Video Game Violence Reduce Crime?

That’s what three highly regarded academics are saying in a report titled “Understanding the Effects of Violent Video Games on Violent Crime”.

The experts, Benjamin Engelstatter of the Center for European Economic Research, Scott Cunningham of Baylor University, Texas, and Michael Ward of the University of Texas provide data that they say the reason for the decrease in crime via video games is because trouble making kids and adults are too busy playing their games to be out and about being a nuisance.

The report goes on to say in effect that claims of crimes committed from the inspiration of violent video games just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. A quote from the report basically says “Consequently, they overstate the importance of video game induced aggression as a social cost.”.

The report shows that violence goes down when violent video games come out and it may be due to the amount of aggression that the players are involved in that allows them to let off steam instead of running around expression such aggressive tendencies in the real world.

“Many researchers have argued that these games may also have caused extreme violence, such as school shootings, because laboratory evidence has found an abundance of evidence linking gameplay to aggression,” the researchers say. They go on to conclude,

“We find that the social costs of violent video games may be considerably lower, or even non-existent, once one incorporates the time use effect into analysis.”

The bottom line here is that violence in video games has become another finger pointing agenda from people and organizations that fail to realize that people can just be aggressive on their own. Past warfare throughout history shows that Ghengis Khan nor other world conquerors had PS3s and Xbox 360s.