For French President Emmanuel Macron, the violent clashes that broke out after a teenager was shot dead by police last week have been influenced, at least in part, by violent video games.
Ludovic Marin/AP
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Ludovic Marin/AP
For French President Emmanuel Macron, the violent clashes that broke out after a teenager was shot dead by police last week have been influenced, at least in part, by violent video games.
Ludovic Marin/AP
Fueled by anger over the police killing of a teenager during a routine traffic stop in June, crowds of young people in France have lashed out at alleged racial discrimination and called for greater police accountability.
Over the past week, protesters have set thousands of cars on fire, attacked schools, town halls, police stations, banks and businesses, and set fire to nearly a thousand buildings. Some in the Paris suburb of L’Hay-les-Roses crashed a burning car into the mayor’s house. Damage estimates have been projected to be approximately $1.1 billion. As a result, thousands of young people have been arrested since the riots began in the days after the murder of 17-year-old Nahel M. on June 27. According to the French Ministry of the Interior, the average age of those arrested is 17 years.
The crisis has exposed deep rancor within marginalized and often low-income communities over discrimination: Nahel is of North African descent. — and a general lack of opportunity.
President Emmanuel Macron has mainly blamed social media for the devastation, but has also claimed that video games have inspired violence and vandalism.
“Sometimes it feels like some of them are experiencing, on the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them,” Macron. saying at a press conference on July 1.
He added that the protesters are using Snapchat and TikTok to organize and spread “a mimicry of violence, which for the youngest leads to a kind of disconnection from reality.”
World leaders resort to an outdated explanation
Concerns that video games promote shootings, massacres or riots are now half a century old; has been traced to 1976 release of “The Death Race”, an arcade video game that puts players behind the wheel of a car to shoot down humanoid figures for points. The storyline gained renewed strength in the 1990s with the release of far more realistic first-person shooters.
It’s an old coconut that politicians have clung to after terrible tragedies. But it has become less common as many studies have largely concluded that there are there is no causal link between video games and violent behavior.
Still, that hasn’t stopped world leaders from trying to draw a correlation between the two. Just three months ago, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized video games for “teaching children to kill.”
“I doubt there’s an eight, nine, 10, 12-year-old kid who isn’t used to spending a lot of time playing this crap,” he told a conference addressing hate speech on social media. (His son later apologized for his father’s comments and said that neither he nor his brothers had become violent as a result of playing video games).
In 2019, following two masses shthings that happened just a few days apart, one in Dayton, Ohio and another in El Paso, Texas, President Donald Trump told the United States that “we must stop the glorification of violence in our society.”
He added: “This includes the gruesome and creepy video games that are now commonplace.”
Experts stress that video games do not cause violent crime
Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the impact of these types of games on the public, said he is surprised by Macron’s comments. The president is 45 years old and belongs to a generation raised on video games, so “to see him mention this is almost anachronistic,” Ferguson said, perplexed.
“The evidence is very clear. Whatever is happening in France, whatever violence is happening, it is certainly not due to violence in video games.”
Decades of research, especially long-term experiments spanning decades, have consistently found “that playing violent video games does not cause even joke-level aggressive behavior, let alone violent crime,” Ferguson said.
He also noted that overall violent crime in the US dropped significantly between 1993 and 2020, the same period during which violent video games skyrocketed in popularity.
And it’s not just in the United States. TO study 2019 from the University of Oxford determined that the first violent video games among British adolescents do not predict serious or violent criminal behavior later in life.
According to Ferguson, if video games were the cause of rampant violence, then countries like Japan, South Korea, and the Netherlands, which consume more violent video games per capita, would be plagued with bloodshed.
“Instead, they are three of the most peaceful countries on the planet in terms of violent crime,” he said.
Ferguson explained that factors that can predict violent behavior tend to be difficult family environments where there is abuse or neglect, poverty, and mental health disorders. “Just being in a bad neighborhood where your chances of getting ahead and having equal chances in society seem pretty remote,” she said.
They are the kind of problems that require deep political and social changes, he said.
“You could wave a magic wand and take all video games away from these people, and that won’t have any effect in any way that helps their lives and reduces their aggression,” Ferguson said.
So why do politicians resort to the familiar refrain? Ferguson said it’s a way for elected leaders to deflect blame for failed government policies.
“It makes people talk about the wrong things. They are thinking about video games. They are not thinking about gun control or the inequalities that are happening in France,” Ferguson said.