In Violent Video Game Effects on Children and Adults, Craig Anderson, Douglas Gentile and Katherine Buckley of the department of psychology at Iowa State University, draw these studies together to argue that violent video games increase aggressive behavior.
If criminal prosecution is too blunt an instrument to use against violent video games, there is a case for awarding damages to the victims, or the families of victims, of violent crimes committed by people who play violent video games.
To date, such lawsuits have been dismissed, at least in part on the grounds that the manufacturers could not foresee that their products would cause people to commit crimes. But the evidence that Anderson, Gentile and Buckley provide has weakened that defense.
Andre Peschke, editor-in-chief of www.krawall.de, one of Germany's leading online computer and video game magazines, informs me that in 10 years in the video game industry he has never seen any serious debate within the industry on the ethics of producing violent games. The manufacturers fall back on the simplistic assertion that there is no scientific proof that violent video games lead to violent acts. But sometimes we cannot wait for proof.
This seems to be one of those cases -- the risks are great, and outweigh whatever benefits violent video games may have. The evidence may not be conclusive, but it is too strong to be ignored any longer.
The burst of publicity about virtual pedophilia in Second Life may have focused on the wrong target. Video games are properly subject to legal controls, not when they enable people to do things that, if real, would be crimes, but when there is evidence on the basis of which we can reasonably conclude that they are likely to increase serious crime in the real world.
At present, the evidence for that is stronger for games involving violence than it is for virtual realities that permit pedophilia.
Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and laureate professor at the University of Melbourne.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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