Video games have been under massive criticism in the last few years, especially when people are saying that they cause violent tendencies in young children and have had a direct link in the recent rise in school shootings in America. But multiple scientists have debunked this claim in multiple articles and by looking at the statistics there is no evident correlation between violence and video games.
If we look at the statistics for when video games really started to launch in the mid-nineties, it shows from there on that video games have risen in popularity and if we look at the statistics for a crime committed in the US the peak was in about 1980 and have started to drop off from there on, and even if we look at the youth crime statistics for the US they have even dropped off since their peak in 1993. These graphs are showing that there hasn’t been an increase in violence since video games rise but they are falling more than ever. If we look at the ten highest countries that spend money on video games and then look at their crime statistics for homicides involving a gun, it shows that the number of mass shootings doesn’t come close to the amount America has, Excluding China because they don’t publish crime rates, and these are some of the countries that population spends a lot of money on video games.
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In a study conducted by James Ivory, he concluded that “When it comes to actual serious criminal violence, there's virtually no evidence that video games matter.” Ivory has researched the social and psychological dimensions of media, particularly the content and effects of video games. He says he's determined that a lot of things influence violent crime — but the media we consume is not one of them. Ivory then again said that “There is a little more interesting research that kind of link between the games and the more abstract forms of aggression. But when it comes to serious violent crime, video games don't really matter.”
An associate professor at the University of Oxford who studies digital media, Andrew Przybylski said “the evidence has become pretty clear that, where there are correlations, it's probably because of a third factor. For example, boys have historically been more likely to play video games, and they also happen to be more aggressive than girls on average.” Przybylski published a study this year of more than 1,000 British adolescents and found that there was no link between the time spent playing violent video games and aggressive behavior.
Multiple studies have pointed out this fact that video games don’t cause people to become more violent and the ones that don’t say this have results that can’t be recreated or the results could have other causes. An example of this is a study conducted in 2014 that claimed using gun-shaped controllers improved the accuracy of children and they got more headshots than before but the study was retracted because the results couldn’t be replicated by other researchers or themselves. Other studies have used methods like having two groups, one that played games before the experiment and ones that didn’t, and made them pour hot sauce into a glass saying that the amount of hot sauce in the glass would be how much someone had to drink and the amount they put in the glass would see how much aggression they had, but a number of factors could contribute to this like they might be a joker and wanted to play a joke of the other person.