Is Violence in Video Games Really to Blame for Aggression?

How many times have you seen the same story? Parents, worried for their kids safety, read into some entirely clickbait articles that are made to pander to what they really want to hear: video games with guns and fighting are going to make children into killers. Im here to say this isnt the case.

I took it upon myself to find the answer to this question. The first place to examine is the question itself. What is aggression?

How does one define it? Theres a technical definition I personally appreciate: readiness to attack or confront something. Confront is important, because it implies provocation, and readiness helps to further specify how aggression is an offensive response to a situation.

As I researched about violent video games relation to aggression, I came across some reviews and studies about the topics. Reviews of the genetics of aggression were mostly inconclusive in terms of human gene structure having a measurable direct effect. Distinguished geneticists, Robert Anholt and Trudy Mackay, wrote that though mice could be pushed to hyper aggression with the mutation of a single gene, humans were not so simple.

With humans, there were too many uncontrollable variables. Being aggressive, in the sense weve made, is not something genetics can quantify exactly. After considering this, I went further into my exploration, and more into the topic of aggression in gaming itself.

There are plenty of studies on both sides of the argument on whether violent video games cause aggression. I knew that such varied data would be of little use, so I had to look somewhere else. I had one certainty in mind: there is aggression that is in some way connected to the online gaming community, which mostly consists of games that are considered violent.

This knowledge came from personal experience. People in online gaming are angry, and often highly over expectant of their teammates, and very aggressive if those teammates did not meet the expectations.Ive found personally that most of these violent video games dont really cause frustration until you add another player into the mix.

Its quite literally a whole new game. One abstract study I found made a link between aggression in gaming and competition, and related these things to competitive gambling. This brought competition into the mix of my searches, and it made too much sense that competition would be a source of aggression to not be investigated further.

Competition is a breeding ground for aggression. By nature, we compete for food, water, mating partners, and survival in general, and we compete by showing acts of aggression in these situations. But gaming is not a competition for survival physically, it is a social situation where players compete to be victorious among peers.

Thanks to online gamings recent growth, people are more often put in competitive situations where they find themselves able to be aggressive without having to see the reaction of a tangible person. In this way, competition, and not violence, is a large source of aggression in the gaming community. My findings and my experiences exemplify that though violence may have some effects on players of games, it is no more damaging than what we see through everyday media.

Though this does not mean that violence in gaming is unproblematic, I am lead to believe that the aggression we see out of gamers comes mainly from the competition they are involved in when playing