Study Shows Effect of Violent Games is “Tiny”

Professor Patrick Markey believes that violent video games do in fact cause aggressive behavior. However, he also thinks that the media and politicians have taken this fact out of context, rather than characterize it as it is. I his words, “What we find from research is it actually has a very tiny effect.” In a study conducted at Villanova University, Markey found that players of the violent video games produced more aggressive responses than the non-violent games players. The mean number of aggressive responses for the three non-violent video games did not differ from each other. Nor did the mean number of aggressive responses for the three violent video games. Now, that looks bad for violent games, I know. But wait! Each participant completed a survey when beginning the study, and these revealed that the mild-mannered people were affected by games the least, while “angry” people were affected more. Also, the size of the effect of these games was comparable to the size of the effect of other types of violent media. Says Markey, “For example, the general consensus among researchers is that the effect size is small, and we’ve accepted that. But in the media it’s difficult to say ‘oh yeah, video games cause aggression but the effect is small’. No one want to hear that, it’s not sexy enough. It doesn’t sell newspapers. And so we only hear the front end of that, which is that video games cause aggression.”

It’s not news to anyone with common sense, but I hope the mainstream media catches on, as most of them don’t fall in that classification.