“I’m required to tell you, sir, that this game is rated M for blood and gore, intense violence, sexual themes, strong language, and drug use.” That was the message I got from the guy who sold me Crackdown. “I think you should stop playing that game. It’s way too violent.” That’s what I heard from a close friend of mine who heard me talk about the game.

I’ve written here before saying that I don’t really put much stock in the belief that violent video games make violent people, especially when the gamers in question are (like me) responsible, rational adults. As it turns out, maybe I was right:

University of Southern California sociologist Karen Sternheimer, who has been researching the topic since 1999, said blaming video games for youth violence fails to take into account other major factors.

“A symphony of events controls violence,” said Sternheimer, who began her research after some experts blamed the video game “Doom” for the gun rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado in which two students killed 13 people and then themselves.

…

Her research, which involved analyzing newspaper coverage and FBI statistics detailing trends on youth crime, found that in the 10 years after the release of “Doom” — and many other brutal-sounding titles — juvenile homicide arrest rates in the United States fell 77 percent.

…

“If we want to understand why young people become homicidal, we need to look beyond the games they play … (or) we miss some of the biggest pieces of the puzzle,” she said, listing community and family violence, suburban alienation and less parental involvement as other possible factors.

Saying that video games make people kill is almost as ludicrous as saying that guns make people into killers, and like guns, video games make an easy target. The problem with simply going after the easy target is that we don’t look deeper, and we never try to understand what’s really happening.