‘Video Games Spread Violence in the Real World’? The Claim Isn’t New, and It’s Still Worth Questioning

We take on the question through history, data, and what’s new in game design.

On March 9, the White House met with people from the video game industry. A video shown at the meeting was later uploaded to the White House’s official channel, then quickly set to “unlisted” — even though the clip, titled Violence in Video Games, drew more than 1.4 million views in its first month, three times the audience for Trump’s inauguration speech.

It ran 88 seconds. It deliberately picked out violent close-ups, stripped of context, from Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Dead by Daylight, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Fallout 4, Sniper Elite 4, and The Evil Within, and strung them into a gory feast that left parents squirming. Even some developers were moved to say:

“The reel the White House put together is disgusting. Every shot in it shows terrible taste, and everyone involved with those games should feel ashamed of it — they’ve hurt us.” — Warren Spector, producer of Deus Ex.

The industry people summoned to the meeting came from the trade association ESA (Entertainment Software Association), the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board), Take-Two Interactive, and Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax Media (Trump’s brother Robert Trump sits on its board). On the other side of the table were several members of Congress, a longtime critic of the game industry, the author of Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing, and the Parents Television Council.

The February 15 Parkland high school shooting set the meeting in motion. But even as the country turned its attention to gun control and the NRA, some politicians revisited an old topic: that video games manufacture a culture of death. A week after the shooting, at a meeting on school safety, Trump described video games, the internet, and film as possible “sources of corruption”: “The level of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.” The White House quickly decided to sit down with game executives, “to see what they could do on the front lines.”

All of this feels like history repeating. The politicians attacking violent games today have little new to say, and the evidence they cite sounds like it comes from the 1990s. For about 20 years now, after one school shooting after another, violent games have been cast as the trigger for the killer’s actions — treated as demons by parents, and by politicians eager to please parents, for their visual force, their interactivity, and their hold on players.

Today, though, it is hard to say whether politicians really believe video games deserve the blame (some of the loudest voices on this have taken NRA money). More and more people point out that this stale exercise in shifting fire does nothing to change reality, and does nothing to push lawmakers toward real reform on guns.

Mainstream society has feared “violent games corrupting teenagers” for more than 40 years. That fear magnifies the chance that games encourage violence, and ignores the other side: games as an outlet for real violent impulses. The argument has never gone away, and it is about more than boundaries — it is also about money.

First, the history of violence in games, and of blaming games for it

Video games are already a better business than film. In 2017 the global game market was worth $116 billion, and players around the world spent $36 billion on games, up 15% from the year before, while the global box office took $41.2 billion, up just 3%. Since games already have the market’s dominant sustainable profit model, they will soon out-earn film.

But this new star of the entertainment business still can’t shake a stain — a taste for violence — at least by the standard the White House applies:

The best-selling game of the past year was Call of Duty: WWII; the best-selling video game ever is Grand Theft Auto V, at 90 million copies. Both are rated M (Mature) — the first belongs to the series the White House used for target practice, the second has been dragged into fight after fight, and parent boycotts, over its violence and its treatment of women. Multiplayer combat and battle royale are everywhere: Star Wars Battlefront II was the second-best seller, Friday the 13th: The Game, in which you flee a killer, swept streaming platforms, and PUBG, a phenomenon by itself, made a brutal “last one standing” genre popular. Even games with real artistic achievement can hardly avoid violence. If the White House had cut in the finger-slicing scene from Heavy Rain, any of the assassination animations from The Last of Us, or the combat footage from Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, someone would have said just as readily: terrible taste, the developers should be ashamed.

Genuinely peaceful best-sellers with no violence at all are rare. Most of them sit in the “indie” corner and seldom reach the mainstream, which is why the Zen school of games, best represented by Journey, feels so precious. Even so, it gets less attention than its violent peers: PewDiePie made playthrough videos of both Journey and GTA V, and the latter’s 20-million-plus views are four times the former’s. Critics of video games find it easy to ignore. Because it is the only one of its kind.

Nintendo’s games are a special case. Harmless Wii Sports and Mario sell all over the world (if you like, Mario, who has been stomping on enemies for decades, is “violent” too). Some people have pointed out that precisely because Nintendo has been so friendly to families and children, it has hardened the adult stereotype that games are toys — which is why adults can’t accept that their child’s toy might one day turn into something as full of gunfire as Call of Duty.

In short: video games give players a violent experience, dull them to it, and make them likelier to reach for violence in real life. That line of argument has a long history. Its real origin goes back to 1976, and ever since, games with violent elements and mainstream opinion have squared off again and again.

In 1976, as arcade games were taking off, Death Race became the first game to cause a big fight over “violence.” In this black-and-white arcade game, the player drove a race car and ran over as many “gremlins” (a kind of humanoid creature) as possible; each one hit let out a scream, and a small tombstone sprang up on the spot. Associated Press reporter Wendy Walker wrote a piece questioning the violent content and its possible effect on players. The story traveled far, and other mainstream outlets, The New York Times among them, followed it. Under pressure, Death Race’s developer, Exidy, finally pulled the game.

Later games deepened the worry. In the 1983 adult game Custer’s Revenge, the player took the role of a fully nude General Custer, dodging arrows to rape a tied-up Native American woman (pixel art, but the meaning was plain enough), and hundreds of people protested on the day it shipped. In 1993, Night Trap used live actors for a B-movie effect, including scenes of scantily dressed young women killed by the villain’s traps. That caught the Senate’s attention, and Congress held a hearing criticizing the game’s details as too explicit and as possible encouragement of violence against women — even though the developer explained that the point of the game was “to protect women from the villain.”

The same hearing also took up the best-selling Mortal Kombat. Unlike pixel-art arcade games, it struck Congress as showing violence too plainly — the blood, the finishing moves — and as looking too real.

That hearing, which put Night Trap and Mortal Kombat on trial, plus the mainstream media coverage around it, led the ESA to set up the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in 1994. It was born out of outside criticism of violence and sex in games, and from then on ran a system much like the MPAA’s film ratings to review game content — in a sense, the ESRB’s arrival also spared games from being reviewed by the government. Submitting to the ratings is voluntary, but nearly every publisher does it, because many retailers refuse to stock unrated games and the mainstream console makers won’t let such titles onto their systems.

Ratings did not end the fight. Over the next 20 years, as the real gunfire continued, so did the tug-of-war between the game industry and mainstream society. After the 1997 Heath High School shooting, the anti-game activist and lawyer Jack Thompson filed the first lawsuit against video games on behalf of victims’ parents, because the shooter turned out to be a player of Doom, Quake, and Resident Evil. In 1998, after the Columbine High School massacre, victims’ families sued 25 game companies for causing the tragedy, because the killers played Doom and other violent games. After 2000, state and federal governments tightened policy on games, either restricting minors’ access to violent titles or trying to pass laws making it a federal crime to sell video games to children. Here is a rough timeline of the argument:

1976

Death Race, the first controversial game, is pulled from shelves.

1983

The adult game Custer’s Revenge is boycotted.

1992

Mortal Kombat is released, seen as the first game to show realistic violence.

1993

The U.S. Senate holds hearings on violent games and social decay; Mortal Kombat is condemned, and Sega’s Night Trap is banned;

Doom, one of the pioneers of the first-person shooter, is released.

1994

The ESRB is founded, and game ratings take effect.

1997

The Heath High School shooting; Jack Thompson files the first lawsuit against violent games, accusing game developers, film, and the internet of neglecting their responsibility in spreading this material to minors, leaving minors desensitized to violence and inclined to commit it; a federal district court dismisses the suit, saying the plaintiff could not present a legally recognized claim.

1998

The first Grand Theft Auto is released, causing an outcry over its drug dealing, sex, killing, and gang activity.

1999

The Columbine High School massacre; the two killers are shown to be fans of violent games; victims’ parents sue 25 game companies, and the case is dismissed in 2002.

2002

Representative Joe Baca introduces a minors-protection bill making it a federal crime to sell violent games to minors; the bill is later named the Protect Children from Video Game Sex and Violence Act of 2003. Washington State introduces a similar law, fining any retailer who sells such games to minors $500.

2003

Devin Moore, 18, is arrested for possession of a stolen car; he grabs a gun and kills two police officers and a dispatcher. His defense lawyer says he was influenced by GTA 3. The same year the Buckner brothers, 14 and 16, fire rifles at cars on a highway, killing one person and wounding another; both also say they were influenced by GTA 3. Two sets of parents sue GTA’s developer; the suit is dismissed.

2005

A federal court finds an Illinois law unconstitutional. The law banned selling games with certain violent elements to minors; similar laws in Michigan and Louisiana, in Oklahoma, and in Minnesota are found unconstitutional in 2006, 2007, and 2008 respectively.

2009

California tries to revive a 2005 bill barring retailers from selling violent games to minors; the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that “the evidence California’s government presented is not sufficient to support the legislature’s stated goal of preventing psychological and mental harm; all the studies are based on correlation rather than causation, and all have serious methodological flaws — no study has established a causal link between minors playing violent games and actual psychological or mental harm.” The state appeals to the Supreme Court.

2011

The Supreme Court rejects the state’s appeal 7–2 and finds the California law unconstitutional. Video games are protected by the First Amendment, entitled to free-speech protection like any other medium: “speech about violence is not obscene.”

2012

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting; the White House meets with entertainment industry figures and calls for further academic research into the link between violent games and real-world behavior.

The argument should have ended with the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling, seen as a hard-won victory for the game industry — because when people blamed video games for their harms, they tended to ignore the data, which made it harder for a data-backed industry to defend itself.

Look at the data and “games cause violence” doesn’t necessarily hold up

Of the 33 school shootings in modern American society since video games became an everyday presence, only 4 had shooters confirmed to be gaming enthusiasts — far below the share of players in ordinary life (about 70% of male students in American schools play games regularly). That not only shows the killers had no special fondness for video games; it shows they were less interested in this violent medium than everyone else. Their motives were later traced mostly to things that have nothing to do with games: antisocial psychology, paranoia, bullying, other mental illness. The FBI once listed “playing games” as a trait worth watching, but the list also included movies, TV shows, music videos, and print — that is, any medium that depicts violence. A Secret Service report found games had a fairly limited hold on shooters: 24% were interested in violent books, only 12% in games, and 37% were more absorbed in their own creative work.

To date, years of accumulated academic research have still not established a firm causal link between video games and violent behavior. The most they find is a correlation. After reviewing several hundred studies, the American Psychological Association (APA) said the link reduces prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral self-regulation, but 230 scholars protested the APA’s continued publication of reports they call unscientific, and even the APA’s own media psychology division asked politicians in 2017 to stop using it to mislead the public.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, for its part, has warned that violent media set a poor example for children: “Games should not use humans or other living things as targets for killing, or reward killing, because that teaches children to link pleasure with their own ability to cause others pain.” It still does not say whether this leads to actual violent behavior — and as we will see below, that pleasure is not necessarily tied to violent consequences at all.

In fact, in the 20 years since GTA’s release, juvenile crime in the U.S. and around the world has fallen to a 40-year low; in the months after a GTA or COD release, murder rates tend to drop; the months when people stay home playing violent video games tend to be safer than other months; countries that consume more video games tend to have lower crime rates than countries that restrict such media. This runs against the other camp’s conclusions, but it supports a popular argument — that once people vent their surplus energy and aggression inside a violent game, satisfied, they stop looking for trouble in real life.

Another theory worth attention is that players are not simply fixated on violence, or venting their anger through games. In many games, “killing” is a form of puzzle-solving. It makes demands on reaction time, skill, precision, and patience; it asks players to learn the game’s mechanics and use a system better; it asks them to practice until they are good, and it hands them harder and harder challenges. Along with the satisfaction of a hit landing, players take pleasure in their own growing skill and their ability to solve problems — “the desire to master the game matters far more than whether the game has violent elements.” The moment a player feels a violent impulse is usually just the moment they are “provoked by the control scheme and the game design.”

When people talk about an “obsession with violence,” they may forget that game design is not limited to fighting and killing. Violent elements are close to a byproduct of the design process, and the work itself long ago grew into something beyond violence.

How should game design answer what society expects?

“A game is something you can play — by analogy to a toy, a good toy is an object that is fun to play with / fun is pleasure with surprises / play is about activities that come with a sense of comparison, pleasure, excitement, power, and drive / play is free activity within a concrete frame / play is any process undertaken spontaneously, for its own sake / play is manipulation that indulges curiosity.”

— The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

At bottom, a game is “a problem-solving activity approached with a playful attitude.” The violence on the surface catches the eye, but in most cases violence is not the end goal — it is a means of solving a problem, and like any act of play it satisfies a player’s curiosity about attempts they cannot make in real life, gives them a sense of freedom, and creates a valuable experience that reality rarely offers.

When designers think about how to build that experience, their first task is not to make it as exciting as possible. There is a scientific framework that requires them to set goals, conflict, and rules, and to design the “uneven outputs” different attempts produce — winning and losing. That process includes challenge and resolution mechanisms. Violence, in the end, is only one part of it, in service of the problem-solving mechanism. Designers tune the degree and form of “violence” so that its presence improves the experience.

Because it is only one aspect of game design, designers can limit “violence” from the other aspects. Mechanics, story setting, aesthetic presentation, and implementation technology make up a game’s four basic elements. Mechanical rewards for violent behavior (killing an enemy for experience that levels you up or moves you on), aesthetic emphasis on or glorification of violent forms (the flashy character animations and effects at the moment of a strike), the violent routes built into a game’s setting — all of these can, in fact, be dialed back by several methods:

Story setting — using the background to justify violent means, and strengthening a theme that takes priority over everything else, such as choosing monsters as the target, or making “survive” and “rescue” the through-line. Emphasizing design aesthetics in other areas, or pushing the overall style toward exaggeration to lower the sense of realism, which gives players room to breathe and relax. Designing another reward system that cuts against encouraging violence, such as giving players who take the peaceful “kill no one” route a higher trophy and a better ending; or using more decisive mechanics to reduce the pleasure of violence — raising the difficulty, adding challenge, turning the act of violence into a drill in skill, strategy, and patience, so that in the end what excites the player is solving the problem. All of it finally moves the player’s primary sensation away from the violence.

In practice that means care about narrative technique, script writing, visual rendering, and compensating mechanisms. That care has given plenty of well-received games their balance, and made the player’s experience richer and deeper. Critics called the trailer for The Last of Us Part II abusive toward women and full of unnecessary violence, but they may not have guessed that the image players of this series remember best is the heroine petting a giraffe. The trailer for Detroit: Become Human was accused the same day of “showing domestic violence too explicitly,” but that violence sits in a particular context — it is in fact urging players to step in and stop a tragedy in time, and creator David Cage recently walked a group of playtesters through defusing a hostage crisis in the game. The much-scolded Call of Duty series has always served the player’s hero complex, and what outsiders know it best for is its reconstruction of World War II and the story in Modern Warfare 2, which stands up next to any good commercial blockbuster. Open-world games leave every option open; a high degree of freedom means no one has to choose to hurt anyone. In the end they want people to be themselves.

In the ten years it took the video game industry to grow into a $100 billion market, developers kept working to send the message that it is “more than a pile of corrupting elements.” In this more open world, having taken its place among serious design and art forms, the medium faces higher expectations inside and outside the business: the Writers Guild of America and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain each set up video game writing awards; Britain’s BAFTA has had game categories since 2004, honoring breakthrough artistic achievement and design, and this year added a “Games Beyond Entertainment” award for new work that explores social and political questions (the action game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, about mental illness, was the first winner); the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) began accepting game writers as members in 2016, and its 2018 Nebula Awards had a Best Game Writing category for the first time; well-known museums including the Victoria and Albert have opened game galleries to honor the “eighth art.”

Open-minded people have gradually realized that clever design, combined with the interactivity and immersion only games have, lets this medium dig deeper into certain questions, and can give certain serious subjects new life.

In that climate, players today no longer judge a game only by the thrill its violent elements deliver. They know to ask for something better, and today’s developers are happy to supply it. Which is why the rebooted God of War turned down the testosterone that filled the original and added a father-and-son story, softening the purely male perspective that once made the series so popular for its raw violence.

Of course, strip away everything designers do to balance violence and what is left is exactly that White House video. There, the cruelest cutscenes get the close-up, a protagonist’s death animation is twisted into an instruction in murder, players who kill Nazis are painted as psychopaths, and the most antisocial choice an individual can make in an open world is the part underlined.

What people should really watch is how game communities are run

Not everyone in the game industry is an angel. In the corners mainstream media never covers, there are plenty of games that use provocative content to pull players in. But the danger that actually reaches into reality does not come from the games themselves.

Some outlets have found that player communities may be the corner most in need of guidance and repair. The subculture around the most popular games’ communities may not deserve the games.

The most popular communities tend to hold players of wildly uneven quality, and with loose moderation, multiplayer modes breed bullying, discrimination, verbal abuse, and pranks that can kill (such as swatting — calling in a fake emergency so a SWAT team storms someone’s home). Hate speech from some users often includes racism and misogyny, and has “fueled the rise of the far right”. In the most extreme case, Gamergate, “hardcore” male players swarmed two women developers and one woman critic across several platforms, doxxing their targets and sending death and rape threats. It is seen as a “culture war” inside video games over cultural diversity, artistic legitimacy, social criticism, and the player’s social role, and it was finally characterized, in gaming terms, as an anti-feminist, anti-progressive right-wing movement.

Some worry that it is the values designers hold that shape what games communicate, pushing players to the right and hardening, inside small circles, some of the extreme views they already hold. The Trump administration’s stress on the dangers of violent games is indeed a way of pulling attention away from gun control — but on the other hand, there is no denying that the ideology inside games does affect players.

“The game industry is already facing up to the relationship between its products and violence and bad behavior — school shootings have just never been part of that conversation.”

This kind of mental influence is again a question of how receptive and how suggestible an individual is. Controlling it takes institutions willing to step in and set rules for people. Developers and publishers should take more trouble to tend their communities, fight hate, and punish troublemakers, instead of letting bullying become routine. Ideally, lawmakers would stop dodging what matters and use direct, effective means to stop real violence, rather than blaming games and other media that “might influence players.”

Cover image from The Last of Us, Roar of the Colossus《巨像之咆哮》, and Fallout 4.