Ferguson, then a graduate student, says that he started to notice a mismatch between the evidence and what researchers were saying. Still, even at that time, not everybody agreed. Read More: Probing the Complex Influence of Video Games on Young MindsĪs a result, in the early 2000s, several prominent studies dug into that link - and suggested that violent video games did indeed increase aggressive behavior.

“Other than a handful of people, there was really a sense of there being a societal consensus on the issue -everybody thought that violent video games were causing these types of shootings.” “In the public imagination, it really solidified this idea that violent video games were responsible for school shootings or mass homicides,” says Ferguson.

Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University who has studied video game violence for decades, refers to the incident as a watershed moment. Playing the Blame Gameįamously, the panic around video game violence spiked again in 1999, when the game Doom, which essentially pioneered the first-person shooter genre, was blamed for the Columbine high school massacre. In 19, it became the focus of a series of congressional hearings into violent video games and their potential impact on kids. Thanks to advances in computer graphics, the fighting game Mortal Kombat boasted gruesome details like spurting blood and the ability to rip an opponent’s heart out through their chest. In the 1990s, the controversy leveled up. Read More: Video Game Addiction Is on the Rise. As a result of the public backlash, its developers pulled it from store shelves. Only five years after Pong ricocheted onto the scene, in 1976, a lo-fi black and white game called Death Race - in which players rack up points by running down digital “gremlins” as they flee from your car - earned the ire of newspapers and civic organizations for facilitating virtual violence. Video games have gotten a bad rap for about as long as we’ve been playing them.

Video games in real life