A phrase you’ve heard from parents, a phrase you’ve heard from teachers, a phrase you’ve heard in a lot of places, yet you don’t know why. The phrase in question:“Video games cause violence,” but why does everybody insist this is true? Could this be linked to the early age of video games, or is there a deeper plot? Well, I’ve looked into this subject, and found some truths in this sea of coined phrases and old sayings. 

       Video games today cover a wide variety of topics, from role play games to simulators, to, yes, violent games, but are all games like this? It’s surely a popular genre, as 20% of video games sold in the United States were first person shooters in 2018, but does it truly imbue violence into people? What about the other 80%? While yes, it is true that some video games have gore, blood, suffering, and more, not every game like that is bad, per say. Video games can cause all sorts of emotions, from joy to despair to desire. Even considering aggression, most correlation studies show at most a small effect. While yes, children may latch onto the actions of violent video games, most violent games are properly rated. Though not everyone follows the rating system, quite a lot of people do. To mention a few points I found, studies have shown violent video games may cause aggression, not violence. Further, any competitive video game or activity may cause aggression. As sales of violent video games have significantly increased, violent juvenile crime rates have significantly decreased. Studies have shown that violent video games can have a positive effect on kindness, civic engagement, and prosocial behaviors. 

       Even in video games that are supposed to be violent, there are undertones and even main points of lightheartedness and humor. Take my personal experience with the game Team Fortress 2, a game that has stood the test of time, and was around during the main arguments of this topic. While yes the game is a class-based shooter (a shooter where you select characters with abilities and/or weapons that are specific to them), it supports teamwork and working with others. The game is also very humorous, with a cartoony artstyle and dramatic effects. Quite a lot of people don’t even fight, referred to as “friendlies,” and the overall theme is usually one of good fun and humor. This game somehow made exploding into a pile of body parts funny through keybind-dying at funny moments, so it must be doing something right.

       And as stated before, quite a lot more video games don’t focus on violence at all. While yes games such as God of War and Doom Eternal exist, there are games such as Minecraft and Super Mario to balance this. On the topic of Doom, I’m not sure people grasp that the point of the game is to kill demons, therefore being a more “righteous” game despite the playstyle.

       And yet where did this mindset come from? Why do people think video games are the cause of all the world’s problems? It seems that it started back at the very beginning of video games, and has plagued them since the arcade age. I’ve traced the first big outcry of violence in video games from back in the arcade era, from a cabinet called “Death Race” in 1976. The game was a simple one, where you had to run over as many “gremlins” as you could in a certain time frame. The issue people had with this, along with the gremlins resembling stick figures, was “that you heard this little ‘ahhhk’ when the person got hit, and a little gravestone came up”. People found this to instill violence in children, and the outcry peaked with ”protesters dragg(ing) Death Race machines out of arcades and burning them in parking lots”, resulting in the game being recalled from arcades. For as long as video games have existed, people have linked them to violence. Unfortunately, a lack of evidence and poorly presented cases don’t do much to prove a point. This minority of people have seemed to have some impact though, from the Mortal Kombat outrage in 1993 to the first video game lawsuit in 1997 made by Jack Thompson. However, the timeline I found contained quite a lot of counterarguments as time progressed. Most cases were dismissed, and many claims had little or no depth to back them up. We simply have no evidence truly linking real-world violence and video games apart from some sketchy claims and strange coincidences.