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. When one thing exerts its influence, one other thing happens 100% of the time. It’s as if the first thing flipped a switch to bring about the second.

Human behavior being the complex & mystifying thing it is, strict causality (which is often the metric being sought in studies on gaming violence) is not provable for anything, let alone the effects of violent video game play on the behavior of an individual.

In fact, this assertion is supported by a still authoritative study Youth Violence: What We Need to Know:

Empirical studies could never be conducted that demonstrate causal connections between exposure to media aggression and rampage shootings”—it explained.

Despite this limitation, some video game researchers, the video game industry itself and the U.S. Supreme Court assert this level of causation needs to exist for them to recognize a relationship between virtual and actual violence.  

Within the field of video game research, there are scores of seasoned experts on youth violence who recognize behavioral issues of young people identified as problem video gamers.

Among them are the likes of Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson who, together with a group of scholarly colleagues, have issued studies and reports on an array of social problems that have stemmed from youth practice of video gaming for decades.

”We conclude that although exposure to violent media is not “the” cause of aggressive and violent behavior, it is an important risk factor that can contribute to more aggressive and violent behaviors, and fewer prosocial behaviors,” the pair wrote in Understanding Causality in the Effects of Media Violence.

According to this approach, one input combines with other inputs to bring about a certain outcome, and the impact of any one input is less measurable given the mix of other inputs it combines with to produce the result.

Multiple contributing factors as a causal source are recognized in addictive patterns, medical diseases and situations producing automobile accidents, as examples.