Does a violent shooting game really make you aggressive?

This week, the latest version of the shooter game Call of Duty was released in the UK. It is a violent video game that challenges players to take down their opponents as efficiently as possible.

This immediately led to the question: do such violent video games incite young people to murderous violence? This connection is regularly made in the media. And perhaps for a good reason.

To name just a few examples: Norwegian fascist Anders Breivik (33 years old at the time) trained his marksmanship by playing Call of Duty. He used a targeting device that he also used in his attack on the youth camp of the Norwegian Labour Party on the Norwegian island of Utøya on July 22nd, 2012. In that attack, 69 adolescents were killed.

Example 2: The Dutch Tristan van der Vlis (24 years old at the time) killed his victims in Alphen aan den Rijn on April 9th, 2011, in the same way that he shot his fictional victims in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, his favourite computer game.

However, Agne Suziedelyte, senior lecturer at the University of London's City Department of Economics, argues that violent video games do not increase violence in the streets. In August, she published a pre-publication of her study in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. The final article, reviewed by other scientists, was released on Friday.

Violence

Suziedelyte focused on boys aged 8 to 18. According to her, that is the group that plays violent video games mostly. She examined the effects of violent video games on two types of violence: aggression against other people and the demolition of other people's property.

Using the research method, she found no clear causal relationship between violence and playing new violent video games. However, the parents of the children involved did report that children were more likely to break things after playing violent video games.

Taken together, these results suggest that violent video games can provoke children. Still, this aggression does not translate into violence against other people, Suziedelyte says. According to her, this is because "video games are usually played at home. There, the possibilities to commit violence are small." She calls this the incapacitation effect.

That effect is significant for boys who are prone to violence and attracted to violent video games. She, therefore, expects that restriction on the sale of video games to minors will not reduce violence against other people. After all, according to her research, there is no connection between the games and violence on the streets.

Male gender

An article in the scientific journal Criminal Justice and Behavior (2008) came to a similar conclusion. At that time, men were found to exhibit more violent behaviour than women. The researchers concluded that "aggression, domestic violence, and male gender" have some predictive value regarding whether men may engage in violent criminal behaviour; playing violent games does not.
Now back to Anders Breivik and Tristan van der Vlis. Was it "just a game" for them too? Probably not. Breivik took a sabbatical from the summer of 2006 to the summer of 2007 to play the role-playing video game World of Warcraft full-time in his bedroom, 16 to 17 hours a day.
The same goes for Van der Vlis. According to an article in Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad in 2011, the game Modern Warfare 2 showed "an awful lot of similarities" with the massacre that the twenty-four-year-old caused in Alphen aan den Rijn.

Shooting children

For most young people, shooters may be "just a game". Norwegian Tore Sinding Bekkedal, who escaped the Breivik shooting, told Reuters news agency that he plays the same violent video games. "And I don't shoot children."

But that doesn't apply to everyone. It is true; if a person plays violent video games and commits violence, it does not prove that the video games caused the violence. But the other way around can undoubtedly play a role, Seena Fazel, a forensic psychiatrist at the British University of Oxford, told Reuters news agency. "Individuals with violent tendencies are attracted to violent video games."

They create their digital reality out of unease with objective reality, notes Thomas Hylland Eriksen, professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. The problems arise when they expand their alternate reality into the real world. When Breivik put on his uniform, "he was no longer the lonely young man from the west of Oslo; he became a knight, a defender of civilization of Europe against the invading Muslims."

However, the London researcher Suziedelyte did not consider these aspects in her conclusions. But they are real. "People want an answer to why these things happen. That is completely understandable," said Oxford psychiatrist Fazel.

So, it doesn't wholly exonerate violent video games. Although violent video games do not cause more cause violence in the streets, they form the ideal realistic training environment for socially hostile individuals such as Breivik and psychologically unstable persons like Van der Vlis. If they also have access to real weapons, the suffering is incalculable.

This is a translation of an article published in Reformatorisch Dagblad on November 5th, 2021