AUSTIN, Texas — Ryan Hill has been playing video games his entire life. His oldest son followed a similar path. And now his 6-year-old son has picked up the hobby.

“I was excited because this is a fun thing we can share together. He’s really going to love this,” Hill said.

Hill’s son has taken a liking to the video game Minecraft. 

“He actually introduced me,” Hill said. “I’d heard of it and had friends that played.”

His initial concern involved the amount of time his son was playing video games.

“You want to teach them how to moderate, which is not an easy thing to learn,” he said.

But a new concern came up when the child’s nanny found the boy playing a game involving the use of guns.

“You were shooting targets, but you were shooting them with realistic looking guns that you could modify, and she was really upset by that,” Hill recalled.

Hill says the two had a small conflict because he, like many gamers, didn’t buy into the idea that video game cause violence due to a lack of evidence.

“She said to me, ‘I think there is (evidence) now,’” Hill said.

The connection between video game violence and its connection to real-world violence has been studied for decades. The debate surrounding the topic arises and fizzles out whenever there is an act of mass violence. Most recently, the conversation renewed when Uvalde families sued Call of Duty developer Activision.

Research widely shows no connection between video games and mass shootings.

“You can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt the exposure to violence caused the violent behavior,” University of Michigan professor Dr. L. Rowell Huesmann said.  

The professor discusses this idea in his study, "Longitudinal Predictions of Young Adults’ Weapons Use and Criminal Behavior from their Childhood Exposure to Violence."

It states that a causal relationship between early exposure to violence and subsequent gun or other weapon use cannot be established because only a true experiment or random trial could do so, which involves ethical issues.  

“We are confident that exposure to violence increases the risk for violent behavior,” Huesmann said.

Huesmann and other researchers looked at whether kids who are exposed to violence are more likely to behave violently when they grow up.

The 10-year study collected data and interviews with high-risk youth in second, third and ninth grades in Michigan in 2006 and followed them as they aged.

The study, published in 2021, found that greater exposure to weapons violence between the ages of 7 and 18 predicts greater risk eight to 10 years later of behaving violently or believing that gun use is normal in many situations.

“We found that exposure to video game violence was a very significant predictor of behaving violently when they’d grow up to be adults,” Huesmann said. “Exposure to neighborhood violence was too.”

The science revolves around brain development and children learning to solve problems.

“The solution they come up with is the script for how they behave and if they do this over and over again that script becomes encoded in their brain and will be repeated,” Huesmann said.

Researchers ended up with roughly 1,000 video games during the study. They were named by the children and asked how long they played it. College students were trained and then played the games to rate them for violence on a 0 to 4 scale. Each game received a score from each rater and then researchers took the average score from the raters after doing some controls to remove invalid ratings.

“Top violence ratings would be games like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Halo,” Huesmann said.

Spectrum News asked Huesmann if he thought other shooter games with a more childlike appeal like Fortnite would land as a more violent game if this study was being done today.

“I do,” Huesmann explained. “It doesn’t matter if the characters look realistic or not, it’s the way they’re created to make the child identify with them.”

The study closes by saying reducing exposure to weapons violence across multiple contexts and addressing normative beliefs approving of weapons use would seem to be critical to enhancing the impact of family, community and school-based prevention programs targeting firearms violence specifically and youth violence more generally.  

Huesmann’s recommendation is parents prevent children from playing violent video games until they’re older teenagers. The researcher wanted to be clear that there are multiple factors involved when considering what causes or allows someone to be violent.

“No matter what we do about video games, media violence and so on, if we can’t do something about restricting the number of guns that are out there  —  particularly automatic rifles  — we’re going to have very sad mass shootings for a long time,” Huesmann said.

Hill has changed his mind set on violent video games since discussing the topic with his children’s nanny and doing his own research.

“I’m sure he’ll want to play games that are more violent when he gets older,” Hill said. “When that time comes, that’s another layer.”

As an experienced gamer, he’ll be a level ahead of other parents when it’s time to navigate that moment.