In the wake of a mass shooting, we can often find the lives of the shooters dissected on national television. One of the most common links between mass shooters such as the perpetrators of the Columbine School shooting, the Aurora Colorado theater shooting and the recent Navy Yard shooting is that they all played violent video games, often for a number of hours at a time.
However, 58 percent of Americans play video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Though it makes for sensationalist news stories, links between violent video games and violent behavior in real life are tenuous at best, and the subject needs more rigorous research before any claims can be made to support such a link.
The continued push for the Violent Content Research Act by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) is merely another link in a long chain of events working to regulate video games on the flawed assumption that playing violent video games leads to violent behavior. Continued study of the effects of media on users is a worthwhile endeavor, but all too often inconclusive data has been used to support the idea of banning or restricting video games.
These calls often ignore the truth about the demographics who play video games and the system of rating already in place and instead seize upon video games as the determining cause of violence, ignoring many other social factors. We should work to build a more comprehensive understanding of these effects before censoring the media that we are allowed to produce.
One of the most common arguments for regulation of the content of video games is the effect that it can have on the youth who play those games. However, this ignores the fact that the ESA reports that average age of a gamer in the United States is 30, with only 32 percent of gamers being under 18.
As Patrick Markey, associate professor of psychology at Villanova University notes, “it’d be more unusual to find one of these shooters that didn’t play video games,” given the number of gamers in the United States aged 18 and above. According to an article by the L.A. Times, Mike Ritrovato, an acquaintance of the Navy Yard shooter, said that, “If he had anything bad about him, it was that he was a 35-year-old man playing video games…”
But again, much like other shooters who played video games, the Navy Yard shooter is not abnormal, but a part of the norm. The continued portrayal of gaming as an activity that only involves young people perpetuates a misunderstanding of the problems that we have often seen tied to gaming.
Craig Anderson, a psychology professor at Iowa State University who has been highly involved in researching video games, argues that there is a definite link between video games and violence. He is quoted in The New York Times this February as saying “…it’s clear that violent media is one factor; it’s not the largest factor, but it’s also not the smallest.”
However, in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion that studies of video games “do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively,” and that most studies “suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology.”
We should continue research into causes of tragedies, such as mass shootings. However, we cannot continue to place blame on video games and ignore the other possible causes. Easy access to weapons for individuals who have had repeated violent incidents, for example, or the social situations that the shooters find themselves in without a support system that can help them.
By continuing to portray video games as the great culprit of violence in society and rely on flawed studies and research to support these claims, we do a disservice to all of society.