The Effect of Video Games (part 3)

Video games are often blamed as a cause of violence. The Columbine shootings were blamed on video games, and even some politicians were publicly rallying against the video game industry during the aftermath. Yet there has always been a lack of agreement over the relationship between game violence and real-life violence. There are no commonly accepted tests for aggression so measuring levels of violence is unreliable. Studies with positive results get published when negative findings often go unpublished, so this publication bias causes researches to slant their conclusions and ignore studies that disprove their own research. There is also a problem of small effect sizes. How large of a correlation is necessary to prove a link between game and real-life violence? Current studies have produced a correlation of about 0.15, which is hardly a result that would warrant reigning in the game industry. It is far more likely that those that have caused real-life violence were already violent people who chose to play violent video games—their violence was not produced by the games they played.