It is really a matter of debate whether violence in real life is related to the violence depicted in our generation video games. What was astonishing was President Trump’s meeting with the leaders of the video game industry to curtail on video game violence. On the contrary, Science has proven Trump wrong. Trump’s view of video games turning players into real-life violence is not sound enough as it isn’t backed up with real evidence like Science does.
People these days, especially parents are quite against the video game violence, their children get to see each day. Yes, it might be inappropriate for them to watch, but it doesn’t mean the violence in the games is going to turn their children into maniacs going out on a killing spree. The debate has heated up because of mass shootings occurring at schools by youngsters.
Black man playing video gameIn response to this, President Trump was reported by the New York Times to have said that,” I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.”
This isn’t clearly the first time where President Trump straightforwardly put his view on the violence in gaming. He was also in the limelight once when the sad incident known as the Sandy Hook massacre occurred. He totally pinned it as video game violence, and demanded that it must be stopped in a tweet:
Video game violence & glorification must be stopped—it is creating monsters!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 17, 2012
Though luckily, the time has spoken for itself, as a new study by the name of Molecular Psychology, just proved Trump’s taken on video games wrong. The study was undertaken by German researchers. They took under them a total of 77 healthy volunteers into three groups who were non-gaming. A number of questionnaires and personality assessments were dropped on them. Now, for another two months, one of these groups was asked to play Sims 3. The other one got to play the GTA V.
As a control experiment, the third group sufficed as they were just told to return after two months. After the two months, the same tests which were taken earlier were taken again. There was another third round of tests, two months after that as well.
According to the study, “‘[We] did not find relevant negative effects in response to violent video game playing.”
“In fact, only three tests of the 208 statistical tests performed showed a significant interaction pattern that would be in line with this hypothesis. Since at least ten significant effects would be expected purely by chance, we conclude that there were no detrimental effects of violent video gameplay.”
What the study means to convey is that there wasn’t really any significant change in aggression levels of participants before and after they started gaming. Not only this but it isn’t the first time that this myth of relating violence with video games was debunked. A similar study was undertaken in 2015 by the Pew Research center, that not only do children play video games, but even 49 percent of the adult population does too.
Even with these kinds of research appearing here and then, people still have their own opinions and are currently unsure of which way of thinking to support. Surely, it would be even harder to convince Donald Trump for sure.