I’ve said all along that video games don’t make you violent, and they are in fact a healthy outlet for such tendencies. Now someone has the numbers — Game Evolution’s article The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games shows that the “Playstation Generation” is the least violent generation on record in America.
You can’t argue with numbers like that, unless, of course, you’re a US politician who only cares about pandering to their misinformed constituents. I guess it’d take actual balls to inform your people that violent video games aren’t bad for their kids.
We’re on the same side - I also believe video games don’t cause violence, and there are man sources which demonstrate that violence (including youth violence) has been on a trend of decline. But I would caution you, as one critical thinker to another, about the merits of citing this kind of article as “proof”. 1. Onling gaming articles are hardly authoritative. They are also hardly unbiased. There is no standard of scholarship at work here - do we know if the author found disconfirming evidence? Who reviewed and fact checked this article? 2. - And this one is more important - numbers do lie. With alarming ease and frequency. The ways are numerous - we can begin with our definition of crime, with how accurate the reporting is, who is doing the reporting (for example, if those stats are drawn from police records, then they may only reflect arrests. Surely youth do violence and don’t get arrested every time. -you can easily think of other examples that will distort the results). The methods of making stats lie are *many*. That’s why university programs exist to teach you how to do statistics, create research models, compile and analyze data. A number is a powerful tool but it’s asking for trouble to rely on them too heavily - they’re just too easy to manipulate, if you don’t know how to examine and interpret their sources. And if you declare numbers are the ultimate authority, you make yourself vulnerable to numerical maipulations - what if youth crime starts to rise? The point isn’t the numbers at all - the point is to establish a causal relationship between the crime and the games. Maybe overall crime went down but every single criminal is a hard core video game junkie, and without those games crime would be even lower, etc.
And since we happen to agree that the current attack on video games is unfounded, then we would be best served by providing solid arguments and evidence against it, not half-joking smart ass articles written by some guy with a website who happens to make video games and can access the internet!
I’m not sure what article you read, but the one I linked to mentions the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics as his source.
He also notes that he is directly quoting a DoJ report when he says “Recently, the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded.”
I’m not sure where else you’d go for US Crime Rates other than the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics. Perhaps you know something more than they do.