How much do video games—especially violent ones—influence young players?
That’s an ongoing question in our culture, and one that we hear in the media virtually every time there’s a mass shooting. It’s also a question that’s more than just academic to me personally, as my 7-year-old son loves video games—despite the fact that we don’t even own a dedicated video game system. (We have downloaded a handful on our Kindle Fire, and he enjoys playing free games online at sites like lego.com as well.)
Whenever this question pops up, we often hear a polarized response to it. One side wants to claim a close correlation, if not outright causation, between games and the actions of an unstable few (a connection that’s often anecdotally strengthened by the fact that so many shooters are also avid gamers). On the other hand, the video game industry and skeptical experts counter that argument, saying that violent video games are a red herring, an easy boogeyman to blame when in fact it’s virtually impossible to determine what role, if any, they might have played.
It’s easy amid such a rhetorical stalemate to throw up our hands and say, “Well, we don’t really know, do we?” But there are some things that we do, in fact, know about games’ influence.
It’s impossible to say that games create killers or cause them to go on bloody rampages, of course. But what’s more clear is the correlation between violent games and how they affect young players’ behavior. A number of studies have documented significant ways that games seem to shape the moral development of young gamers, and a new study reinforces those findings.
Back in 2010, we reported on a story involving researcher Craig Anderson, director of Iowa State University’s Center for the Study of Violence. Anderson is at the forefront of researching violence in the media, and he published an analysis of 130 video game studies that “strongly suggest” that the medium can increase players’ aggressive thoughts and behavior, as well as decrease their empathy. Anderson said this generalization is true “regardless of … gender, age or culture.” The studies that his team reviewed encompassed more than 130,000 gamers from elementary school age to college age in the United States, Europe and Japan.
A new Canadian study is consistent with one of Anderson’s findings, namely that violent games have a negative influence on young players’ ability to show empathy. Specifically, researchers at Brock University in Ontario found that teens who spend more than three hours playing violent video games daily may be impairing their moral development.
The researchers theorize that excessive exposure to violent imagery paired with diminished social contact makes it more difficult for teens to tell right from wrong. Additionally, adolescents engaged in too much violent gaming were less likely to develop the ability to empathize with others.
The study involved 109 13- and 14-year-old boys and girls; it surveyed what kinds of games they played and how much time they spent playing. Eighty-eight percent played games, and more than half played daily, with violent games (defined as those that involved killing, maiming or torturing another human being) were among the most popular.
Social scientists teach that an individual’s moral judgment goes through four phases. By the age of 13 or 14, adolescents should be entering the third phase, which involves seeing a situation from another person’s perspective and empathizing with it. Their surveys indicated that teens who regularly played violent video games lagged in that stage of moral development. Researcher Researcher Mirjana Bajovic said of the findings:
The present results indicate that some adolescents in the violent video game playing group, who spent three or more hours a day playing violent video games, while assumingly detached from the outside world, are deprived of [social] opportunities. Spending too much time within the virtual world of violence may prevent [gamers] from getting involved in different positive social experiences in real life, and in developing a positive sense of what is right and wrong.
Writing in the journal Educational Media International, the research team added, “Exposure to violence in video games may influence the development of moral reasoning because violence is not only presented as acceptable but is also justified and rewarded.”
I think we need to zero in on a couple of important findings from this latest video game study. First, the kind of games kids play is important. Those that involve realistic simulations of human-on-human violence are likely more problematic than, say, Candy Crush, Super Mario or Angry Birds when it comes to players becoming more empathetic (or not). Second, the amount of time kids play games is also important. In this case, three hours of game time daily seemed to be a significant threshold for impairing adolescents’ moral development.
For those of us raising children in our 24/7 media-saturated world, I think studies like this one are encouraging and important. They remind us media really does exert a significant influence, and they give us some guidelines for setting concrete, measurable boundaries when it comes to our children’s entertainment. In this case, limits on violent video games and the amount of time spent playing them will help our kids grow into the empathetic adults every parent hopes they’ll be someday.
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