Video Games Don’t Cause Violence (and why you shouldn’t trust the internet)

by Aaron Boulding
in Advice for New Dads · Featured · Random Parent Stuff
— 7 May, 2012

For years, scientists have been attempting to prove that kids playing violent video games will turn those kids violent. It’s the kind of pseudo-scientific armchair sociology that keeps getting funded because of the innate belief that the average parent out there really wants to believe in such a simple explanation. Violence is a serious social issue that needs to be carefully addressed and done right so people can be productive with results. This is why we all have to be careful when it comes to learning from random internet sources.

We fully agree with the conclusions and tips put forth in the video clip below but, Franklin Delano!, how they get there is so wrong and torturous that we’re impressed at our ability to keep from headbutting our keyboards.

All-Star Baseball 2003? Halo: Combat Evolved? The super-fat “Duke” controller for the original Xbox? Shimmering Sheep Dip! Is this video from 2002 or just an extended flashback of a show that never should have been? It’s so bad, the message from the kids and researchers could’ve easily been lost.

The fact that the kids in the piece explain that video games (like most of the things kids are into) are simply another social vehicle around which teens and youngsters gather is extremely important. We’re not psychologists and don’t know everything about every kid. We do know, from our own lives, that kids are going to tell stories about gross things, make jokes that are only funny to other kids and engage with one another on topics that are important to them. Video games, for the most part, are just another campfire or other spectacle around which to gather. If you want to keep depraved and twisted material of any kind away from your kids, then you and all of us have our work to do. Even hinting that such material should not even be created, distributed or celebrated, however, isn’t how we do things here and runs the risk that something new and valuable WON’T be created. And that’s as true today as it was ten years ago.