Which gamer doesn’t painfully remember all the TV reports that completely vilified our beloved hobby? Nowadays, I look back with an amused smile at reports from “Frontal 21” or some theories from Professor Christian Pfeiffer.
For almost 10 years, video games were the scapegoat for tragic events, such as school shootings or increased violence among teenagers. Since in Germany there is a tendency to always find a single reason and to avoid thinking about multicausal connections, it was, of course, easy for the media to pounce on that.
However, it seems that this era is finally coming to an end, as more and more long-term studies on this topic are slowly coming to fruition. One of the most recent studies by Christopher Ferguson from the USA has again found no correlations between the consumption of (violent) video games and real violence propensity. Based solely on the numbers, in fact, the opposite has occurred: with the introduction of video games, the potential for violence among teenagers has even decreased somewhat – although Ferguson does not want to establish a direct connection there.
It is also interesting that he strongly criticizes the previous short-term studies. These were mostly conducted under laboratory conditions with short video clips and thus far removed from the reality of any gamer.
It will probably take a while for the prejudice of “killer games” and “danger of rampage” to dissolve from the minds of the older generation, but studies like these are important building blocks to bring our hobby back into the right light.
As a reminder, a Frontal 21 report.
