Game Theory: Do Video Games Cause Violence? It's Complicated.

Every time we see the news talking about

video

game

s these days it seems like it's always the same thing in the two decades since the Columbine

video

game

s have been at the center of the controversy surrounding gun

violence

in America, particularly violent video

games

and It has experts and some parents. alarmed this includes the gruesome and gruesome video

games

that are now common, but again this type of alarm is nothing new role that VHS tape from the early 90s you can rip your opponent's head off with electronic blood and guts the game is called Mortal Kombat one of the most popular video games out there feels like going out and punching someone after watching this game.

Tell me the truth, yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same, but to be fair, our counterarguments in the early 90s were also exactly the same. So you know, it's time to change the conversation and that's my goal with today's episode, to move beyond this he-said-she-said style of argumentation that these topics have been stuck in for decades. Instead, we must get to the real story, the scientific one. In fact, do video games really make people more violent? Hello Internet, welcome to Game Theory, a show where we talk about a lot of things that don't matter at all, from the physics of Mario to the history of haunted chuck-e-cheeses.

Yes, I know some people. Take these episodes too seriously and it's especially hard if I talk about how I don't know your favorite hero and call him evil all the time, but really, at the end of the day, it's all just for fun, whether it's true or not. Phoenix Wright is breaking the law and his quest for justice just doesn't matter and by the way, it was a terrible episode. Anyway, I'm very sorry. In short, this program is meant to be entertaining first and foremost with a little education, I was lucky to have parents and teachers who got me excited about learning, but many others are not as fortunate, so if through this small web series I can get you interested in the way a computer works. works by talking about Mario maker or teach us something about gravity and astronomy through the lens of Minecraft well that's great, you had fun, you learn a little and the whole world is a slightly more positive place be

cause

you watched a video, but today for all the stupidity.

Strange topics we talk about today on this program. What we're talking about really matters. In fact, it's more relevant now than ever. Do video games make the people who play them more violent? Is there a connection between video games and the The issue of gun

violence

in the United States Since the 1990s, several politicians have invoked video games as the main contributor to the mass shootings that make headlines again and again and now the president He even denounces it, so I wanted to do an episode on the topic so that we can get a definitive answer once and for all and see that that's what happens in this debate.

You have two sides that are so entrenched in their respective responses that no one bothers to stop and investigate. On the one hand, you have people. who are so convinced that it must be the media we consume that is causing this aggression that they are eager to blame it be

cause

they are prejudiced against games, they don't understand them, but on the other side there are people like me, people who grew up playing video games where our instinctive reaction is like no, of course. I play video games. I know a lot of people who play video games and we are not violent.

The problem with that is that it's not a real test, it's a With a small amount of anecdotal evidence, it's important to recognize that everyone's brain works differently. We too are biased in this debate because we are eager to defend this thing that we love and that embodied our childhood. Neither party here is having a conversation because we are both so sure we are right, what I want more than anything is what I hope we all want and that is the truth, if video games have no connection to the violence of the Real world, I want to have done my homework and have the receipts to prove it. and then be able to show those receipts to other people who claim otherwise, on the other hand, if I found conclusive causal evidence that such video games, our deformation of the mind makes us more prone to violent impulses and makes us less sensitized to violence.

I want us to hear that hard truth: It's going to suck, yes, but it's going to be important for us to know because we can start to find a solution from there and this isn't me trying to get political or anything I don't care about. you are someone who believes strongly in gun ownership rights or the exact opposite at the most basic level. I hope we are all united in this same goal of trying to find the source of the blame and how to correct it so that fewer people get hurt and die. It's as simple as that and if video games are to blame, then great, at least now we know and we can start correcting it at the end of the day.

I don't want my son to grow up in a world where he feels like he has to be on guard for people trying to hurt him at school, at church, or at Walmart, so to be clear, my goal today is not to propose any kind of solution. policy. I'm not qualified to do so at all, but rather than simply sharing some hard data, scientific research done by trusted institutions presented to you and in the most unbiased way possible, the work I've done for this episode has looked at the topic from three separate angles, the first examining the links between video games. and crime number two, which looks at the profiles of many shooters and the role video games played in their lives, and number three, which explores the psychology behind video games and how they affect our perspective on violence, it's now true, or if you can't tell with this.

Well, this won't be my happiest episode of game

theory

, but it's certainly one of the most important. Let's start with angle number one. To start, we look at the links between video games and crime. We need to talk a little. A little bit about the history of some of the most controversial and violent video games, if there really is a direct causal link between the violence shown and video games and users becoming more violent in their daily lives, then we would expect to see increases in encouraged violence. for some of the most popular violent video games in history and well there are definitely some of the first video games that had violent themes if we want to talk about real or realistic violence becoming popular in the mainstream while we would probably have to look here, early 90s and mortal kombat which was released in 1992 as well as wolfenstein 3d and doom in 1992 and 1993, from that point on we have seen many other violent video games that got bad press such as the Grand Theft Auto series, Call of Things like that in the Battlefield of the Duty series, but for the most part the availability of violent video games has been pretty constant since the mid-90s.

Now, this graph you see right behind me shows us the growth of games both in terms of pure number of games sold per year as well as the number of titles released per year and unsurprisingly both started to take off here in the mid 90's with platforms like PlayStation on Nintendo 64 really increasing their popularity. and then exploded in the 2000s when they really peaked and everything started to decline in the mid-2010s as smartphones and mobile gaming became more popular, but it's pretty clear that if the actual rise of video games, which would include violent video games, occurred between the mid-1990s and 2010, well.

If they are influencing people to commit more violence in real life, then the crime statistics should show similar growth during those same periods, but when you look at the data, that is the opposite of what happened, the rate of murders in the United States actually peaked in 1980. Pac-Man fever really took hold in people's minds to the point of anger, but starting in the early '90s those rates dropped a lot from 1991 to 2016. Homicide in the US is actually down by forty-five point five percent and it's not just homicide that we're doing. We're talking about all the major crime categories across the board: assault, robbery, rape, all of them have decreased by at least 30% since 1991.

The idea that the popularity of video games, which again were not as commonly played Even around the 1990s it has contributed to making the United States a more violent society, as a whole it simply does not appear in these types of statistics. No, you might think that since young people tend to play the most video games, statistics on juvenile crime would actually show the real impact of violent video games on our minds, but those statistics actually seemed pretty similar. The number of violent crimes committed by people ages 12 to 17 has plummeted since those early days of the 1990s to a rate of about 1/5. than it was at its peak, so the general data seems to tell us that crime is not getting worse, although today someone who watches the news we think it is worse than ever and it is probably less because crime as a whole Incidents of mass shootings have become larger, more prominent, and more impactful in the media.

Exactly what constitutes a mass shooting creates so many disagreements that it is surprisingly difficult to define, as everyone comes up with their own definition to present whatever statistic they want. We're looking to prove it, but in general I think a fairly common definition is that a mass shooting involves an incident in which at least four people are killed by a shooter in a public place. In that case, from 1982 to 2006 there were approximately 1.6 mass shootings per year. but in the years since 2006 it has actually more than tripled 25.4 per year to put that statistic another way, from 1949 to 1998 there were 9 mass shootings in the US where at least 10 people died, so which ends up being approximately one every five years.

Meanwhile, in the last 20 years there have been 18 shootings in which at least 10 people died, which translates to one per year, five years per year in the same way, although while the murder rate has decreased, the percentage of homicides committed with firearms has increased. steadily increasing reaching 73 percent in 2016, so perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether video games are making our society as a whole more violent, but whether they are causing select individuals in that society to suddenly snap and decide to become a mass. shooters, as I said at the beginning of this episode, everyone's brain works totally differently, so 19 9.9% society may not be affected at all by violence and video games, all it takes is for just one person to have a bad reaction to what they are playing.

The second angle we need to look at on this topic is what kind of role video games have played in the lives of mass shooters of the past, perhaps the most famous being the two Columbine shooters from 1999. They were both fans of the first shooter game in first person Doom. Elementary school shooter Sandy Hook had a lot of video games, like on disc games like Left 4 Dead Dead Rising Grand Theft Auto and there was a Norwegian shooter that I know was focused on us. shooters, but needed to extract as many data points that he could reasonably investigate in 2011, he claimed that playing Call of Duty actually helped his aim and target acquisition, both skills he used during his attack now to make sure some mass shooters are fans . of video games, but you can't just take these few examples and create a causal connection there, especially since I could list many other tragedies where those shooters didn't have strong ties to video games, in fact, of the 18 incidents I mentioned above that had over 10 kills, my research actually tells me that only four of those shooters had notable video game habits.

There are many explanations for that, but it all jibes with the report issued by the Secret Service in 2002, which indicated that only 12 percent of school shooters expressed any kind of interest in violent video games. Now you could probably argue that the interest in video games is a statistical coincidence, given that the majority of mass shootings are actually committed by young men and 72% of men are under the age of 10. 30 play video games 58 percent of men between 30 and 49 also play video games. It's not so surprising that young people who do bad things also share habits with other young people who don't do bad things with other young people in their The same demographic traits that these shooters share are breathing oxygen, eating food, wearing clothes, but saying that seems ridiculous. , TRUE?

I not see tono one attacking the denim industry because these shooters tended to wear jeans, it seems like video game opponents are mixing correlation. causally now, in that Norwegian terrorists claim that shooting games made them much more effective in their shooting, those claims may have had some substance if they hadn't been drafted over the years. You see, a study was published in 2014 that found that people who played shooting games got more headshots in real-world shooting practice by a wide margin, but that study was retracted because the results couldn't be replicated by external researchers or by the original researchers who performed the experiment in the first place, regardless of whether there is still one.

More evidence that makes me think that video games are not the culprit variable in our gun violence epidemic. Here, the United States is not alone in its consumption of video games, compared to other nations with large gaming cultures, although we are. Unique in the amount of gun violence we have, the numbers back us up absolutely well. is number one in money spent on video games per year the rest of the top ten includes China Japan South Korea Germany Canada Spain and Italy now China does not publish statistics on gun violence, but the rest does and if you compare homicides by weapons fire and adjust for population size, the United States actually has more gun deaths per year than the other eight countries combined, these countries are not immune to mass shootings, but it is tremendously hard to believe that our consumption video game is to blame for gun violence in America, when other nations use those same games, they are popular, they don't have nearly the same problem, but I'm still willing to consider the possibility that violent video games could be harmful , especially since the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have spoken out against violent video games, so video games make us more violent in the long run or perhaps they are desensitizing us to real-world violence by simulating So graphic and often realistic graphics. violence in gaming, well there are many, and I mean many, studies done on this topic, the connection between video games and aggression, and many of them actually show a positive correlation between the two, but the problem here is that there are many. from the media here, hey, this study shows a connection between video games and aggression, but I don't understand the report or fully talk about the limitations of those types of studies to show you what I mean, we need to think about how they are done this type of studies. that are being carried out, for example, how would assault be proven in the first place?

These tests have to be ethical, after all, you can't just give kids video games and then ask them to act out shooting things, so the marks of aggression in these types of tests The tests are things like whether the subject would be willing to subject your opponent to a loud noise or offer hot sauce to gain some sort of advantage in the game. I'm not saying these findings aren't revealing, but it is pretty difficult to extrapolate someone's willingness to give spicy food to someone else under the assumption that now, suddenly, someone is more likely to be shot with any weapon in the world. real.

I mean, that's an exaggeration, it's already an exaggeration to say that giving spicy food is aggressive. behavior maybe they just like to play tricks on the other person or maybe they think the other person is hungry maybe they just like spicy food. Another problem here is that findings that are statistically significant are not necessarily statistically impressive, as seen when a study determines that there is a correlation between two things being tested that correlation is measured with a value between a negative one and a positive one now a A value of zero would say that the two variables have no relationship with each other, while a positive value would indicate that one predicts the other, so a positive correlation of point three, for example, would mean that one thing predicts another by a little, while something like a positive point seven correlation means that one thing strongly predicts another positive, guaranteed that yes, X Y is going to happen 100% now as far as our In the case of video game use, violent behavior, none Of the studies I saw that claimed to show some level of connection between violent media and future behavior or immediate aggression seemed to correlate beyond a positive 0.3, meaning that studies can sometimes indicate a correlation, but even At best, it is a very weak level of correlation and that is not to mention the contradictory studies that contradict all of the ones I just mentioned or the psychologists who write entire articles and articles talking about how exaggerated the idea that the video games cause violence and aggression.

The behaviors can be confusing when trying to figure out which findings are most valid, which researchers may have conflicts of interest, which are simply publishing weak findings because they have to be published to maintain their jobs, but for me, one of the most revealing analyzes of the state of psychological research on this topic violence in video games actually comes from an unexpected source the Supreme Court of all places In a 2011 case titled Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association the Supreme Court ruled that a California law that prohibited the sale of certain video games to children was unconstitutional and they struck down that law by a vote of 7 to 2.

The portion of the majority opinion written by the court stated this quote. Psychological studies that purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove this. While such exposure causes minors to behave aggressively, any demonstrated effects are small and indistinguishable from effects produced by other means. End of quote, what's really encouraging about that message is that that majority opinion was written by Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most conservative members of the court, but it was co-signed by one of the most liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

What I mean by this is that when you analyze gun violence it does not have to be a partisan issue, Supreme sure. Court judges aren't supposed to be part of any political party, but with how divisive discussions about gun violence become, it's important to remember to look at the research and decide what is and isn't supported by solid scientific data. is not a matter of Politics is a matter of caring about the truth above and beyond everything else, let's get back to the cow and that is one of my main takeaways from researching this episode: the need for us to be able to put aside politics when we analyze these types of problems.

There's a reason I haven't made this video in the last eight years of doing game

theory

and it's because I was afraid of what I would find. I was afraid that the investigation would lead me to a conclusion that I was afraid to tell you. guys and believe me, there is still a lot more in the gaming community that we should be concerned about, like how video games could be shortening our attention span or how certain mechanics and video games can be linked to problem gaming. There is more information that people can point to video games and say that they are not a good influence, but in this case the fact of the matter is that there is very little strong causal evidence to suggest that video games are more likely to make people commit violence or that playing video games makes people more violent, it is important that we remember, regardless of our political stance on guns, video games or whatever, that we all want the same thing, a safer and less violent future for ourselves and for our children. and for our country, just as I had to put aside some of my preconceived notions about video games to investigate this episode, we are not going to find any solution to the problem of gun violence in this country if we only listen to the things we want.

Listen, I think data-driven decisions, non-partisan research is what's going to help us have a shot at making that happen, it's not about emotions, it's about facts and I'll do my best to keep an open mind but criticism if any finding shows us. the way forward and I encourage you all to do the same, it is not so much a theory but a recommendation, a game theory recommendation, thanks for watching and for keeping an open mind.