Study Shows No Link Between Homicides and Violent Games
Contexts, a journal by the American Sociological Association, has a very good article asking the question, "Do video games kill?" The article looks into the reasons why our leaders are so eager to pin the blame on video games when white, middle-class youths decide to open fire and act violently. It turns out that over the past century...politicians and people of authority have been quick to label such things as harmful..."folk devils," if you will. Cars, movies, rock music, and comic books have all shared the blame for corrupting the youth of America. However, other potential causes such as social conditions, issues at home, poverty, schooling, and mental illness are often conveniently overlooked. The media may touch on alternative causes but do not often explore them in any depth, and the media are also the ones who seem willing to feed the fire. Since 1997, 199 newspaper articles offered video games as the explanation for the shootings at Springfield, Paducah and Littleton. The Littleton, CO (Columbine) school shooting inspired 176 of those 199 articles since 1997.
I encourage anyone reading this post to take a look at this well thought out and informed article and ask for you to post your thoughts. Here's the opening statement:
As soon as it was released in 1993, a video game called Doom became a target for critics. Not the first, but certainly one of the most popular firstperson shooter games, Doom galvanized fears that such games would teach kids to kill. In the years after its release, Doom helped video gaming grow into a multibillion dollar industry, surpassing Hollywood box-office revenues and further fanning public anxieties.Then came the school shootings in Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Littleton, Colorado. In all three cases, press accounts emphasized that the shooters loved Doom, making it appear that the critics’ predictions about video games were coming true.
But in the ten years following Doom’s release, homicide arrest rates fell by 77 percent among juveniles. School shootings remain extremely rare; even during the 1990s, when fears of school violence were high, students had less than a 7 in 10 million chance of being killed at school. During that time, video games became a major part of many young people’s lives, few of whom will ever become violent, let alone kill. So why is the video game explanation so popular?
Karen Sternheimer goes on to explain in her article, which is linked at the end of this post. Feel free to share your thoughts.
"Do Video Games Kill?" [American Sociological Association]
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Super Timsy
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 2 March 2007
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: American Sociological Association, Do Video Games Kill, Folk Devils, Karen Sternheimer, Media, Politicians, Scapegoat, Sociology, Violence
i find it funny that the amount of shootings since 93 have gone down as video game popularity has gone up, but if im not mistaken, hasnt there been a humungous increase in school shootings this year?
Sephylove, Don't confuse news reports with actual incidents. A few well-publicized reports can lead to the perception of a problem as out of control, when in fact the problem is at it's least prevalent during the period.
People like simple answers to complex issues. In this case, correlation definitely doesn't add up to causation. So violent people like violent video games, this is obvious. What isn't obvious is that NON-violent people ALSO like violent videogames.
Death and violence often appear in classic literature, but that doesn't make people who like classic literature homicidal maniacs. The disturbing thing is that so many people it's true for video games even if not for classical literature.