According to BNI Treatment of California, “(a) recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology looked at 167 young adults who self reported as either non-gamers, non-violent gamers, or violent gamers, using an online questionnaire and the Levinson’s Psychopathy Scale. There was a link reported between heavy violent video game exposure and decreased practice of empathy, immature moral reasoning skills, moral disengagement. In reviewing existing studies, the authors found that violent video games can lead to negative behaviors, such as pathological lying, manipulative behavior, lack of impulse control, irresponsibility, and immediate reward seeking. These traits can give rise to such antisocial behaviors as aggression and delinquency.”
These effects are compounded by the nature of current video games. “Modern video games are extremely life like – a far cry from the old games of the past. These video games use highly sophisticated graphics to produce lifelike imagery, including the characters that populate the games. This means, too, that the violent scenes of death and destruction are also quite graphic.” .
Harvard Medical School’s Blog gives this description of these violent games; “Blood and gore. Intense violence. Strong sexual content. Use of drugs. These are just a few of the phrases that the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) uses to describe the content of several games in the Grand Theft Auto series, one of the most popular video game series among teenagers. The Pew Research Center reported in 2008 that 97% of youths ages 12 to 17 played some type of video game, and that two-thirds of them played action and adventure games that tend to contain violent content. (Other research suggests that boys are more likely to use violent video games, and play them more frequently, than girls.) A separate analysis found that more than half of all video games rated by the ESRB contained violence, including more than 90% of those rated as appropriate for children 10 years or older.”
Based upon these facts, “(t)he view endorsed by organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) is that exposure to violent media (including video games) can contribute to real-life violent behavior and harm children in other ways.”
It is indisputable that games like Grand Theft Auto encourage their players to engage in acts of violence eerily similar to that perpetrated by Ayala and Keys. There are even tutorials available on line to educate players on how best to accomplish maximum mayhem.
For instance, this video shows the gamer how best to use a machete to cut down pedestrians while driving a motorbike through the streets of a city. Then there is this video which shows you various methods for “killing” a player’s Avatar, including striking them with a motor vehicle.
Meanwhile, on Facebook, you can view this scene of a bicyclist being hit by a car traveling at 100 MPH, sending the bicyclist flying through the air, and landing against a building in a pool of blood.
Further, in this Player’s Blog, a poster’s topic is, “I hit a bicyclist and he landed in the bed of my truck,” complete with a link to a screen shot taken of the “deceased.” One commentator added, “Happened something similar during a mission where you have to drive around a truck…Hit a bike and the man landed on the roof of the truck. I went off road and drove off a cliff because I was laughing.”
As we stated, we have not been informed that Ayala and Keys were aficionados of Grand Theft Auto, or that they were gamers at all. But given the high percentage of people in their age category who engage in video games, as well as the close resemblance between their actions and the havoc readily available to those who play this or similar games, the odds are extremely high that both have played blood soaked games of this nature in the past.
Further, it is not our intention to single out a particular video game as being responsible for the death of Andreas Probst. Grand Theft Auto is only one of many hundreds of violent games available across the world.
This analysis is also not an effort in any way to excuse or justify the conduct of these cold-bloodied murders. But if we want to understand how such a lack of empathy or compassion could develop in such young men, we need look no further than the entertainment center hooked up to the television set in our own living rooms for at least one possible explanation.
Judge John Wilson (ret.) served on the bench in NYC
Photo: Pixabay