Video Games and Crime 1

Criminal Justice Research Paper

Video Games and Crime
Carson Rich
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Video Games and Crime

With all the shootings that have been happening all around our country, a lot of people

have been talking about violent video games and if they relate to crime and aggression. I wanted

to look more into this topic because I personally love to play video games. Video games are one

of my favorite hobbies and I think they can bring a lot of happiness to the people that play them,

but I do realize that even though video games can have a good effect on people, they can also

have a bad effect on people. From all the information I got from the textbook and websites I

researched, there is plenty of evidence on both sides of the argument which is why I think it is

such a heavily debated topic.

In August 17, 2010 Tyler Savage attacked and murdered Kimmie Daily. Law authorities

wondered why he had done such a horrible thing. Savage had a clean record and no past that

showed any aggression or violence. The only clue they had was the fact that Savage told them

that after he had committed the murder, he went home to play the online fantasy video game

Dungeons and Dragons. Savage later admitted that the video game did have something to do

with why he killed Daily. Over the years we have seen more of these cases where crimes have

been attributed or related to violent video games.

The video game industry is a big-time money-making industry that has started to take

over youth culture. “A recent study from the pew Internet and American Life Project found that

97 percent of children ages twelve to seventeen play video games regularly.” (Gaines/Miller,

2013) I didn’t realize that video games had reached such a large audience at that young of an

age. What’s alarming is that fact that almost 50 percent of this group they tested have been

exposed to playing “M” (mature) rated games that are supposed to be restricted to sale for people
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who are at least 17 years old. These games usually tend to have excessive sexual content and

violence. In this study that the pew Internet and American Life Project did, they found that

teenagers showed increased brain activity in places of the brain that can lead to more aggression,

and decreased brain activity in places of the brain that relate to self-control.

On the other hand, “No legal authority has found that any of the studies cited above prove

that violent video games actually cause crime. At best, they show a correlation between the

games and aggressiveness, which does not always lead to violence.” (Gaines/Miller, 2013) You

can also make the case that people tend to turn to violent video games as a scapegoat for a

person’s criminal activity and violence instead of looking at other factors that could have a big

influence, “such as parental control, socioeconomic status, and hormonal imbalance.”

(Gaines/Miller, 2013) Also, I wouldn’t have guessed it but Over the last fifteen years arrests for

juvenile violent crimes have decreased even though the sales and popularity of violent video

games have jumped out of the building.

President Donald Trump chimed in with his thoughts on video games, as he thinks that a

lot of violence and crime, we see in our country is caused by what kids see in video games and

movies. Chris Grady, a survivor of the shooting that occurred at Stoneman Douglas Highschool

in Florida, disregarded President Trump’s comments saying, “I grew up playing video games,

first person shooter games, and I would never, ever dream of taking the lives of any of my

peers.” (Scutti, 2018) From what I have found in my research it almost seems like violent video

games, such as first-person shooters, can have a bad influence on some people, but for the most

part it doesn’t have a bad affect on everyone.

Yes, there are a lot of kids who do play video games in todays world. But how many of

them contain violence in them? According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 85 percent of
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video games have some form of violence in them. In 2016 the American Academy of Pediatrics

stated, “Video games should not use human or other living targets or award points for killing,

because this teaches children to associate pleasure and success with their ability to cause pain

and suffering to others." (Scutti, 2018) Overall the academy’s feeling towards violence in video

games is that it should not be tolerable in our society.

Although these opinions are not shared by all social scientists. Whitney DeCamp, an

associate professor of sociology at Western Michigan University, thinks that all the evidence

actually shows that there is no relationship between video games and violence. He agreed that

some studies have shown the correlation between kids playing violent video games and violent

actions and behavior. “But there is a problem with looking at those two things in a vacuum: Kids

who like to play brutal video games may have a predisposition toward aggression” (Scutti, 2018)

Christopher Ferguson, chairman of the Department of Psychology at Stetson University, supports

Whitney’s claim. Ferguson argues that by keeping young males busy with hobbies they like to do

such as sports or video games helps keep kids off the streets or put in situations to commit crime

or get in trouble with the law.

Evidence from an economic study published in February 2016, looked at violent crime in

the first few weeks after a few triple-A gaming companies released their video games. They

tracked both the crime rate and sales of these games and concluded that not only did the crime

rate not increase, but it happened to decrease the crime rate during those times. Although the

authors of this evidence did acknowledge that this test didn’t show the long-term affect. Some

social scientists make the argument that playing violent video games helps a person safely

release their aggression.

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Fortnite has become a video game sensation. 78.3 million people played Fortnite in the

month of August, setting a record for the most played game ever. Fortnite has continued to be the

most popular game in the industry in the last year. Fortnite is a “Battle Royale” game mode

where 100 players who are all playing together online are dropped into a map where they

scavenge for armor and weapons as they fight and kill each other until the last person standing.

Although there isn’t any blood or gore, it is still considered to be a violent third person shooter.

Most of Fortnite’s audience is a very young age. Their player base mostly consists kids under the

age of 18. I find it interesting that the #1 game in the world is a violent game that targets kids. I

think it would be interesting if they did a study on Fortnite or even the “Battle Royale” game

mode and how it might influence this topic.

In these studies, they focus so much on how the video games they play and how that is

the cause of the violence. Unfortunately, they forget about to mention the other things that can

happen to a person in their life that could have an influence on their aggression levels and

criminal activity. Aggressiveness can be caused by so many things they fail to mention in these

articles. People can have mental disorders that affect how aggressive they are. Someone can have

a life altering experience in their childhood that could affect how they behave the rest of their

life’s. They don’t consider a person’s level of aggression during infancy or their toddler years.

How someone is parented or what type of city and neighborhood they live in can influence how

they act.

In 2015 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) found that not only did violent

video games increase aggression, but it detracts a person’s feeling of empathy and sensitivity to

aggression as well. “But a large contingent of researchers focused on pediatric and adolescence

health disagree. In fact, a group of 230 scholars from universities across the globe published an
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open letter in 2013 calling the APA’s stance of violent video games misleading and alarmist.”

(Psychology Today, 2018) Recent studies have showed that a lot of the different experiments and

studies done on the relation between violent video games and violence have been “prone to false

positives and false negatives, which lead to faulty conclusions.” (Psychology Today, 2018)

Another review found that a lot of the research that has been published on violence and video

games is mainly influenced by publication bias. Essentially what is happening is that most of the

research done on this topic are giving all their efforts toward finding the relation between

people’s violence and the video games they play, but not looking for any of the contrary

evidence.

Researching all this data has taught me a lot and I have learned so much about the

subject. I think that with everything that I have learned it is still hard to come to a decision on

which side is right or has more evidence to back up their claims. There are a lot of facts that

support each side, but I do wonder if everything that I read in my research is completely true as I

feel that each publisher has their bias towards the side they favor. I feel that if they did more

studies on the subject but did them with no bias and tried to bring in the other factors on what

causes a person to be violent, we could get a clearer answer on the subject. I personally think that

both sides of the argument are right. I think that with certain people it can have a really negative

affect on how they behave in general, but with other people no matter how violent the video

games they play it doesn’t influence them to act in violence in any way. The relation between

violent video games and violence or criminal behavior will continue to be a hot topic in our

society today.
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References
Gaines, L. K., & Miller, R. L. (2013). Criminal justice in action. Boston, MA: Wadsworth.

Scutti, S. (2018, February 22). Do video games lead to violence?

https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/25/health/video-games-and-violence/index.html

Cunningham, S., Engelstatter, B., & Ward, M. R. (2016). Violent Video Games and Violent Crime.

Southern Economic Journal, 82(4), 1247–1265.

https://doi-org.libprox1.slcc.edu/10.1002/soej.12139

Home - PMC - NCBI. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704015/

Do Violent Video Games Make Kids More Violent? (n.d.). Retrieved from

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evidence-based-living/201807/do-violent-video-

games-make-kids-more-violent