Play Fighting THE REAL-WORLD VIOLENCE OF VIDEOGAMES
From controversies over Dungeons & Dragons to the supposed copycat crimes inspired by A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), the relationship between popular media and violence has long ignited public debate. Videogames, in particular, have been a key battleground in this area over recent decades. While many, if not most, popular videogames contain violence of some kind – whether it be jumping on Goombas in Super Mario Bros. or engaging in showdowns in unincorporated territory in 2018’s sales-topping Red Dead Redemption 2 – military-themed first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike have garnered particular infamy.
Over the decades, countless studies have examined the hypothetical link between videogames that incentivise violence and a decrease in prosocial behaviour among players, and countless more have questioned whether violent games contribute to a player’s likelihood of participating in individual instances of aggressive behaviour.1 There have been papers suggesting2 or debunking3 a link between famous violent crimes and videogames – perhaps most infamously, Eric Harris’ and Dylan Klebold’s enjoyment of the MS-DOS first-person shooter Doom and their perpetration of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, in which they murdered twelve students and a teacher before killing themselves.4
In 2011, the United States Supreme Court ruled that there was no clear connection between real-world violent behaviour and videogames, and that the psychological research presented to the court was ‘unpersuasive’. Despite this, the moral outcry around videogames rages on, even at a government level. In the US, President Donald Trump responded to This claim was subsequently fact-checked by and , which found it to be unsubstantiated.
