Many people often reference violent video games as a factor in motivating violent youth crimes such as high school shootings in the US.

Some people that believe this choose to reference cases of such action from many years ago. One of these references is to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. One of the students involved in the shooting named his gun ‘Arlene’ – allegedly after a character inspired in a computer game ‘Doom’.

However, on the other end of the spectrum, people that play these same graphically violent games do not refer to violence. In fact, as stated in a “Science Alert” article, over the last century (2000-2015), the only trend that cropped up was an increase in consumption of violent video games correlated with a decrease in youth violence.