"The jury is still out" on whether violent video games trigger violent behavior in youth, said Dmitri Williams, a University of Illinois speech communication professor, speaking before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee last week.
The subcommittee, chaired by U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kan., is taking a hard look at why legislation in four states and two cities has failed to meet constitutional muster when attempting to keep violent video games out of the hands of minors.
Williams said one reason the legislation has been losing is because "the legislators are only talking and listening to people who agree with them, when in fact there is significant disagreement within academia."
The issue has generated recent heat in light of improving technology and the increasing ability of game-makers to create highly realistic depictions of violence-particularly violence against police officers.
In the game "25 to Life," players can choose the role of a gang member, using guns, pipe bombs, Tasers, Molotov cocktails, and broken bottles to kill officers and other innocent people, Brownback said.
But Williams is skeptical about whether you can make direct causal links between these games and violent crimes. He said legislation has failed on the scientific front because lawmakers have relied on proof provided by short-term studies, while ignoring the longer-term studies.
"We don't know if we can trust a lot of the existing research because of how short it is," Williams said. He has found dramatic differences in studies looking at how violent video games affect players after 30 minutes of play versus studies that track behavior over hours or months.
Williams cited two separate studies in the 1990s that examined "Mortal Kombat," one of the earliest violent video games to stir controversy. When youth played the game for only 10 minutes in the first study, researchers found "large effects" in increasing aggressiveness. But in the second study, after 75 minutes of play "the effects were nearly gone. That means there's a very good chance they fade away or weren't there in the first place."
In 2005, Williams also published the longest study to date on video game violence.
"I had players play a game over a month and not in a laboratory," he explained. "The average playtime in my sample is 56 hours, which is the longest research exposure for a game ever. And after 56 hours, I found nothing, and I was surprised. No increases in violence, aggressive cognitions, anything."
However, Williams was quick to tell the subcommittee, "I'm not suggesting that this study proves the games don't cause violence. A different game, a different sample, different measures might have found something different."
Williams also said he throws his support behind the Children and Media Research Advancement Act, which would fund future research on this issue. As he put it, "My hope was that the committee would see that a lot of us aren't opposed to the research, but that it very badly needs to be improved in order to inform public policy."
Read more about Williams's research.
