Free Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield Page B

stuff to provoke considerable scepticism. And, indeed, 2008 saw a rather different case being made by a peer-reviewed longitudinal study of violence in games published in the US journal Pediatrics . A joint venture between American and Japanese academics, this paper (‘Longitudinal Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression in Japan and the United States’) argued that, across three samples of Japanese and American secondary school pupils examined at two points in time over a period of three to six months, ‘habitual violent video game play early in the school year predicted later aggression, even after controlling for gender and previous aggressiveness in each sample’. The authors thus recommended ‘reducing the exposure of youth to this risk factor’. What are we to make of contradictions like this?
    One nation that already seems to have taken the most radical anti-games school of advice to heart is Germany, where in June 2009 leaders of all sixteen German states voted to ban entirely all games ‘where the main part is to realistically play the killing of people or other cruel or inhuman acts of violence against humans or manlike characters’. Germany has always been strict in its regulation of games, and the ban is a direct consequence of the shootings that occurred in a German school in March 2009, when a seventeen-year-old ex-pupil, Tim Kretschmer, killed nine pupils and three teachers before turning the gun on himself. Kretschmer, it was widely reported, spent a large amount of time playing first-person-shooter video games, and there were suggestions that these had somehow ‘trained’ him to perpetrate the massacre.
    The case is, like all such occurrences, a rare and extremely disturbing one. Yet attempts to trace a causal relationship between violent games and real-life killings tend, at best, to be misleading, and at worst simply to be inaccurate scapegoating. Adam Lewitt, writing in The Sunday Times , was typical in his description of ‘remarkable parallels’ between the bestselling game Far Cry 2 and the killings. ‘In the game it is essential to hijack cars to move around,’ he explained (which it isn’t); ‘characters in the game … wear black camouflage uniforms – the clothing Kretschmer wore’ (almost none of them do); ‘Most sinister of all, Far Cry 2’s killer uses a Beretta 92 handgun, the weapon fired 112 times by Kretschmer’ (no Beretta handgun appears in the game); the game ‘also rewards players who shoot their victims in the head, the style of killing chosen by Kretschmer’ (it doesn’t). Perhaps more relevant was the large supply of guns the boy’s father kept at home, the fact that his father had been taking him shooting since the age of eight, and his recent depression. But such reasons are less incendiary fuel for speculation.
    Although it grabs occasional headlines, the case in favour of video games directly causing violence is one that it’s increasingly difficult to take seriously. With over 90 per cent of Western adolescents now playing video games to some degree, it’s hard to see how a near-universal pattern of behaviour can, in any meaningful sense, predict a rare occurrence of violent, let alone murderous, behaviour. Moreover, when it comes to the most comprehensive study of high-school shootings ever undertaken (a 2002 study by the US Secret Service and Department of Education, investigating thirty-seven such incidents between 1974 and 2000), it transpires that only 59 per cent of the perpetrators took even ‘some interest’ in violent media of any kind; and that, among these media, video games were the least significant, with only 12 per cent of subjects expressing an attraction towards them. Even taking into account only the incidents that occurred after 1989, by which year ‘violent’ games could safely be said to have become widespread, a mere 15 per cent of perpetrators were noted to have shown any interest in violent games.
    Of course, more sensible