Games Second

Hey All,

It’s been a long time but I’ve been out and I haven’t really seen anything come across the wire in a while. However this graph from the front page of digg caught my attention:

If you want to see a bigger version of this please go backtrack the picture link.

As you can see the total rate of violent crime, as tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics has gone down over time, particularly when violent video games have hit the market.

Whether video games have done anything to reduce violent crime is absolutely debatable. It could have been the economy (stupid)* which picked up in the 1990s bolstered by the credit boom of the early 2000s that turned people off to crime. There is a theory of how poverty leads to crime, btw, but it has largely been buried or replaced by other ones (such as Left Realism) which replace crime with lack of opportunity and socio-economical repression. I would say that while the disparity between “rich” (top 10%) and “poor” (bottom half?) grew in the 90s and tech bubble, so did opportunity. So we all gained (even if some gained more than others).

Family activities may also have played a role. A AOL study reports that over 50% of parents surveyed responded that they spend some time during the week playing video games with their children, with over half intergenerational players spending over an hour with their kids. Wow. Do we even spend that much time together eating dinner each week?

In short there are a lot of things that could have contributed to the decline in violent crime. More money and opportunity, perhaps, or maybe it could have been the result of little Johnny spending less time getting hounded at the dinner table about his daily activities and more time assaulting covenant Battle cruisers in Halo 3 online with Mom, Dad, and lil’ Sis that kept him from assaulting his next door neighbor.

*this is not to say the economy is stupid, or believing that violent crime reduction is affected by economic conditions is stupid, it’s not, but instead this is meant to point fun at the political commentators who will blame everything from your political decisions to the weather on the economy. As in “It’s the economy, stupid”.