Expanding the ‘Peace Plate’ of Trump & Macron to Include Effects of Violent Gaming
French President Emmanuel Macron brought his smooth style and endearing smile to Washington this week to pitch President Donald Trump on the importance of securing international peace. Not only would this be a welcome development to Europe’s war weary, but also to the world.
Considering the past questions each has raised about the effects of violent video gaming— & in light of the recent incident in France where a 23-year-old man admitted to taking the life of a girl shortly after a losing a round of the video game Fortnite— the pair’s plan for peace could’ve included gaming-inspired acts of aggression in their respective countries as well.
In case you are unaware, multiple news outlets reported an incident occurring on February 7-8 in Epinay-sur-Orge, France is as follows: an avid gamer with a history of committing acts of verbal abuse in the presence of his girlfriend participates in a Fortnite session (which can feature up to 100 players at a time). Within the game, the perpetrator has heated in-game dispute with another player, after the conclusion of which he leaves his residence to ‘cool off.’ In that process, he crosses the path of an 11-year-old girl he follows, deceives for the purpose of thievery and murders after she calls attention to the unwanted situation she was in.
The expert response to the tragic situation is as tired as it is predictable: decades of studies have illustrated no causal link between virtual and real acts of lethal violence. The same old ‘bogeyman’ (violent video games) is again dismissed. The discussion on the potential linkage of the gaming activity and the atrocious behavior of the gamer, like so many instances before it, ends with this denial.
Although no public statements by either Trump or Macron are available on this specific event, each leader is on the record for having raised the prospect of gaming influence on violent behavior in the past.
As highlighted in the adjacent blog titled President-Elect Trump’s Renewed Opportunity to Tackle Glorification of Violence, Trump- in his first term- took issue with the “glorification of violence in our society which includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.”
As part of that same statement, he asserted “we must stop or substantially reduce this and it has to begin immediately.”
More recently, in the wake of a set of the July 2023 French riots where students took to the streets after a teenager was killed by law enforcement after a routine traffic stop, President Macron, cite a “sort of copycatting of violence” before asserting:
”This, among the youngest, leads to a sort of escape from reality, an we sometimes have the feeling that some of them are living in the streets of the video games that have intoxicated them.”
Just the same as President Trump’s caution was dismissed in 2019, so, too were Macron’s by media organizations and the greater population alike.
The common reaction to this kind of event by defenders of the video game medium is that game playing can’t be cited as a precise cause of such an act, but that could be said of any and every natural phenomena according to the tour de force in causal reasoning set forth by Scottish philospher David Hume in the 1700s when he ascertained there is never and inherent link or absolute certainty about cause-and-effect relationships.
Instead,
but that does not mean they can not be a material, precipitating factor to a major crime.
The problem with this idea is that the common sense of politicians keeps being quashed by the experts-in-denial on the influence video gaming can have on its players.
An oft-repeated mantra of President Trump is that he has been returned to office to restore common sense.
It’s long past time for him and other world leaders to stand up to the naysayers regarding video gaming violence and recognize the serious harm some gamers have done to society while under the influence of the gratuitous violence certain games saturate players in.