There is, contrary to public opinion considerable evidence to prove the negative effect of prolonged use of violent video games on the human brain. Because this is now a 180 billion dollars a year industry worldwide, there are huge efforts amiss to cover up such studies and to dismiss that all these acts of mass violence have anything to do with stimuli caused by these games. I have been writing about school shootings for several years and recently I came across the following very extensive study. After over twenty-five years of working with troubled youth including thirteen years working at a local special education school, substitute teaching, the following find in my opinion is a treasure trove of priceless information. If you really want the truth on the subject, dig into this study.
The Iowa State University Psychology Department published a 121-page dissertation online which was an extensive study entitled “Testing Ratings of Violent Video Games: How Well do They Measure Up?” © Katherine E. Center, 2015. Even though this is a secular university with references to studies done by secular psychologists, we should consider their findings invaluable to the church and our cultural influence in monitoring the effect of such games.
Katharine quotes the findings of multiple studies done on people from different age and ethnic groups over the process of several years on the direct influence and personality changes of people who are frequent users of video games. These studies compare the difference between violent and non-violent video games and consider different personality types in their comparisons. Katharine’s research is the most comprehensive study that I have ever discovered because it considers the effect of video games on different personality types.
On page two Katherine states, “According to a variety of published work, repeated exposure to violent video games has an assortment of important outcomes including increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognitions, physiological arousal, and decreases in pro-social behavior. (for review, see Anderson 2004) On page 10 under “Desensitization to Violence, she states “Repeated exposure to violent video games results in desensitization to violence”, quoting a study by Anderson et al., 2010 Gentile &Anderson, 2003.
Electronic games were introduced in the early seventies with the first Atari video games. It is no news to anyone, however, that the gaming industry has grown exponentially. Today it is a 180 billion-dollar-a-year worldwide industry. In the past twenty years, the rise in mass executions has become so frequent that the shock factor is waning, nevertheless, video games still receive a lot of bad press. As police do their follow-up investigations, in almost every incident they discover the shooter or bomber was obsessed by violent video games. Although the gaming industry continually insists that their games are safe for all to use, taking refuge in the fact that only a very small percentage of users ever turn to something so violent as a public shooting spree, there are many additional facts which are being covered up which the gaming industry does not want us to know about.
This multi-tier study absolutely confirms what I have been saying in my 25 years of working with and around today’s young people! It is obvious that we do not realize that we have made an electronic sport out of fictionally killing people with today’s video game market and that the level of video realism is so advanced that it is designed to make killing people seem like fun. That, my Christian brothers and sisters, is the root of the problem behind these mass shootings. While many can play violent electronic games and be unaffected, there are those rare few that these games take over the edge. Their violence affects us all! Until we can test the effect that these games will have on the mentally ill, we have an incomplete study. Proverbs 24:11a states, “Rescue those being led away to death.”(NIV) If there was a drug that was only poisonous to the mentally would we be forced to pull it off the shelves? The mentally ill are not permitted to have firearms in most states! Somehow there must be a solution to this documented cause and effect!