Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered "yes" to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after their child's birth, and told me that they didn't play video games. The data, based on my first round of calls, was conclusive: if you play video games, you are much more likely to breast-feed your children.
You're probably ready to shoot five thousand holes in my argument. For one, I only called people I knew—we're talking about a small sampling of individuals who happen to be friends with someone who writes about games for a living. Second, my friends are firmly in their 20s and 30s, which means they grew up playing games. I could have asked them almost anything and linked it with playing games. I did my job though, and you clicked on the headline. You may comment on this story, as well. It's a good way to get readers, this tactic of linking a popular topic on a tech website to any other controversial topic.
The reason for this experiment? The number of headlines linking violent criminals to video games isn't going down, and the link between playing games and violent, if not murderous, behavior is continually talked about in the mainstream media. Gaming blogs, hungry to throw content to an insatiable audience demanding hundreds of posts a week, breathlessly report on other people reporting on this supposed connection. If there is no problem, why do we continually make the finding of video games in the home of the killer of the week such big news?
Video gaming is a hobby that the majority if Americans take part in, with 2007 research indicating that 63 percent of Americans play games. Violent criminals are, no matter what the number of news reports would have you believe, rare creatures. If you mix a limited sample with a hobby that the majority of the population takes part in... ta-da! You find that most killers have played video games.
The last media frenzy over a possible murder-video game link is the case of Erik Salvador Ayala, who allegedly shot nine people outside of a nightclub called The Zone. Two were killed, the rest injured, and Ayala then turned the gun on himself. It was widely reported that he played video games, although a detective on the case doesn't believe in any kind of connection. "There were a lot of video games in the apartment," he told the Portland Mercury. "Of a wide variety of the kind you might find in any 24-year-old's apartment."
The story you won't hear, because it doesn't sell, is that as gaming gets more popular, violent crime has gone down. "The reality is that...as violent video games have become more prevalent, violent crimes have decreased dramatically. This is true both for police arrest data, as well as crime victimization data," an article in the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling stated. The data is striking.
"This is certainly not to say that violent video games are necessarily responsible for this decline, even partially. However, this certainly cuts away the basis of any belief that violent games are promoting societal violence," the article claims. "The correlation (an astonishing r = ?0.95) is simply in the wrong direction. This would be akin to lung cancer decreasing radically after smoking cigarettes was introduced into a population, which is simply not the case."
The problem with that story is that it dies; you can't keep repeating it ad nauseum. If there is no direct link because gaming and violence, you can't run the same sensational story every time it turns out a shooter enjoyed a good game of Left 4 Dead. This is a story that papers and blogs get to run with every few weeks, and it makes them money. And the politicians, for their part, have a problem that they can take instant action on: if games are causing all these problems, then we should do something about it.
Video games are the gangsta rap of the 2000s
The ensuing legislation is often deeply silly, and always incredibly expensive, but it reads well to a scared populace. People don't like crime, and if games create crime, then we can show we care by trying to get those games in locked boxes and covered in warning labels, and we can fine those that sell the games to minors. Poverty, broken families, and decaying schools are subtle, perhaps impossible problems to solve... so it's not worth thinking about them. Video games, on the other hand, are a "problem" that you can legislate away.
In imagining the homes of these killers, you could tell what time of history you are in by what makes the news. A few years ago you might have made news by finding gangsta rap CDs in a stereo. Years before that? Jazz on the turntable. It must be like pulling the sheet off a ghost and looking for clues about what this person was like, and why they did what they did. We simply look for the most obvious and easy-to-solve causes.
The solution would be to stop reporting on these things, unless there is a strong, provable link between gaming and the crime committed. Stop turning these stories into two-parters, with the first report remarking on the link, and the second debunking it. Pointing and laughing at the mainstream media perpetuates the issue, and comes off as snarky instead of helpful. We're all guilty of riding this issue for easy readers, and lawmakers use our publicity for easy points with their constituents.... it's time we stopped.
Then again, I got you this far by bringing up breast-feeding.
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