After two gunmen opened fire at a stream of passing cars on a Tennessee highway in 2003, killing one person and badly wounding another, it didn’t take long for the police to find the culprits. Lurking in the bushes nearby were two teenage stepbrothers, who quickly confessed to the crime. But it wasn’t their fault, they explained. They hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. They were simply copying their favourite videogame: Grand Theft Auto III.
Once they were put trial, this claim was taken at face-value by the victim’s family’s lawyers, who launched a $246 million lawsuit against the game’s developers, Sony Computer Entertainment America and Rockstar Games. The case, however, was eventually dismissed. Exactly twenty years after GTA III was released, the debate over violent video games can seem like yesterday’s controversy.
But it’s a theme that keeps reappearing: it was referenced last week by Ted Sarandos, the Co-CEO of Netflix, after criticism of the new Dave Chappelle comedy special. Netflix as a company, Sarandos wrote in an email to staff last week, “ha[s] a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm”. He continued:
“The strongest evidence to support this is that violence on screens has grown hugely over the last thirty years, especially with [first-person] shooter games, and yet violent crime has fallen significantly in many countries. Adults can watch violence, assault and abuse — or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy — without it causing them to harm others”.
Sarandos has now distanced himself from his remarks, saying they should’ve been made with “a lot more humanity”. But was he right right that videogame violence was a useful analogy? Is it really the case that there’s no translation from virtual to real-world violence? What have we learned in the 20 years since GTA III?
The evidence is certainly confusing. The American Psychological Association published a review of videogame violence in 2015 (updated a little in 2019), which concluded that playing violent videogames does indeed make children, adolescents and young adults more aggressive. But the APA also concluded that there simply wasn’t enough evidence to say whether this translated to real-world criminal violence or delinquency.
In 2020, another set of researchers added an extra dose of ambiguity: they pointed to a number of holes in the APA’s analysis, uncovered lots of studies that had been missed, and noticed on a closer look that many of the studies cited had been very poor-quality. They concluded that the APA had “greatly overestimated” the consistency of the evidence linking videogames to aggression. Although stated with quite some uncertainty, the association between videogames and aggressive behaviour in their new analysis appeared “negligible”. Higher-quality studies since then tend to support that case.
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SubscribeIt’s been with some bemusement but greater disappointment, that I’ve seen friends on the left, who passionately argued against censorship and ridiculed the idea that there was a link between violence on the cinema and in video games, and it’s perpetration in the real world, today demand anything that they deem unpalatable be banned on the grounds that it will incite violence.
A villain in a film who is female, an ethnic minority or foreign will cause the audience to become misogynistic, racist, xenophobes and thus should only be portrayed in a positive or at least sympathetic light. Of course, they are immune to such malign effects, been enlighten social justice warriors but those who don’t posses such acumen are just one cinema trip away from causing a massacre.
This hypocrisy is rooted in the fact that censorship is about power, not just the obvious, been able to refuse the right for someone to be free to view whatever they should please within the law. It denies agency to those they believe are incapable of rationality and therefore susceptible to being corrupted.
The danger is, if a certain subset of the population cannot be trusted to control their baser instincts after consuming media content; what other rights will be deemed too dangerous to be allowed to the populace next?
Excellent piece by Ritchie as usual. However, even though the evidence may indeed show short term reductions in violence after GTA releases as potentially violent, young, mostly male shooters occupy their time and satiate their desires virtually, what is much more difficult to measure is long term effects as players become, to some degree, desensitized to killings and death. Recent killings in the US where bystanders filmed the killing while neglecting to call police may be evidence to this kind of desensitization – it’s just hard to prove what % of the moral decay is due to video games and mass media – it’s likely > 0!
A older teenager who knows how to check a car’s tyre pressure or, at home, change the fuse in a plug; who isn’t going to look upon a potato peeler and recoil in horror at the sight of it in the way an elderly pensioner lady would at the sight of a group of thugs just behind her on the bus; who can change a light bulb, in my mind is someone who has not spent a short childhood playing violent video games as if it were some kind of part-time daily job.
I may have read the article too quickly, but what you are referring to with your comment?