US President Donald Trump gathered game industry representatives, as well as videogame critics, early on March 8 to ask their opinions on how violence in the sphere of digital entertainment might affect children and push them into commit acts of mass murder.
He started by showing them a video, featuring examples of violence in video games, commenting on it with the question "this is violent, isn’t it?" The move was not well received by advocates of stricter gun control in the country, with many of them claiming that the president is trying to shift responsibility for mass shootings away from the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Twitterians living in Canada joined the fray to throw in some statistics showing that while they have the same interactive entertainment as Americans do, Canadians don't kill so many of their fellow citizens using guns each year.
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Some Twitter users noted that so far, no scientific proof has been found for the alleged link between violence in videogames and violence in real life. Some users added that they play a lot of games, but have still not killed anyone.
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The idea that videogame violence is adversely affecting young minds has been circulating in the public sphere for decades, often popping up in wake of a new mass shooter being found "guilty" of playing violent games. This was, however, quite possibly the first time that the media in the US took the other side, not blaming the games industry. Instead, it was Trump who focused on the videogame factor.
So far, scientific studies on the connection between playing video games and becoming more violent in real life have yielded controversial results. While some of them showed that certain correlations between the two really do exist, others have failed to find proof for this assumption.