For as long as video gaming has been around, countless people have criticized the gaming industry for influencing people to have violent behavior. These critics usually point to the fact that many school shooters played violent video games. Though the games themselves may be violent, there is no evidence to support that violent video games cause violent behavior.

Two years after the Columbine shooting, a high school shooting in which two teenagers killed 13 people and themselves, parents of the victims sued 25 video game companies, such as Nintendo. This was because the shooters played violent video games like Doom, a game in which a marine must fight demons in hell, and the parents thought this motivated the shooters. Though the parents sued the companies for over 5 billion dollars, the lawsuit was denied.

In a study made by the American Psychology Association found that “contrary to the claims that violent video games are linked to aggressive assaults and homicides, no evidence was found to suggest that this medium was positively related to real-world violence in the United States.”

President of the Gaming Club, Ross Groombridge said, “In my opinion, video games don’t cause violence as much as they influence violence that would have already occurred. The Columbine Massacre was influenced by the Matrix but the shooters would still have killed people regardless of whether or not they had seen the movie. Violence is caused by something happening in the real world, but it may be influenced by something happening in a fake world.”

Video gaming should not be criticized as a way to cause aggression. It is a form of entertainment like television or chess. Romans would watch people be killed in real life as a form as entertainment and no one criticized it, so why should a game get blamed for real life situations? We use video games to escape from reality and though video games may desensitize us from in-game violence, it doesn’t cause people to become aggressive or violent.