- video-games and violence
- Violent video-games breed violent thoughts and behavior.
- Violent/graphic video-games keep people from indulging in violent behavior.
- Video games are violent because we designed them that way. They are simply a reflection of our natural violent tendencies. It is us who impacts them, not vise versa.
- The people who commit violent crimes only make up a small population of people who play video games. Therefore their actions shouldn’t reflect upon the whole.
- A majority of young males who play video games are less likely to commit crimes, like shootings, and some who do commit shootings just happen to play violent video games. Causation vs correlation
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Counterintuitive 
I don’t ban topics or hypotheses, JokerTheFool, because I prefer to empower students to follow their interests in their research. However, I do make warn students who propose to research overworked territory of the danger that they will not discover anything new, that their “research” will amount to collecting the opinions of thousands who have already drawn conclusions, and that their grades will suffer as a result.
You’ve written a clear set of premises and ended with a direct claim. So you’re starting strong and given me reason to be hopeful. But guard against the temptation to gather “opposing views” from the trove of essays that precede yours. No proposal that boils down to “he said/she said” or worse “he and thousands of others have said/she and thousands of others have said” comes to much good.
As soon as possible, find a compelling source that indicates you’re onto something new and I’ll enthusiastically partner with you to develop a fresh perspective here.
Respond, please.
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I understand what you are saying about treading on already claimed ground. There may not be anything new to discover. I’ve been thinking more about the topic and was wondering if moving to the root of the problem would yield a fresher perspective. Maybe examining why the blame is constantly put onto violent media in the first place would be better. The inability of the courts, politicians, and others to explain what truly causes horrible crimes like mass shootings. Why we need a target for our hatred to be pointed at when something bad happens. I was wondering if these ideas would be more interesting to explore, despite still being a little broad.
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I like all three of your new ideas better than your first. All are worthy of consideration and present challenges of their own. Good.
First, let’s examine that premise. Since Columbine, when’s the last time a mass shooting was blamed on video games or violent media in your recollection? The Vegas hotel shooting wasn’t blamed on media. The 2017 Texas Church shooting of 26 people wasn’t blamed on video games. The Mandalay Bay Vegas Hotel shooting wasn’t blamed on anything. “The mass shooting remains unresolved in the US, as police are still unsure as to why the gunman opened fire on 22,000 festival goers for 10 minutes. Without a motive related to extremist ideologies of a political, religious, social, racial or environmental nature, officials will not call the mass shooting an act of terrorism.” Maybe that premise offers a chance for something new. “Everybody says” the media blame violent video games for acts of public violence, but everybody’s wrong.
(Except, of course, the president did just what you say after the Parkland shooting.)
I’d like to know. Find out whether anybody’s done good numbers on how many acts of multiple-victim violence are committed in the US compared to the rest of the world. If it’s as bad as we think it is, and if most such acts are committed with guns, then there are still two possibilities: America has more than its share of deranged individuals, or we have just as many crazies, but they have guns.
Do we? Or is laying blame just a natural stage of grieving, a part of denying that we could ever be personally responsible for our own pain and suffering?
Thanks for letting me play along. This one is fun. And yeah, way better than your first idea.
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Check it out. Somebody is offering up some reasoned thinking for you: https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/10/17101232/a-brief-history-of-video-game-violence-blame
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“Of the 100 most deadly school massacres in modern history, 40 took place in the United States. The most deadly took place in 1927, in which 38 elementary school children and six adults were murdered by a man who wanted revenge for his failure to secure an elected position.
A total of seven attacks took place in the era before video games were a part of American life, leaving 33 school shootings between 1980 and 2018, in which more than one person was slain.
In four of those 33 mass murders, the perpetrators have been definitely identified as being fans of video games.” From the above
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Any recent progress to report?
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I read the article you sent me. It definitely helped do a lot of the leg work for my, so thank you for that. After reading it, it got me thinking. People believe that we put the blame of violence crimes on video games because it helps us avoid the real issues(I.e. gun control and mental health). But what if the opposite is true? I’m currently looking into this line of thinking just to see where it takes me.
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Of course, my heart is gladdened when my students propose that “the opposite might be true.” I’m delighted that you’re keeping and open mind, and I’ll always be happy to pass along anything I find that I think will be helpful.
This is the one-year anniversary of the shooting in Las Vegas (a mass shooting not blamed on video games). Some of the casualties who did not die are caught in that regrettable cycle of wanting to acknowledge the enormity of what they suffered while simultaneously wanting to put it forever out of their minds. That’s not particularly relevant to your research, but it came up on the news today. There’s always something about shootings or gun control in the news.
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