer, stole his gun, shot him and another officer, and then fled down the hall and shot a 911 dispatcher in the head.

He then grabbed a set of car keys on his way out the back door, got in a police car and drove away. Moore, who had no criminal history, had reportedly been playing a lot of "Grand Theft Auto" before the killings [source: CBS News]. In "Grand Theft Auto," players steal cars and kill cops.

Violence in Multiple Forms of Media

In many ways, the argument against violent video game exposure mimics what we've heard for decades about violence on TV, and science has come to a general consensus that under certain conditions, TV does have some effect on kids' behavior.

For instance, there's evidence linking high exposure to TV sex with younger involvement in sexual activity. Some believe violent video game playing is even more likely to affect behavior because of the immersive quality.

People don't just watch video games; they interact with them. The games are also repetitive and based on a rewards system, a primary component of classical conditioning, a proven psychological concept in which behavioral learning occurs due to rewarding (or punishing) particular behaviors [source: Jaccarino].

Many of these claims seem logical, but proof of a link between virtual and actual violence is tough to come by. A handful of studies, though, have produced some interesting results.

Violent media has always made good scapegoats for negative behaviors among young people. In the 1950s, people blamed comic books for kids acting badly [source: CBS News]. In the 1960s, rock 'n' roll was blamed for making kids do drugs [source: Paul]. In the '80s, heavy-metal music was blamed for causing teens to die by suicide [source: Tewksbury].

The 1999 Columbine massacre, with its unprecedented number of victims, might have ushered in the official age of "blame the video games." There is some evidence to support a relationship between playing violent video games and behaving violently.

Published Studies

A 2000 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology had college students play video games and then engage in a competition that ended with the winner punishing the loser with a loud audio blast. The students who had played a violent video game punished their opponents for longer than the students who played a nonviolent game [source: American Psychological Association].

A meta-analysis reported in the journal Psychological Science in 2001 noted several common conclusions among previous video game studies, notably reports of a "fight or flight" response in children playing video games. Their heart rates and blood pressure increased, and their adrenal glands released adrenaline.

Real-life violence triggers the same physiological responses. The analysis concluded that the studies "clearly support the hypothesis that exposure to violent video games poses a public health threat to children and youths."

A 2006 study at the Indiana University School of Medicine revealed other physical links, like brain activity. Researchers looked at the brains of 44 kids immediately after they played video games. Half of them played a nonviolent game, and half played a violent game.

The brain scans of the violent-game group showed increased activity in the amygdala, which stimulates emotions, and decreased activity in the prefrontal lobe, which regulates inhibition, self-control and concentration. These increases didn't show up on the scans of the nonviolent-game group.

Parsing Relevant and Irrelevant Correlations

Whatever the factors, the evidence for some connection is compelling. Today's "school shooters" certainly do seem to share a love of violent video games. But, as Villanova University psychology professor Patrick Markey explained in U.S. News & World Report in April 2013, 97 percent of adolescents play video games.

Markey said: "It could similarly be argued that bread consumption predicts school shootings because most school shooters likely consumed a bread product within 24 hours before their violent attacks."

Freedom of Speech

After the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, the wife of a murdered teacher sued publishers of violent video games in the perpetrators' collections. The judge threw the lawsuit out, deciding the games' content did not rise to the level of "incitement of violence" (an exception to the right of free speech) because the publishers could not have anticipated what happened at the school.

The First Amendment, then, protects the companies' right to distribute games, regardless of content [source: Ward].

In science, correlation doesn't imply causation. Changes in brain activity, for instance, don't necessarily lead to changes in behavior.

Even an obvious relationship between virtual aggression and real-life aggression, like acting out the specific behaviors portrayed in "Grand Theft Auto," isn't necessarily one of cause and effect. It may be that real-life violent psychopaths enjoy being virtual violent psychopaths, and they choose games based on that preference [source: Lillebuen].

In fact, there are considerable deficiencies in studies connecting violent gameplay with violent (or, more accurately, aggressive) behavior, including a failure to contextualize and a general inconsistency among results [source: Ferguson].

Psychotic Traits

For instance, a 2010 study published in the "Review of General Psychology," reviewed past studies that reported ties between violent games and violent responses.

The researchers found the subjects most deeply affected by violent gameplay were those who exhibited personality traits indicative of psychoticism, which include lack of empathy, nonconformity and impulsiveness.

People who fit this model are predisposed to see violence as an appropriate response to social conflict [sources: Markey, Harris].

A Lack of Causality

More recently, Stanford Researchers analyzed 82 medical research studies that discussed the connection between playing games with violent themes and violent crime.

"Current medical research and scholarship have not found any causal link between playing video games and gun violence in real life," the researchers wrote in Fortune.

While some of the studies stated there was a link between violent video games and aggressive behaviors, which can include pushing someone to deadly violence, there was still not enough data to back up that connection. The researchers stated, "Even when considering the range of action that this definition covers... such studies did not find a causal link between video games and violent behavior."

Beyond the Lab

National trends, which rely on much larger sample sizes than do lab studies, also go against a causative relationship between video games and behavior.

While sales of violent games are increasing (and games themselves are getting more violent), violent crime rates in the United States are going down [source: LiveScience]. In 2013, crime rates in the 10 biggest U.S. cities were the lowest they had been in four decades [source: Zadronsy].

And one 2013 study, published in the "Journal of Youth and Adolescence," found the behaviors of "at risk" kids to be unaffected by playing violent video games. "At risk," in this case, meant they exhibited symptoms of attention deficit disorder or depression, conditions widely believed to increase vulnerability to the potentially negative effects of video game violence.

The researchers looked at the behaviors of 377 such U.S. children, examining both their game-playing habits (violence levels, time spent playing) and their negative social habits (getting into fights, bullying, cutting class), and found no link between the two.

In fact, in a small number of children with attention deficit symptoms, playing violent video games seemed to correlate with slight reductions in bullying [source: Ferguson].

The APA Weighs In

In an open letter to the American Psychological Association (APA) published in 2013, a group of more than 200 psychology experts petitioned the APA to reexamine its resolution that "all violence be reduced in video games and interactive media marketed to children and youth" [source: APA].

As people of science, they explained, they simply could not support an official position based on what they considered dramatically insufficient evidence. In 2020, the APA reaffirmed its stance regarding the lack of causal relationship.