Your source for understanding problem video game behavior
Main Appeal
Dear Friend,
Perhaps you would agree that the case list of aggressive and violent acts committed by our youth is heartbreakingly long, and this presents a serious problem for America.
You might not dispute the notion that extra-ordinary, large-scale acts of violence perpetrated by young people substantially began in the 1990s, ticked upward in the 2000s and has remained steady to the present.
An industry twice the size of movies and music combined, video gaming touches nearly every American household with children.
Reaching this remarkable plateau has involved an incredible amount of creativity since Atari released Pong in 1972, with the driving element being about greater immersion with each technological development.
Causality
The most important question in the debate about the potential effects of violent video gaming is: can the virtual practice of violent acts beget real-world, even lethal, violence?
As with many other cause-and-effect matters of social science, the issue of strict causality vs. correlation between a set of inputs and an outcome enters into play.
Strict causality theory can be viewed as a sort of tripwire, or this-for-that, type of cause and effect.
“It is illogical to assume that advertising, an industry worth half a trillion dollars in 2016 can influence consumer behavior, but that content in media does not influence aggressive behavior.”
— April 2018 Editorial from International Society for Research on Aggression
Resources
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