Some myths have more lives than cats and Mario combined. That’s the way plenty of us feel whenever we see someone blaming video games for every new armed atrocity that shocks the world. Look, we get it, video games are an easy target. It’s far easier to blame them for somebody acting violently than it is to confront the tangled, messy, complex web of interrelated reasons that’s actually at fault. But it doesn’t mean that we should power down our critical thinking, just because we want easy answers.
Donald Trump, the President of the United States, and other politicians recently used video games as a scapegoat to (at least in part) explain the recent shootings in El Paso and Dayton. However, the internet quickly reacted with a whole slew of original memes that hit back against this idea.
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Bored Panda collected the best of the best, the crème de la crème, of memes showing how video games don’t cause violence. Upvote the ones you love the most and leave a comment to let everyone know what you thought of the memes. Keep on scrolling, because the memes at the very bottom of the post get lonely sometimes (just don’t feed them after midnight)!
Professor Andrew Przybylski of the Oxford Internet Institute told Bored Panda that “the idea that violent video games cause real-world aggression has been with us for more than four decades but in this time there has been no convincing evidence that supports it.”
“I’d observe that video games with combat, crime, and war are quite popular in Japan, South Korea, Germany, and the U.K., and these countries do not have the same problems with large numbers of shootings,” noted Przybylski, who is an experimental psychologist and Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute. His work is concerned with applying psychological models of motivation and health to study how people interact with virtual environments.
When asked by Bored Panda why he thinks video games keep getting blamed for violence, Przybylski answered that “research indicates that about half of the adult U.S. population plays games, I suspect that as this number rises (i.e. gamers age) this excuse will hold less water.”
The professor also mentioned that video games “might” desensitize people to violence, “but it’s likely that the effects are smaller and more nuanced than many assume.”
“I think that games are a complex form of play and that gaming companies should share their data with independent researchers; not because games cause violence, but because they are now an essential part of our lives. It’s their responsibility to our society as good corporate citizens,” Professor Przybylski added.
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