Gaming and violence – a contrarian point of view

Here’s a contrarian point of view to conventional wisdom that violent games breed violeng behavior. The source is a blog and a summary of one researcher’s findings. If you’re working on gaming violence as a topic for INCG, this could be useful.

Video Games And Violence: Are Studies Biased?
Submitted by News Account on 14 May 2008 – 7:37pm. Psychology

Does playing violent video games make players aggressive? It is a question that has taxed researchers, sociologists, and regulators ever since the first console was plugged into a TV and the first shots fired in a shoot ‘em up game.

Writing today in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry, Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex, England, suggests that there is scant scientific evidence that video games are anything but harmless and do not lead to real world aggression. Moreover, his research shows that previous work is biased towards the opposite conclusion.

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The rest of the article is here.