Help me answer the question whether videogames cause violence

[Augen]

Psychotic said:

Augen said:
The issue tends to be showing a correlation. Some people may become desensitized to violence in gaming and be susceptible to acts. The problem is that these kind of minds in the absence of games could easily be affected by other stimuli in the same fashion.

In large numbers gaming has not shown to make cultures more violent. If anything we are less violent than our ancestors. However, there are other factors at play so I wouldn't jump to games causing us to be less violent.

We have been violent for thousands of years due to our brain development, it is humans burden to overcome their own violent nature. Good news is we're getting better, bad news is we have a ways to go.

But the truth is most of the research does conclude there is a causal relationship between media violence and real-life one. True, the critics of those stuides do point out major methodological errors in those studies, but still... I didn't read them (as I would have to buy them for a lot of money), so I can't ell if that's true and it's hard to sound unbiased when you disregard so many peer-reviewed studies.

I think there are dozens if not hundreds of factors that make a person or society more or less violent.    

If you removed games would we become less violent?  Were we less violent before games?  Are cultures without games less violent?

My guess is cultural stability and education weigh about a thousand times more than media does in how we act.