Way back in November, Derek wrote an article titled Games and Television :: How Closely Are You Watching Your Children? and after reading it, I started work on an article responding to it. However, my response got pushed aside, saved into a subdirectory on my flash drive, and forgotten about until now. Before you read any further, take a moment to at least skim through that post as I will be making several references to it here.

For the most part, I agree with what Derek said, especially the last section “Sorry, that doesn’t fly in our house.” However, like Derek, I do foster some disagreement with the facts presented in the section “So what does that have to do with television and video games?” So many times, facts like these are used to try and show a cause and effect relationship when in fact, all they are really showing is a correlation. While Derek’s article focuses more on parental involvement and raising children, this article is more focused on the misconception of a causal relationship rather than a correlation.

What is shown by the multitude of studies and statistics available relating to violent video games and violent behavior in real life is a correlation, not a causal relationship. These studies need to dig a bit deeper to discover the true cause of this real-life violent behavior. Those individuals who seek eliminate violence from the video game industry in hopes of eliminating it from society are on the wrong track.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not one that believes that video games or sexual television programs are to blame for the problematic behavior of children.

Actually, I believe that the children playing these games and watching these programs have a larger problem - parents that are not involved in their lives.

Even though the above is a direct quote from Derek’s article, I feel exactly the same way. it’s not the movies or the video games, it’s not the television programming or the music, none of these things are the factors that are causing youngsters to become aggressive, violent, promiscuous, or dissident. The largest factor in these people’s lives is their parents.

The parents are to blame on several levels: involvement, home life, rules, morals, etc. A brief set of questions that can be used to evaluate how much blame should be place on the parents could look something like this:

Of those individuals who become violent, agressive, and all the rest:
How many had parents that were involved in their childhood?
How many had a home life that included family time, outings, and activities?
What kind of rules (if any) did their parents set and enforce while they were growing up?
What efforts did their parents make to teach them morals and right vs. wrong?

I don’t have any statistics or answers to these questions because they are not the statistics that people try to gather, it seems to be much easier to find a more superficial cause no matter how accurate it may or may not be. I guess this makes a bit of sense though, it’s easier to ask and/or find out if a person found entertainment through violent video games than to go through all the questions above.

The studies that have been done show that those individuals who watch violent programming and play violent video games are more likely to engage in those acts than individuals who do not regularly watch violent programming and play violent video games. There have been many different studies that have come to this same conclusion and it is evidence that is hard to argue with. However, note the keyword “likely” as in it’s likely (not guaranteed) that you will get exactly what you asked for this Christmas. In the same way that not everyone will get everything they wanted for Christmas, not everyone that watches violent programming or plays violent video games will engage in violent behavior.

It is my belief that there would be a much higher “likelyhood” and probably even a causal relationship between having a lack of rules and parental involvement at home and engaging in these behaviors. If an individual has few or no rules to follow as a child, he or she will be less inclined to follow rules elsewhere.

The studies that have been highly publicized thus far, have expected outcomes that individuals who play violent video games engage in violent behaviors and individuals who don’t play the games don’t engage in the behaviors. However, in doing their research and gathering this information, there have undoubtedly been many examples that did not fall in to these two categories. I know there are many individuals who play violent video games yet do not engage in violent behavior, I personally know many people in this category. Also, it would be my best estimation that there are many people who engage in violent behaviors that have never played a violent video game, perhaps they didn’t have/couldn’t afford video games. Furthermore, people were engaging in violent behaviors (armed robber, assault, murder, etc) long before video games were even available so it would be a bit far-fetched to say that the games are the cause of the behavior. I have no doubt that there is a correlation between the video games and the behavior and the studies have left little room for doubt, but this does not mean there is a cause and effect relationship.

In today’s western society, there is a correlation between gender and hair length. The correlation is that men have short(er) hair and women have long(er) hair. However, being male does not cause one to have short hair and being female does not cause and individual to have long hair. There are men with long hair and women with short hair. Nonetheless, if I were to take a quick survey asking participants their gender and the length of their hair, it would probably show that men have shorter hair than women. What would not be shown by a 2 question survey, however, are the underlying factors that determine hair length (occupation, personal preferences, etc) even though these are the things that “cause” a person to keep their hair a certain length.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with one final thought, knowing that it’s more about the parents and how a person was raised than the games they play that cause a person to engage in socially unacceptale acts, by blaming these behaviors on the video games we are only increasing the correlation that the studies show. I say this because the people (parents) who pay attention to the “warnings” and “studies” and limit what games their children play or movies they can watch are the same ones whose children would have not engaged in violent behavior to begin with. The children that are most likely to engage in violent behavior will continue to play the violent video games no matter what studies show or what warnings are published because they are the ones whose parents are not involved enough to do anything about it.