With Christmas approaching, many parents are undoubtedly facing a familiar dilemma. Numerous adolescents will ask for the latest action oriented game in franchises such as Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed. Setting aside for a moment that many of these games, just like many movies, are made for and rated for adults, do these games actually harm minors? Are parents bad parents if they give in to their teens' Christmas requests?
It's a question that has been around for decades. Every so often, this issue gets brought up after a horrible mass shooting when the shooter happens to be a young male (but not when the shooter is older or female). Since almost all young males play action oriented games, finding out that a young shooter did as well isn't as revealing as some treat it. And as the shooting last month in Colorado Springs by 57-year-old Robert Dear reminds, mass violence is not the unique provenance of game-loving youth.
Fortunately this tendency to equate video games with horrible acts of gun violence appears to be waning. Criminologists specifically refer to claims of such connections as "myth." The last time the idea seemed to get much traction was after the horrible 2012 shooting by 20-year-old Adam Lanza. Yet the official investigation report revealed he was more interested in peaceful games like Dance, Dance Revolution than action ones.
Even the idea that a vulnerable population of mentally ill youth may be influenced by action games hasn't borne out in the science. One recent study by Chris Engelhardt and colleagues at the University of Missouri found that neither young adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) nor non-ASD young adults were made aggressive by playing action games. A 2014 study I conducted with colleague Cheryl Olson, found no evidence that youth violence was associated with action game playing among kids with elevated depression or ADHD symptoms.
What about milder forms of aggression though? Here the evidence is less clear. As I found in a 2015 meta-analysis of such studies, there's little evidence to link action games to mental health problems like depression or ADHD. Very small correlations between action games and aggression do exist, but once studies control for other variables such as gender, family environment or personality, these correlations vanish. As a 2015 study by Johannes Breuer and colleagues suggests, it appears that more aggressive youth tend to gravitate toward action games, but action games don't lead to later aggression.
Other studies suggest it's not really the violent content in action games that's the important variable anyway. A 2011 study by Paul Adachi and Teena Willoughby at Brock University found that it's the competitiveness in some games that increases aggression, not violent content. Most previous studies had failed to account for competitiveness when comparing games on violent content. And a 2014 study by Andrew Przybylski at Oxford University, found that getting frustrated in a game, but not violent content, could lead to aggression. This helps us also put the aggression we're talking about into proper context. Some games may make players more aggressive, but only in the same way a lot of other activities do, such as playing cards or checkers, watching sports, having a debate on politics, etc., stuff we all take for granted. And it doesn't seem to be the content of games that determines the outcome, but rather how games are played and their social context. Further, as a recent Australian study by Grant Devilly and colleagues has made clear, there's little evidence that the interactive nature of games make them more harmful than books or television.
Am I saying that every parent should run out and buy the latest Grand Theft Auto for their child? Not at all. As parents we often decide to filter our children's media exposure simply for moral reasons. And that's perfectly fine, because many of these games are made with content intended for adult audiences. We just have to be careful not to mistake our moral objections to certain media with a public health crisis. As the US Supreme Court pointed out in 2011 during a case regarding the regulation of action game sales to minors, there's just no evidence for an impending public health crisis caused by video games. During the era in which action games sales soared, youth violence has plummeted dramatically.
If the spurious association of video games with mass homicides has shown us one thing, it's that moral panics about media can distract us from more important and pressing matters of public interest. And that is the real tragedy of the video game debate.