It worries me that I’m even giving this thought, but with so many stories regularly popping up that blame videogames for real life violence, I’m beginning to wonder if there is any justification for these claims. I mean, seriously, can so many people believe that games lead to violence if there isn’t any truth in the idea?

The thing is, I do enjoy the odd violent game. So do many of my friends and the majority of my work colleagues and fellow gamers have all enjoyed a good GTA or Resi Evil session. But I’ve never known any of these guys to have real life violent tendancies, or that the anger they let loose in these games would ever surface in the real world. So knowing hundreds of gamers, and none of them violent people, I do wonder where the ‘games equal violence’ ties come from.

Well, there are two big schools of thought when it comes to this at the moment. The first is that in-game violence leads to desensitisation. This is an argument currently held by US Lt Col Dave Grossman, a law enforcement trainer and author of On Combat and On Violence who blames videogames for the rising number of US cop killings each year.

There have been 54 US officer killings this year, which is a 60 per cent increase from last year and the worst since 1975 when there were 99. Grossman believes criminals have become desensitised to opening fire on a police officer due to the ‘cop-killer, criminal simulators’, saying that in meth labs and gang houses they'll always find videogames.

Ok, that may well be the case, but you’ll also find videogames in hundreds of thousands of friendly homes that belong to kindly peace-keeping folk.

But Grossman says; "The videogames are their newspaper, their television, their all-consuming narrative. And their videogames are all cop-killer, criminal simulators."

Another argument, and the one I suppose I mainly lead towards, is that there is a bad element in any society, and perhaps videogames and reality can get blurred for these kinds of people. So its not actually videogames that turns them violent; that ‘problem’ is already there, but they may use gaming as their excuse, their scapegoat, in order to push the blame away from themselves.

But these are just two points of view, and I’m sure there’s a much wider range of arguments for and against games equalling real world violence. I’m sure Jack Thompson’s got some interesting ones he could share, anyway! Plus I also think this is a topic that will never reach a happy conclusion. People disagree, and people always like to have something to lay the blame on. For now at least, it seems videogames lead our youth to crime and violence, but I wonder what will take the blame next…

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