Your heart rate soars, you experience feelings of extreme aggression and bloodlust. Victory is a headrush of violent power; defeat an emasculation. You can't wait to do it again. Sometimes you even dream about it.
But no one wants to ban chess. Yet when such visceral emotions are associated with video games, people get very worried. Stands to reason, doesn't it? If you love blowing the heads off realistically animated digital people, or even, as in the fabulously violent new Soldier of Fortune, keeping track of kneecappings versus headshots and groin wounds, you're going to grow up into an extremely ill-balanced individual. Some time, you'll probably get hold of a real gun and shoot all your friends.
That's what they said about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two gunmen behind the Columbine High School massacre last year. They were known to be obsessive players of Doom, a 3-D game in which you must defend Mars from aliens with a massive shotgun. Clearly, the video games turned them into killers, no? Best keep the kids away from the PlayStation or PC and teach them knitting instead.
Now, apparently, we have new evidence that video games really do make you a more violent person. At least that's the way the newspapers reported it on Monday. "Computer-game thugs: on-screen violence is transferred to real life," screeched the Daily Mail. "Computer games make children far more likely to commit violent crime and to fail at school. A leading expert in the field has warned that there is now clear evidence that youngsters can be prompted to act violently by spending time on the computer."
Well, that would be news. For decades now, scientists have tried to prove that video games are bad for your children. But there has never been any proof. And, if you look beyond the hysteria, there still isn't. Not a shred. Nada. Zip.
The report, Video Games and Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings and Behaviour in the Laboratory and in Life, by Craig A Anderson and Karen E Dill, appears in the April issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It consists of two separate experiments performed on psychology undergraduates at Iowa State University. The first experiment is merely a set of interviews with the students and decides that "aggressive delinquent behaviour" (fighting, mugging) is positively correlated with "exposure to videogame violence", and also that low academic performance is correlated with a longer amount of time spent playing video games in general.
We can deal with the second point straight away. Of course if you spend six hours a day playing video games your school grades will suffer. They'll also suffer if you spend six hours a day baking cookies, hugging trees or doing anything else except your homework. Next!
The other finding crumbles when confronted with the crucial scientific slogan: Correlation Ain't Causation. There is no evidence that the games cause real-life violence. To their credit, the authors of the article acknowledge this: "It could be that the obtained video game links to aggressive and non-aggressive delinquency are wholly due to the fact that highly aggressive individuals are especially attracted to violent video games." In other words, violent kids are more likely to play violent games. Well, duh, of course they are. And they're more likely to steal your lunchbox. But lunchboxes don't cause crime.
The second experiment is more interesting. One group of students played the violent Wolfenstein 3-D (in which you shoot Nazis) for 15 minutes, the other played the tedious Myst (in which you look at pretty pictures and solve dull puzzles). (By the way, Anderson claims that Myst "shares the 3-D 'walk through' format" of Wolfenstein. It doesn't.) Then the students were told to play a game of quick reactions against a human in another cubicle. After a round, they could "punish" their opponent (who was actually just a computer) with a blast of noise. The people who had just been playing Wolfenstein punished their enemies with longer blasts of noise than the Myst players. Conclusion: a violent game makes you more aggressive.
But the noise increase was tiny. The Wolfensteiners averaged a 6.81-second blast; the Mysters a 6.65-second blast. And this difference appeared only when the participants had just lost a round of the reflex game. You'd see the same thing after making someone play a game of squash or chess and comparing them with a couch-potato's responses. And we have only the author's own pet theory, their "General Affective Aggression Model", as evidence that such a minuscule short-term effect might translate into long-term violence.
In fact, the article unwittingly furnishes evidence for the opposite argument, the "catharsis hypothesis". Several other studies in the last decade have argued that playing violent games is actually a healthy release for natural feelings of aggression: a safe way to exercise them without harming real people. This is the view shared by nearly all gameplayers and industry types, not to mention the New York Police Department, who told the producer of the notorious joyriding-and-cop-shooting game Grand Theft Auto: "We'd rather they did it in your game than on the street."
The crux comes when the psychologists notice that women were more hostile than men after playing both games, delivering longer blasts of noise. In fact, when the participant had just won a round of the reflex game, this gender difference was the only one observed: it had nothing to do with whether they'd been playing Wolfenstein or Myst. The authors are bemused, and suspect it's because the women in their study were generally "less familiar with videogames".
But this implies either that the catharsis hypothesis is true, or that what the experiment was measuring wasn't aggression at all. Either the men delivered shorter noise blasts because they regularly used games as a vent for their natural aggression and so were more chilled-out, or the experiment was measuring frustration (because the women weren't as good at either game) rather than violent tendencies.
In conclusion, the authors again have to admit to having "no empirical evidence" that games increase violent behaviour. They even sulkily acknowledge the many competing views: one 1997 study argues that video games increase children's IQ, others claim further evidence for the catharsis hypothesis or point out that the communal activities of video game hint-swapping among children aid socialisation.
Playing games isn't going to make you want to practise violence in real life. The skills aren't the same anyway. If I want to beat someone up, I can hardly use my Doom skills on them, because whacking them over the head with a mouse isn't going to hurt much. I'd be better off studying karate. And people who can't tell the difference between video game fiction and real life, like Harris and Klebold, are psychopaths, and they might equally be set off by a film, or a heavy-metal record played backwards. There's no accounting for nutters.
Video game enthusiasts should thank Anderson and Dill. They tried to prove that videogames are bad for you; but they ended up showing that they might make you a more relaxed human being. Thank goodness for that. Now, I'm feeling tense, frustrated and aggressive after all this irresponsible and inaccurate reporting, so if you'll excuse me, I'm off to fight someone to death with an enormous axe.
• Steven Poole's Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (Fourth Estate, £12) is out on May 18.
