Moyer, M. W. (2018, October 2). Do Violent Video Games Trigger Aggression?



Moyer, M. W. (2018, October 2). Do Violent Video Games Trigger Aggression? 

Moyer does a fine job in being the devil’s advocate but does have a visible stance on the video game
violence debate. Throughout the article Moyer cites professors on both sides of the spectrum. She reviews
either advocates for or against the correlation between violent video games and real world violent actions.
Moyer seems to lean on the notion that video games do not have any link to increased violence in the real
world while also understanding the debate will not end for some time.
I agree with Moyer’s stance on the statistics regarding the affect video games have on pre-teen or adolescent violence in the real world. After reviewing controlled experiments, she states that “the meta-analysis reported an effect size of 0.08, which suggests that violent video games account for less than one percent of the variation in aggressive behavior among U.S. teens and pre-teens…”. Furthermore, she cites Johannes Breuer, a psychologist at GESIS, who says ““a common rule of thumb in psychological research,”” effect sizes below 0.1 are “considered trivial.”” While video games do have an impact on a person's violent tendencies, it is so small that, in a lack for better words, it does not matter.

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