Emmanuel Macron blamed video games for the violent riots in France. He isn’t the first one

The idea that video games create violent behaviour originated in 1976, after the release of the arcade video game Death Race, in which players would sit behind the wheel and drive over humanoid figures to win. (Photo by Piotrus via Wikimedia Commons 3.0)

Content warning: Contains mentions of suicide, mass shootings.

Paris is burning. On June 27, 2023, 17-year-old Nahel, a French-Algerian resident, was shot dead by a police officer when he tried to escape arrest. Since then, riots have spread across the country, with young people far beyond Paris taking to the streets to protest the shooting. Cars have been set on fire, buildings damaged and vandalized as thousands have lashed out against alleged racial profiling. According to the French ministry of the interior, the 2023 riots have already caused more damage and mobilized more security forces than the 2005 riots—which were sparked by an eerily similar incident.

Days later, French President Emmanuel Macron made an observation about the spreading unrest in his country at a press conference. He said that young rioters had been using social media, such as Snapchat and TikTok, as platforms to organize and orchestrate protests. He also said the rioters were “acting out the video games that have poisoned their minds” and the protests themselves were “a mimicking of violence, which for the youngest leads to a kind of disconnect from reality.”

Macron has been criticized on social media in the days since this event, for the reductive and simplistic nature of this argument. It’s a comment that seems particularly on the nose in the face of persistent police brutality—an issue that has been part of the French socio-political landscape for decades. And especially ridiculous given that in September 2022, Macron himself announced that France was to host two major eSports events in 2023 and 2024, including a Major Counter-Strike: Global Offensive competition.

But the French president is hardly the first to blame social ills on video games. In 1999, two twelfth-standard students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were the main perpetrators in the Columbine High School massacre, an early school shooting incident in Colorado, US—considered one of the deadliest mass shooting incidents at a high school in US history at the time. They murdered 12 students and a teacher, and even attempted a bombing, and eventually committed suicide.

Media reports after the incident suggested that violent video games such as Doom and Wolfenstein 3D influenced Harris and Klebold—even though further investigation revealed no such link between their acts and the games. Similarly, in 2003, the Rockstar North stealth psychological horror game Manhunt was held responsible for several untoward incidents in the UK, including the murder of a 14-year-old boy. There was public outcry against the video game which was believed to glorify violence and murder.

In 2016, the infamous Blue Whale Challenge was doing the rounds on social media—a disturbing online phenomenon that allegedly involved a series of tasks culminating in self-harm and suicide. It was initially believed to be linked to a video game, but that theory didn’t hold up in the long run.

In 2019, after two mass shootings in Ohio and Texas happened within the same week, then POTUS Donald Trump speechified to America that “we must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.”

Games like Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite and, yes, CounterStrike, have always had their share of blame: they’ve been accused of glorifying prostitution, drugs, murder, carjacking, guns and weaponry. But studies have repeatedly shown that the link between these role-playing games, their storylines and the real-life behaviour exhibited by players is tenuous at best.

In 2018, a study published by the nature journal Molecular Psychology found no difference in the levels of aggression exhibited by 77 volunteers who’d been divided into three groups, two of which were assigned to play GTA V and Sims 3 daily for 30 minutes. Nor did the researchers spot any significant difference in the volunteers levels of empathy, impulse control, levels of anxiety or depression.

A different study published by the American Psychological Association in 2019 concluded that people are more likely to blame violent video games as a cause of school shootings by white perpetrators than by African-American ones. Through an analysis of more than 2,00,000 news articles about 204 mass shootings over a 40-year period, researchers found that video games were eight times more likely to be mentioned when the shooting occurred at a school and the perpetrator was a white male.

“When a violent act is carried out by someone who doesn’t match the racial stereotype of what a violent person looks like, people tend to seek an external explanation for the violent behaviour,” said the lead researcher and psychology professor Patrick Markey. “When a white child from the suburbs commits a horrific violent act like a school shooting, then people are more likely to erroneously blame video games than if the child was African-American.”

If that observation points to the bias and prejudice that often accompany social inequality, others have explored the connection between video games and mental health. According to Tom Grimes, a Texas State journalism professor with a background in psychology and who has studied the role of media on violent behaviour extensively, there is significant research that shows that video games do not make well people psychologically ill.

Talking to KXAN, Grimes said: “That’s not to say that videogame playing doesn’t have psychological effects. But they aren’t psychopathological effects,” he explained. “Game playing can’t make well people sick. Would you shoot up an elementary school after playing a lot of videogames? The question and answer is that simple.”

The report goes on to cite research by the US National Institute of Justice-funded Violence Project, which found that 26 of the 136 mass shooters in the US since 1992 had played violent video games. Further, 22 of those 26 had at least one mental-health illness or demonstrated psychiatric disorder, even when not diagnosed.

The idea that video games create violent behaviour originated in 1976, after the release of the arcade video game Death Race, in which players would sit behind the wheel and drive over humanoid figures to win. Macron is just the latest in a long line of politicians, which also includes the Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, claiming the corruptive effects of video games, while ignoring much more endemic issues such as social and racial inequality.

Why do the powers that be continue to lay the blame on video games when there is abundant proof to refute their claims? Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University Florida, told NPR that if video games were the cause of rampant violence, then countries like Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, which consume more violent video games per capita, would be the primary sites of bloodshed and chaos. But they are actually the three most peaceful countries on the planet in terms of violent crime, Ferguson observed.

To blame video games is a way for elected leaders to get people talking about the wrong thing, the professor told NPR. Because when we’re busy blaming a role-playing simulation for the ills of society, we probably won’t be asking governments and elected representatives about their failed policies.