Do video games make people violent?

Many people say that Video Games make Australian kids and teens violent murderers but there are several sides to this argument.

To start off there are many studies that show moderate gaming can reduce stress and improve health and wellbeing. Gaming also allows young people to form connections with peers since gaming creates a sense of community, mutual participation and a shared passion. Several studies have shown that Anti-Social and violent video games do not produce anti-social behavior in players. One study has shown that playing anti-social games like Grand Theft Auto and violent video games like Call Of Duty compared to Pro-social games like World of Zoo and non-violent video games like Portal 2 has little effect on the helpfulness of players. Only when researchers dropped the pens in the middle of the gaming session did it have a substantial effect on helpfulness, increasing helpers from 37.5% of those playing anti-social games to 87.5%. All the arguments about violent video games can be disproven because over the last 10 years there have been a lot more people playing video games and a lot of those are violent video games but in the same period there haven’t been a corresponding increase in violent behavior.

If you look at this chart it shows that kids aren't the only ones playing video games.  A lot of this chart shows how video games are played and who plays them.

This chart also shows a very real statistic. If you look at the circle above it clearly shows that the amount of gamers is many times larger than the amount of criminals who happen to play violent video games. Yes video games can be quite violent in certain situations and its common sense to understand that it is a game you are playing and that you can’t go out and for example steal a car or assault someone in real life. Many believe that the video games people are playing now are giving the younger generations ideas on how to rob a bank or how to steal a car the correct way but these things have always been around. Some say that since the video games allow you to rob banks or steal cars in a virtual world it possibly takes stress away from the gamer showing that they are able to do these things in this virtual world but at the same time it can be used in other ways. If someone has anger issues they can by all means go into the virtual game world and punch or kill someone but they can’t do that in real life so some people believe that gaming can take away anger rather than give it. In my opinion video games really don’t make people violent, they allow you to run people over or even get into high speed chases but it really comes down to common sense because you must realize that you just can’t do these things in real life because they have real consequences .