Do video games make you violent? The shooting that broke out Sunday in Jacksonville (Florida) during a video game tournament revives the theory making this entertainment an ideal culprit. But is this correlation founded?
Since the Columbine massacre in 1999 – where two players from Doom and Wolfenstein killed 12 high school students and a teacher – video games have been the subject of strong criticism fueled by the surge of violence hitting the United States.
The controversy resumed again on February 18, 2018 after the shooting in a high school in Parkland (Florida) which left 17 dead. “I hear more and more people saying that the degree of violence in video games really shapes their state of mind,” Donald Trump said at the time.
Since the shooting on Sunday, some even call for a “legal framework” or a “restriction” of the use of this entertainment.
“Peremptory assertion”
“To say that video games make violent is a peremptory assertion”, explains to the Parisian Patrice Huerre, child psychiatrist and president of the Virtual Institute. “What must above all be taken into account is the personality of the individual who has taken action”, he recommends.
According to the child psychiatrist, a “favorable ground” is needed so that, under certain circumstances and at a certain age, the potential for violence is expressed. “In a balanced person, immersion in violent video games will have no effect because he knows how to distinguish fiction from reality,” he explains. On the other hand, among the most vulnerable people, who for example have suffered or witnessed violence, the fact of encountering violent images legitimizes a passage to the act. It seems widespread, so we allow ourselves. “
The passage to the violent act thus depends more on a pathology or a psychiatric fragility than on an appetite for video games. A study titled “Violence in Video Games and the ‘Real World’: Rhetoric Against Data”, conducted by two American universities, shows that between 2007 and 2011, sales spikes in violent video games – like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty – directly coincide with notable declines in violent crime.
Video games like catharsis
“These violent video games can act as an enforcer. A disappointment in love, an annoyance at work… Games can serve as a punching bag. Instead of causing a passage to the act, they make it possible to calm the impulses of the violent people ”, nuance even Patrice Huerre.
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