Study: MMO games cause Violence - NOT!

Lately I've noticed that when strangers ask me what I do for a living and I tell them that I make Video Games they respond with some remark about how they are all so violent or how they are the cause of violence in society. People tend to parrot what they hear in the media without much thought to its validity and lately there has been a ton of coverage blaming games for the ills of society.

Along comes the University of Michigan to inject a little intelligence into this debate with an interesting study based on MMO players...

Two groups of subjects were recruited, none of whom had played MMORPGs before and many of whom had never played video games at all. One group then played the game for a month, for an average of nearly two hours per day. The other group acted as a control. All participants were asked questions about the frequency of aggressive social interactions (such as arguments with their spouses) during the course of the month to test the idea that gaming makes people more aggressive.

Game players, it turned out, were no more aggressive than the control group. Whether the participants had played games before, the number of hours spent gaming, and whether they liked violent movies or not, made no difference.

I find this study all the more convincing once you factor in that they used Asheron's Call 2 as the test cast. If that game doesn't make you want to smack someone upside the head nothing will :)

This is not a new phenomenon. In the nineties it was movies, in the eighties rock music (Ozzy is the Devil!) and in the seventies it was comic books. Who knows, next maybe it will be the evils of Podcasting!

If people care to do some research they will find decades of research that shows that violent social behavior arises from a lack of impulse control that is learned by most children in their formative years. Ever hear your grandparents use the expression "Spare the Rod, Spoil the child" or as my former boss put it so aptly "Some people really just need a good ass kicking" :)