Sixteen-year-old Evan Jones played his first violent videogames when he was 3. He slew demons in Diablo II, blasted Lovecraftian horrors in Quake and shot terrorists in Counter-Strike.

If you buy conventional wisdom, by now Jones should be a tightly wound coil of aggression, ready to attack someone at the slightest provocation. Instead, he’s a pretty laid-back kid.

“[I get] an adrenaline rush during the game, and the need to win, but afterwards it’s just fine,” the San Francisco Bay Area teen says of playing his current favorites, including the gory Killing Floor. “I see violent videogames as an outlet to aggression and stress,” Jones said in an e-mail to Wired.com, adding that he is not interested in violent movies or TV and doesn’t like real-life violence.

What’s going on here? Ever since the first black-and-white video games like Death Race—and particularly since the Columbine High School shootings—many concerned parents and politicians have argued that violent games are minefields for impressionable minors. Some scholars argue that there is a correlation between videogame gore and aggression in kids, while others say there is no such thing.

In 2005, California state Sen. Leland Yee authored a bill that would make it illegal for retailers to sell what the bill deemed “ultraviolent” videogames to anyone under 18. Such games already have the game industry’s voluntary “Mature” rating clearly printed on them, meaning that the games were meant for players 17 and up, but younger teens could legally purchase them.

Yee’s bill passed the California legislature, and then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed it into law. Foes sought an injunction, and the law was overturned in 2007. On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the law, holding that it violated the First Amendment rights of game publishers and minors.

Videogames are more sophisticated, more realistic, and sometimes more gruesome than ever. And yet, crimes among teens, including homicide, are on a 16-year slide, according to FBI data.

Parents are quietly deciding to let their kids play violent videogames, and nothing bad seems to be happening.

Ontario, Canada, resident Taylor Chisholm, 13, loves to play Call of Duty, the first-person shooter that has raked in more than $3 billion in revenue. “When I play games with shooting, I have fun. I doesn’t make me feel like I want to go out and start shooting other people, but it releases stress,” he said in an e-mail.

His parents slowly let M-rated games into the house, starting with Halo. “My husband played it first. ‘The blood looks like jelly,’ he reported... The game wasn’t that bad,” said Taylor’s mom, Astra Groskaufmanis, in an e-mail.

This is not a cheerful time to be coming of age in America.

Tim Berglund, a Denver parent, took a slightly more scientific approach. He read numerous magazine articles describing how violent videogames might affect teens, and decided his son, Zach, couldn’t play first-person shooters until he was 14.

“I made a judgment about approximately how old he had to be before the formative influence of spending your recreational hours aiming and shooting at human figures was small enough to be outweighed by the highly positive utility of how dang fun shooters are,” Berglund said in an e-mail.

Still, when Zach spends too many hours at the screen—no matter what game he’s playing—he’s a little surly afterward. His dad chalks it up to the fact that videogames have guaranteed rewards, while real life is much more tedious. Usually, separating Zach from his games for a week is enough to sweeten his mood, Berglund said.

Many, possibly most, teens play violent videogames, and some think that’s a good thing. In 2003, writer Gerard Jones authored Killing Monsters, a book in which he argues that kids in stressful, turbulent times need outlets—ones that match the intensity of what they’re facing in reality. That has only intensified in the ensuing eight years, Jones said in an e-mail.

“For the world of adolescents, [reality has] mostly gotten more stressful and bleaker,” he said, citing the dire economy, stressed-out parents, the increasing demands of public education and two lengthy wars in the Middle East. “This is not a cheerful time to be coming of age in America. The need for escape, the need for fantasies of potency, and the need for a community of peers is greater than it’s been in a long time.”

Violent videogames provide exactly that kind of escape, giving kids “an arena where they can play with fantasies of danger, aggression and conflict, developing a feeling of mastery that can serve as an antidote, or at least a necessary break, from daily anxieties,” Jones said. The increasingly social nature of gaming also helps kids forge important friendships, he said.

Are violent games good for you?

The video game industry has made every effort to restrict sales of Mature-rated games to minors. In the Federal Trade Commission’s most recent secret-shopper survey, conducted between November 2010 and January 2011, 87 percent of teens 13 to 16 who attempted to buy an M-rated game were turned away at the cash register. This is better than every other industry: In the same study, 64 percent of the teens could buy CDs with “parental advisory” stickers, 33 percent were admitted to R-rated movies and 38 percent could buy R-rated DVDs without a hassle.

George Rose, chief public policy officer for Activision and Blizzard, told a Commonwealth Club crowd in San Francisco last March that game companies have gotten store clerks fired for selling M-rated games to buyers under 18.

“The videogame industry has absolutely gotten better at enforcing their rating system,” Yee said in an e-mail. “With that said, the recent FTC study equates to millions of kids purchasing M-rated games every year, which is unacceptable.” Yee says his goal is to make sure “parents are involved in the process.”

Overall, that’s already true. A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study found that 97 percent of teens play videogames. However, the average game buyer is 41 years old, and parents are present 93 percent of the time a videogame is purchased, says Dan Hewitt, spokesman for the Entertainment Software Association.

In 2010, 17 percent of all videogames sold were rated Mature, according to the NPD Group. There’s no way to know how many of those are played by teens, Hewitt said.

Another thing that has changed since Yee’s bill passed is that academics are finding more and more evidence that violent games have a neutral, or even positive, influence on players.

University of Rochester researchers found that gamers who played 50 hours of the first-person shooters Call of Duty or Unreal Tournament were significantly better at making quick, accurate decisions than those who played 50 hours of the nonviolent, slow-paced Sims 2.

Jayne Gackenbach of Grant McEwan University in Edmonton said that post-war soldiers slept better at night and suffered fewer nightmares if they played combat games such as Call of Duty. This suggests that violent games might provide relief for other players who have experienced similar levels of stress.

Doug Gentile, a researcher with the University of Iowa whose work has predominantly linked violent videogames with poor outcomes for kids, has noted that any negative effects of violent games could be wiped out when gamers play cooperatively with friends or family.

Mike Ward, who studies violent videogames and communities for the University of Texas at Arlington, recently co-authored a study with Scott Cunningham and Benjamin Engelstätter that found that US counties with more videogame stores had lower juvenile violent-crime rates. In another study with similar findings, Ward went on to theorize that teens predisposed to unruly behavior may play violent videogames instead of getting aggressive in real life.

Most teens are surly sometimes. They talk back to their parents or pick on younger siblings. Among the teens I’ve surveyed, 71 percent said they use videogames to blow off steam. Another 14 percent said they’ve tried, but they don’t play well when they’re frustrated or angry.

This suggests that teen players have a strong sense of whether they need violent videogames, and which ones they want. In the same survey, 55 percent said they had encountered one or more games that were too intense or scary for them to keep playing. The other 45 percent had either stayed away from such games, or found that no games were too much for them. In all cases, they knew their limits.

Raven Laddish, a 15-year-old from San Francisco, decided she didn’t want to play the Grand Theft Auto games after watching friends play them. “Those types of games don’t really appeal to me,” she said. “I just don’t feel that it’s a good message to send to teens.”

Evan Jones had a similar experience when he was younger. “I did stop playing Doom 3 when I was 9,” he said, “because it was scary... and I was 9.”

Beth Winegarner is an author and journalist based in San Francisco. She is writing a book for parents on the most controversial teen influences.