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Study Links Violent Video Games, Hostility
"Manhunt 2" is a video game in which characters kill and torture using items such as a fuse box and a toilet.
(Rockstar Games Via Associated Press)
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Daumas noted that many of her sons' friends play the games. "It's a tough balancing act," she said.
Tracey Goldman, 42, a mother of two in Takoma Park, said she enforces time limits on video-game playing and does not allow violent content. Her fourth-grader plays Lego Star Wars, she said, but otherwise, "I just feel very uneasy about letting him play those kinds of games."
Still, she said, monitoring game-time can require vigilance because children can find games on Internet sites. She recalled looking over her son's shoulder as he played at a computer, asking: "Wait a minute. Is that shooting people?"
Parents have debated the potentially harmful effects of video-game violence for most of the last two decades, as the games have become more popular and more graphic. In the new research, games were deemed violent when one character harmed or killed another.
Still, not all video games are violent or associated with such negative effects, said Joseph Kahne of Mills College in Oakland, Calif., coauthor of a recent video-gaming study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The Pew study, based on a poll of 1,102 youths ages 12 to 17, found that most teenagers play many different kinds of games and that some types of play -- such as making decisions about how to run a city -- are correlated with more political or civic involvement.
Overall, Kahne said, "it's important to pay attention to the nature of the games and the sense that kids make of the experience."
Although the longitudinal studies reported in Anderson's study showed that frequent playing of violent video games leads to greater aggression, Anderson also said this message should be understood in the larger context of a child's life.
"A healthy, normal, nonviolent child or adolescent who has no other risk factors for high aggression or violence is not going to become a school shooter simply because they play five hours or 10 hours a week of these violent video games," he said.
Extreme forms of violence, Anderson said, "almost always occur when there is a convergence of multiple risk factors."
A U.S. surgeon general report in 2001 identified an array of those risk factors, including gang involvement, antisocial parents and peers, substance abuse, poverty and media violence. Males are more at risk.
The new study noted that video games are played in 90 percent of American homes with children ages 8 to 16 and that the U.S. average playing time of four hours a week in the late 1980s is now up to 13 hours a week, with boys averaging 16 to 18 hours a week.
