Study: Violent Games Reduce Violent Crimes

According to a research study conducted by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Baylor University and the University of Texas at Arlington, playing violent video games lowers the likelihood of committing violent crimes. The theory of this is simple: Violent people are drawn to violent games; they then spend many hours playing them instead of, say, stealing cars or beating people up with baseball bats.

While the study conceded the hotly debatable point that violent games can cause aggressive behavior, the researchers conclude that the net benefit to society of keeping violent gamers cooped up in the living room playing Call of Duty instead of stealing and killing outweighs the negative of making a few borderline individuals go over the edge.

“The effects of playing video games include both the promotion of aggressive behavior and a time use effect restricting the time for practicing aggressive behavior,” says Benjamin Engelstätter, researcher at ZEW. “Our findings for the United States show that the time use effect on players is stronger than the aggression-promoting effect. Therefore, possible regulations of violent content in video games should be carefully designed. They could lead to a reduction in long-term aggressive tendencies. However, in the short-term, they would probably lead to a rise in crime rates as a number of gamers would spend less time playing video games that might have lost their appeal due to the regulations.”

Personally I can see that point of view. Video games can be a very effective outlet for a lot of people. Myself and many people I know play violent games as a way to relieve stress. You go though a few rounds of Mortal Kombat and kick the crap out of virtual opponents until you’ve worked all the stress out of your system. It’s a way of venting and healthy venting is a way to stay mentally healthy. Letting go for a while in a video game lets you forget about your troubles and gives you a constructive way to cope with life. That being said, if you need to talk through an issue to get to the root problem, please seek out counsel from a friend, family member, or therapist. Sometimes the games wont help relieve the cause of the stress.