Sydney- It's an urban myth that playing violent video games makes children more aggressive. That's the conclusion Australian researcher Grant Devilly came to after reading the literature and studying the behaviour of 120 school kids in Melbourne aged 11 to 15.
"If you have a quite hyper kid, they will come down after playing a bit, but for the rest of the kids, the vast majority, it makes no difference at all in their general aggression rate," Devilly said.
His finding was that those predisposed to violence, and who were more reactive to their environments, changed their behaviour after playing a violent video game. Some became aggressive and some did not.
"The majority of people didn't increase in aggression at all - and we are not the first people to find that," Devilly said.
The Swinbourne University study, published in the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, relied on monitoring the behaviour of children after a 20-minute session with the violent video game Quake II.
