Sj0's Journal: Violence in Gaming: hype versus statistic

I'm going to tell you something right now.

It's something Jack Thompson doesn't want you to know.

It's something the mainstream media doesn't like to talk about.

It's a dirty little secret that a cottage industry of, who sell themselves to TV stations who hope to strike fear in viewers, to clients who want to engage in frivilous lawsuits to capitalise on tragedy, and to small-minded special interest groups who want to erode our freedoms to pursue their agendas.

Ready for that secret?

The United States Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) counts five categories of crime as violent crimes: murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. According to BJS figures, the rate of violent crime victimization in the United States declined by more than half between the years 1991 and 2005.

Isn't that interesting? In the years since Doom first came on the market, violent crime has fallen in half! Rather odd for a piece of work supposedly bringing about all this violence in the world.

Well, let's look at another year. Duke Nukem 3d and Quake were both released in 1996. Surely, with such ultra-violence, that year would have shown a spike in violent crime! Actually, there was a 4% drop in violent crime between 1995 and 1996.

But Grand Theft Auto, the game that has so corrupted our children that we can't possibly recover! The game is destroying America, and there's no possibility that the violent crime went down after this game was released! What's that? Violent crime dropped 2%?

I could keep going on, but the fact is, violent crime went down nearly EVERY year between 1991 and 2005, despite the supposedly crippling effects of video games, and despite the fact that more people started playing violent video games between those times than any other time.

Basically, there's nothing to defend. There's no violence epidemic being fueled by video games. This discussion, as far as I'm concerned, is over.