A formerly common refrain from social conservatives is that violent video games desensitize players and leads to gun violence. In a sense this assertion is correct about desensitization, but there is no direct line between violent games in the matrix and the waking world.
You don’t see the argument about violent video games put forth much these days, and the last persons of note in the public arena who had enough cultural cachet to get this idea taken seriously were Tipper Gore and Charlton Heston in the mid-1990s (though Speaker Kevin McCarthy did bring it up in 2019). They did this about the time video game technology advanced from 8-bit Mario Brothers side scrolling games in the mid-1990s to the more advanced graphics of the first Mortal Kombat and Doom, and there were congressional hearings on the matter in 1993. The response from the video game industry, fearing government intervention, was to take the well-trod route of the movie industry and comics industry before it: self-regulate, make a rating system (ESRB 1994), and then say they inform and empower parents through the rating system. Unlike the self-regulation of the movie industry via the Hayes Code (1934-1968) or the Comics Code Authority (1954), which involved actual self-censorship after congressional hearing in both instances, the video game rating system has proven to be as useless a gesture in preventing children from viewing sexual or violent content as the movie rating system has been since the Hayes Code fell apart in the late 1960s. The Comic industry has also pretty much phased out the code. And as video game graphics improve, the issue increasingly applies to a more addictive, immersive, and realistic medium.
The best case for the idea that first-person shooter games and violent games like Grand Theft Auto leads to violence and mass-shootings has been put forward in an impressive book called On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by retired military officer Lt Col. David Grossman. A very sympathetic long form podcast interview of Grossman can be found here: https://www.patrickcoffin.media/321-what-is-behind-every-single-mass-killing-lt-col-dave-grossman/
On Killing was assigned reading at one time for me as an officer’s professional development when I was in the service. On Killing uses a wide variety of military studies to show that the social stigma on killing another human in war is difficult to overcome for the average person. Individual soldiers in WWII, for example, were reluctant to aim and fire at an enemy. Here’s the meat of the issue:
“[Historians conducted] mass interviews with thousands of soldiers in more than four hundred infantry companies, in Europe and in the Pacific, immediately after they had been in close combat with German or Japanese troops. The results were consistently the same: only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.”
This lack of shooting, however, was not the case with crew served weapons, such as machine guns and artillery, when no single person is responsible for killing an individual enemy. Most of the killing in WWI and WWII came from machine guns and artillery, and this wasn’t all changes in tactics necessitated from technology. With distance comes decreased resistance to killing, and the Western way of war has been to create more and more innovative ways to kill at a distance with minimal danger to oneself. A line of men in Napoleonic or American Civil War battle formation had no way of knowing if his individual bullet hits a specific enemy. The guilt of killing his fellow man was a collective guilt, it was a group effort.
However, there are several ways the low rates of firing by individuals can be overcome with the right kind of training. The U.S. military started using man shaped pop-up targets to train, via operant conditioning (think Pavlov’s dogs) its troops to fire at enemies when they appeared. The long and short of it, is that this technique worked, with increasingly realistic looking targets to now include video games, there has been a 90-95% firing rate for the trained infantryman from Vietnam onwards. If you’re playing Call of Duty, you’re training yourself to drool at the sound of a bell, I mean, to pull the trigger and fire a weapon at another human being. Moreover, there are no real consequences for this trigger pulling, as opposed to a hunter, who also trains his brain to kill, albeit only with animals. Either way, the hunter, or the man who butchers his own backyard chickens, learns the consequences of his actions the way a kid playing video games never could. You can get people to shoot in video games, but without the messiness of actual blood and death. A nuanced view is that games do train your brain to kill without consequence, but the more video games individuals play, the less they tend to actually be violent, either because it’s a catharsis, or highly immersive video games that can take 100+ hours to beat keep people away from situations that might result in violence. Until the spike in crime after 2020, the crime rate had been declining for decades, even if there have been more mass-shootings and ever more realistic and violent video games and movies. However, like our military trainees, people already close to taking the plunge into real world violence will be part of that 90-95% and more able to pull the trigger on another human, having done so thousands of times already. Some might recall that much was made of the fact that the Columbine shooters (1999) played a lot of Doom, and that is a perfect example of my nuanced view. Also, any internet browser will reveal a plethora of cases where a random stranger was murdered for no clear reason.
Have mass shooters, specifically, been pushed over the edge? What evidence is there that mass-shooters have gone over to the dark side, as it were, and numbed by video games, have gone on shooting rampages psychologically lubricated by hours of operant conditioning? Not much. Fortunately, the evidence on this issue is such that violent video games do not create perpetrators of gun violence, even though modern mass-shooters also play violent video games. At best, it appears that in a multi-causal way, exposure to visualizations of extreme acts of sex and violence are just part of the mélange of modernism that we are all steeped in.
Please don’t take the bait that violent video games are a red herring, as many in the gun control crowd will tell you, citing research showing that violent video games have no connection to shootings, as this research usually play a slight of hand. It says they “find no causal link” to playing violent video games and mass-shootings. In highly scientific terms, let me respond with “no shit.” It’s virtually impossible to give self-report surveys to people asking them how much exposure they’ve had to violent video games and presume you will find a direct causal link to real world violence, let alone specific mass-shooters. There has to be some sort of “causal mechanism” by which, pun intended, the shootings start due to pretend shooting, and humans are not robots that way. At most, studies have found self-reported beliefs about acceptable levels of violence being higher with the more expose one has to violent video games. But there are all sorts of cultural mediators of norms of violence, and violence has always been seen as more acceptable in those of a lower socio-economic status, long before video games came on the scene. See a couple fair research examples here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00384/full
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/violent-video-games-and-young-people.
Players of violent video games are not spurred to criminality any more than any enjoyer of watching (or playing) hockey, football, boxing, MMA, or any other violent sport which the fandom enjoys a mix of fetishized acceptable violence and camaraderie building. While technology changes, human nature remains the same. And in the end, we are but Romans enjoying a gladiator fight as a spectacle, where virtually all of us don’t want to enter the arena ourselves.