Could violent video games be saving lives?
When it comes to fatal injuries, cars, guns, and poisons lead the way.
This graph from CDC shows age-adjusted death rates per 100,000 population in the US. Deaths from motor vehicles and firearms decreased from 1979 to 2006, but poisoning deaths more than doubled.
From news accounts I’d have thought guns would be on top – soaring, as a matter of fact. But poisonings are the subtle menace, and not surprising to me. (See my post on homicidal poisonings from May.)
Note that these aren’t relative rates, they’re hard numbers. Safer cars could account for the steady decline in the MVA stats; and except for a bump in the late 80s and early 90s, gun-related deaths have had an overall downward trend for the last quarter century, despite few changes in gun laws. (Yes, the assault weapon law in 1994, but they were never big players in the death rate, especially since 55% of US gun deaths are suicides.)
But then, violent crime in any form has experienced a steep drop across the country since 1993.
Why? Better enforcement? Probably not, since the arrest rate is about the same over this 30-year run.
Let me go way, way out here. The drop begins in 1993. What video game was released in that year? Doom. Video game consoles have made steadily deeper penetration into US households since 1993, and violent action games have multiplied like cockroaches.
And yet…and yet…the violent crime rate continues to slump.
Yeah, I know: the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. But video games are being blamed for causing violence, and the claim makes for great headlines (as do gun-related deaths), but the numbers argue against it.
Could it be that violent video games siphon off aggression?
Somebody had to ask.
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Years ago, my wife began to encourage me to go to Combat Shooting Matches. (She was skeptical at first.) When I asked why, she said, “When stresses build up, you start getting cranky. But when you come back from a match, you are sooooo relaxed.”
So, I think you’re right; things like this actually provided an outlet — a catharsis –for stress and aggression.
If only every single man determined to injure or kill his wife and children played a video game instead. Three women a day are killed in the U.S., usually by their intimate partners, so in one respect anyway, this theory seems unlikely.
Did you correct for race in your conclusion, Caitlin? Getting into details would take a whole other post, but the racial profile of the typical gamer doesn’t match well with the racial profile of the most frequently abused and abusing Americans.
In response to another comment. See in context »Admittedly this was a broad conclusion to draw from the data. I’m really tendering a hypothesis. I’m most interested in provoking people to think (at least for a while) against the everybody-knows flow.
I agree with you that this is a very broad conclusion to draw, given so many other active variables. Personally, I subscribe to the population density explanation: too many witnesses around, now, making criminals more wary about committing impulsive violent acts (?). But that conclusion is also reductive. Other possibly influential factors are: the spiraling use of the Internet, changes in diet, differences in sentencing and incarceration practices, etc. (now I’ll have to go look all of those up!)
Thanks for this post. Video games have gotten a bad rap for years. Richard Rhodes “Media Violence Myth” ( http://www.abffe.com/myth1.htm ) turned on video games pretty early, not to mention all but crushing the comic book industry. For the real rap on this, and the intersections between what mass media and politicians need us to believe, and what actually is observable, check out Stephen Johnson’s _Everything Bad is Good For You_ ( http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-Steven-Johnson/dp/1594481946/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248906288&sr=8-1 ), Gerard Jones’s _Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make Believe Violence_ ( http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Monsters-Children-Make-Believe-Violence/dp/0465036961/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248906313&sr=8-1 ), and the recent _Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Video Games, and What Parents Can Do_ ( http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Theft-Childhood-Surprising-Violent/dp/0743299515/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248906355&sr=8-1 ). The catharsis argument has come up before, and is dealt with in part in each of these books, alongside observations of other societies where it’s clear that when there is actual violence in the environment, violence in the media decreases. So there seems to be a relationship between the two, though likely not causal. Still, it’s really important that these issues be examined closely by people willing to accept the answers that they find, rather than only the answers that serve their political causes.