Study Linking Video Games And Violence Retracted

Trending News: The Link Between Gaming And Gun Violence Just Got Shot Down

Long Story Short

Good news: six hours spent bingeing on Call of Duty probably won't lead you to a murderous rampage, upon the retraction of a famous study used by video game opponents to support a link between games and violence.

Long Story

A study back in 2012 suggested that playing a lot of video games with first-person shooting trained you to use guns in real life.

But the study, titled "'Boom, Headshot!': Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy," has now been retracted because of “irregularities” with its data.

The man behind the study was Brad Bushman, from Ohio State University. Bushman has produced several studies on violence and the media and even served as a member of Barack Obama’s committee on gun violence in the good old days when he was president of the United States.

On his website, it states that Bushman’s research has “challenged several myths,” such as the argument that violent media only has a trivial effect in aggression – and, ironically, that one of his co-workers calls him the “myth-buster”.

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Bushman argued that people who played a lot of games with headshots using a digital handgun more accurately score headshots on mannequins afterwards, using real handguns. He concluded:

“Habitual exposure to violent shooting games also predicted shooting accuracy. Thus, playing violent shooting video games can improve firing accuracy and can influence players to aim for the head.”

In fact, he starts the study off by saying: “Video games are excellent training tools”. But this myth-buster has been busted; a number of researchers have now debunked his findings.

It was thanks to the efforts of researchers Patrick Markey and Malte Elson, from Villanova University and Ruhr University Bochum respectively, that the study has been properly questioned.

They argued that Bushman’s findings were wrong, and managed to get the University of Ohio to issue a retraction – which Bushman eventually agreed to.

So unfortunately, the only skills that video games will hone is your ability to justify sitting in one position all day. Still – at least you’re not a self-proclaimed myth-buster caught out telling myths.

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Aiming into the toilet still improves shooting skills though, right?

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Video games generated more than $25bn in the United States last year.