David McManus asks if playing violent video games links with crime

The controversy over the potential social impact of violent video games never falls too far from current headlines.

Without doubt the most talked about titles over a number of years have been the Grand Theft Auto series which puts you in the role of a protagonist who can (and must) perform multiple violent crimes in order to progress through the games.

A particular element of one of the older releases of the title caused the biggest stir when it became clear that during the course of play it was possible to kill prostitutes. This one activity quickly became the go-to example of everything that was wrong in the world of modern gaming as though homicide of employees of the world’s oldest profession was more outrageous than killing the innocent bystanders in the rest of the game.

GTA is now in its fifth incarnation and game play remains just as extreme. Its developers, Rockstar Games, clearly play on its own notoriety and sales have soared as a result.

Watching violent or otherwise antisocial acts on the screen has been around for as long as the moving image itself. Much of early cinema consisted of slapstick comedy which, when boiled down to its core elements, often involved someone being knocked backwards or hit in the face with a heavy object.

Kids’ favourites Tom and Jerry spend every minute of every outing attempting to inflict physical injury on each other in ever more imaginative ways, a point brilliantly and highly unsubtly satirised in The Simpsons’ Itchy and Scratchy characters.

Even the most graphic violence in modern movies is generally accepted as long as the film’s title is suffixed by the number 18 in parentheses. Obviously even if you abide by the age restriction, once you reach that magic birthday you are either instantly desensitised to graphic violence or you are suddenly able to separate make believe from reality.

Video games garner greater attention because it is you, the person holding the controller, who makes things happen. Despite the fact that computer generated visuals do not yet match real life (though they are getting ever closer), it is not the graphical accuracy of the violent act that causes offence but rather the consumer’s involvement in it. Indeed, some suggestions were made at the time of the horrific Columbine High School killings that those responsible had been influenced by playing Doom, a 20-year-old game that had you shooting spectacularly low-definition, two-dimensional monsters.

Is there a link? It seems unlikely. The number of people playing computer games, particularly those involving guns, continues to rise while cases of violent crime are falling. To many people, the suggestion that shooting people in the imagined scenario of a video game would encourage them, or even desensitise them, to carry out anything remotely similar in reality is absurd.

A case could be argued for keeping this content away from the very young just because it illuminates humanity’s dark side but, defeatist though it may sound, it is hard to imagine how that would be possible in the modern era.