A man cries out. As he dies, a sublime smile flashes across the killer's face.

On to the next victim...

Sometimes she pounds them. Sometimes she freezes them. And as the body count rises, Carolin Esser, a Stetson University junior, knows she has to stop.

But she's having too much fun.

Whether it’s the wildly popular Assassin’s Creed or Mortal Kombat series as Esser was playing at a laboratory for studying the psychology of video games, most video games revolve around a simple plot: You have an objective, but someone's standing in your way. While you may be able to sneak around or negotiate with your antagonist, it’s often easier — and a Stetson University study says, more fun — to kill him.

But does playing violent video games cause violent behavior?

The study’s co-author, Stetson psychology professor Chris Ferguson, said that while cause is difficult to prove, there’s no correlation.

Ferguson and John Colwell, a professor of psychology at the University of Westminster in London, surveyed more than 300 children from the United Kingdom in 2014 for a link between video games and antisocial behavior. They recently published their findings in the Psychology of Popular Media Culture’s scholastic journal.

“There’s an ongoing idea that exposure to violent video games leads to more bullying and antisocial behavior,” said Ferguson, 45. “That’s not what we found. There actually was an inverse correlation between games and civic volunteering.”

Concerned parents, religious groups and organizations like the Parent’s Television Council have long contended violent games make people violent.

Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, a nonpartisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment, dismissed Ferguson, who's written other papers with similar conclusions dismissing a link between video games and real-world violence.

“He is a media violence crusader 'wolf' dressed in scholarly 'sheep’s' clothing,” he wrote in an emailed statement.

The organization didn't provide any evidence to contradict the study’s findings. One who did was Deborah Nichols Linebarger, associate professor of human development at Purdue University who believes there is a link between video games and violence. A study she published in 2015 showed nonviolent games were associated with fewer behavior problems, especially with high-risk kids. The degree of the link depends on a number of factors in which violent video game use occurs, she said.

“The magnitude and nature of any effects is going to depend on an individual child and his family, the specific content, and when, how, with whom the video games are played,” Linebarger said. “If we approach it that way, we can begin to make decisions about who can benefit and who might be more adversely affected.”

In recent years opposition groups have been fighting an uphill battle. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games are considered a form of free speech. The court's majority argued there wasn’t enough evidence to show video games caused harm to minors. Opposition groups also face a power higher than the court: the dollar.

Violence sells, and estimates place the global video game market at almost $100 billion. In the U.S., about 145 million Americans played some sort of video game in 2011, according to statista.com. That source also found that about one-third of American gamers are between the ages of 8 and 18, and they spend 73 minutes a day playing video games.

Whether all that game time is devoted to murder and mayhem depends, in part, on how violent games are defined. In the Stetson study, that definition wasn't limited to the gory, graphic games but also included “any game that involves one creature doing something aggressive towards another,” Ferguson said.

By that metric, Pokémon and Angry Birds are violent games, he said.

“Theoretically, it doesn’t matter how graphic (a game) is. Pac Man should make you as violent as Grand Theft Auto 5,” Ferguson said. “The fact that you’re doing naughty things to a creature over and over again (should) make you more aggressive.”

The study says it doesn’t.

“Overall, our results do not lend evidence to the belief that violent video games contribute negative outcomes in youth,” the study says. The only significant projector of antisocial attitudes is gender, and across the board males are likely to be more antisocial, the study says.

Case closed.

Not so fast: For every study that says video games don't contribute to violent behavior, there’s one that says they do. On that, the two professors agreed.

All studies have limits and Ferguson said this one is by no means definitive.

“There’s no such thing as a study that proves anything,” he said. “It’s just one piece of evidence. One piece among many that suggests previous fears of video games were probably misplaced.”

For his part, Ferguson’s not new to the debate. He began studying video game violence back in 1999 after reports on the Columbine massacre said the teens played “DOOM” a violent first-person-shooter video game.

The argument isn’t new, either. Every preceding generation blames a scapegoat for the youth that’s run amok, Ferguson said.

Depending on your age, it could be comic books or Elvis’s gyrating hips. Go back far enough and you find that the Greek philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death in 399 B.C. for corrupting Athenian youth, Ferguson noted.

“It’s mostly moral objections driven by age and generation,” he said. “People tend to be frightened by stuff they don’t understand. This is just another moral panic.”

So if it’s not the video games, what’s causing the violence?

Ferguson and Linebarger both said that genetics, culture and the home environment are factors in predicting violent behavior.

“It usually comes down to real events going on in a real environment, not fictional things going on in a book or TV or game,” Ferguson said.

As to what will finally end the debate, Ferguson said that will happen, “when the old people die.” And then something else will rise to take it's place.

“As we age, it’s sort of natural to become anxious and we want our kids to do we what we want,” he said. “There’s really no point to it. You’re not going to stop it. You can criticize it all you want, but usually the criticism makes (what you're criticizing) more popular.”