Violent Catalysts

After the lecture and today's tutorial, I have been churning the idea of violence in video games around in my head. Firstly I must point out that I agree with most scholars and Kevin that generally video games do not cause people to become violent. This is with respect to the "correlation doesn't equal causation" idea in this weeks reading. Just because somebody plays violent videogames and then engages in violent actions doesn't mean that the videogame is the reason behind the actions.

In tutorial we were discussing the accepted role of violence and sports and I raised a question about the relationship between the NZ Warriors and domestic violence in South Auckland. When the Warriors lose, domestic violence increases. As we discussed, this is not due to the violent nature of rugby league, rather it is because of the emotional investment of the audience with the result of the game. This combined with gambling (on the result) and alcohol leads to an increase in domestic violence. Now in any societal group there are some individuals who are more pre-disposed to violence than others. And it appears that in the South Auckland community, sporting failures acts as the catalyst for violence. In other groups the catalyst could be any number of things from, a bad day at work to the weather.

Because of this I think videogames can act as a catalyst for violence. If an individual predisposed to violence was immersed in a videogame and therefore invested in the result of it; then surely failure in the game could act as a catalyst for actual violence. I know myself that I can get very frustrated at losing the most meaningless games (stick cricket, madden) to the point of needing to take a break to chill out. I have even been knonw to throw controllers around the room/ at my brother.

These reactions are from non-violent games. Perhaps failure at a violent videogame would lead to a more violent reaction, I don't know. My point is that while there is no evidence to suggest that violent video games cause people to become violent, I believe that in an individual predisposed to violence, they could act as the catalyst that then turns that individual violent, if they are immersed in the game.