14 DAY TRIAL // London has been affected by a number of riots for four days already and a number of other cities in the United Kingdom have also been affected and already some news outlets have pointed to video games as being one of the possible causes for the chaos created by gangs of youngsters bent on destruction.
But Christopher Ferguson, who is an associate professor at Texas A&M International University, has told Eurogamer that, “According to Moral Panic Theory, this in fact is rather expected. Many moral panics focus on crime particularly among youth, and typically the broader society searches for 'boogeymen' who can be blamed for real or imagined (most often imagined) violent 'epidemics' among youth.”
The professor has been looking at the links between violence in video games and actual behaviour for some time and adds, “Western society has a long tradition of media-based moral panics from the Greeks to the present day. Everything from Greek plays to dime novels, comic books, Elvis Presley, Dungeons and Dragons, Harry Potter and video games (I suspect social media may be the next boogeyman in line).”
The link between GTA and the riots seems to have first suggested by a police constable who talked to the Evening Standard, bemoaning the days when young people were only exposed to Pac-Man and board games.
Actual research has not yet uncovered a causal link between video games, especially the violent ones, and an increase in actual violent behavior in the real world.
Actually since video games have become widely available and the majority of the adult population has engaged with them the numbers of violent crimes statistically recorded have actually gone down.
Most of the commentators have pointed to cuts in social services and in community outreach coupled with outrage at the police shooting an alleged criminal as the original cause of the riots, with the follow-up events mainly linked to copycats.