Quite simply, the research just hasn’t panned out. For one thing, even while video game sales have skyrocketed, youth violence plummeted to its lowest levels in 40 years according to government statistics

tend to relax

Other scholars have found, as have Andrew Przybylski and colleagues writing in the Review of General Psychology, that matching video game conditions more carefully in experimental studies with how they are played in real life makes VVG’s effects on aggression essentially vanish. Since most video game experiments only have players play for short periods of time, often for as little as 10 minutes, and violent games tend to be more difficult to learn and have more complex controls than non-violent games, it appears that many participants in these experiments may simply have been frustrated by being cut off so quickly before they even learned how to play, rather than by the violent content of the game. Letting them play long enough to learn the game, or simply providing violent and non-violent games of equal complexity, erases the effects. In fact, experimental research led by my graduate student Jose Valadez found that both violent and non-violent games tend to relax people over time, not anger them.

Secondly, it has been increasingly recognized that much of the early research on VVG linking them to increased aggression was problematic: most studies used outcome measures that had nothing to do with real-life aggression and failed to control carefully for other important variables, such as family violence, mental health issues or even gender in many studies (boys both play more VVG and are more aggressive.) This was something the U.S. Supreme Court recognized when, after considering California’s attempt to ban the sale of VVG to minors in Brown v. EMA, it stated on June 27, 2011, “These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason.”

The US Supreme Court ruled that violent video games do not cause youth to act aggressively

Sales of violent video games have significantly increased while violent juvenile crime rates have significantly decreased.

four-cornered.

Mirror

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes.

The Author to Her Book

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,