The publishers of video games such games as Doomand Grand Theft Auto joined US President Donald Trump Thursday, in a White House roundtable discussion about violent video games and whether they play a part in desensitizing some players and contribute to the likelihood they might commit violence.
The meeting comes in the wake of last month's shooting at a school in Florida in which 17 people lost their lives.
President Trump has in the past expressed the view that violent games were "shaping young people's thoughts".
But the games industry has defended itself, saying there is no evidence to suggest a link between violent games and real-life violent actions.
President Trump spent an hour talking to partisans on both sides of the violent video game debate, without any sort of conclusive outcome. The White House also ran a reel of violent video game footage.
“I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts,” Trump said.
The most provocative thing about the meeting may have been the presentation of an 88-second reel of footage from violent video games. It contains footage from M-rated games such as Wolfenstein, Fallout 4, and Call of Duty, including the notorious No Russian mission that allowed players to witness or participate in a massacre of civilians at an airport. The video is currently hosted on the White House’s YouTube page, unlisted. The clips appear to be ripped from YouTubers’ footage of the game as well as from the gaming outlet Giant Bomb.
Early in the meeting, clips of violent games were displayed for the attendees to watch and while the clips played on, he (Trump) was pointing out how violent those scenes were.
Melissa Henson, program director for the PTC, noted that during the meeting it was understood that the entertainment industry is still fighting to maintain the status quo and is not ready or willing to confront the impact that media violence has on youths.
While the PTC’s position is that science shows that video games can cause aggression, there has been no scientifically proven link between games and violence, let alone school shootings.
Decades of research has failed to come up with any correlation between violent video games and actual violence. The ESA, as well as many players of violent video games, have pointed out that violent games are popular globally but that gun violence is only rampant in the United States.
Even the PTC, in a conference call, ranked violent media (including movies and TV) as its third-leading contributor to gun violence, trailing access to guns by those who shouldn’t have them, followed by mental health.
Henson said in a conference afterwards that “the tone in the meeting was information-gathering. It was a fact-finding meeting.” Attendees described the expected clash of views, with the gaming people standing by the rating system and saying games aren’t the problem, while the violent-game critics asserting that violent games are bad for kids.
It’s unclear what, if anything, will happen next. A similar listening session hosted in early 2013 by vice president Joe Biden, following the Sandy Hook school massacre in the fall of 2012 went nowhere.
This meeting, which ended just before Trump’s announcement of his controversial steel tariffs, also concluded with a whimper. “We just sort of all shook hands,” Henson said. “ I think the door was left open for further conversations about this.”
