They make kids fat and they turn children into murderers! It’s time the media put down the pitch forks and stop promoting the negative stereotypes attached to the gaming community.

Research conducted on video games found that over 85% of games contain some violence, and approximately half of video games include serious violent actions. The media blames video games for promoting violent behaviour in children and to some degree I believe they do. But to discriminate an entire community based on a select few which also had various other factors contributing to the violence, to me, doesn’t make sense. One article suggests that, once family violence exposure was controlled, no correlational relationship between violent game exposure and violent criminal behaviours remained. Another researcher studying the attitudes of violence in video games of gamers and non-gamers found that “the widest gaps in attitudes surround whether games provide cognitive and social benefits. The only role that non-gamers more frequently identify than gamers is that video games cause violence in society – a perceived negative consequence.”

As with most topics, there are many researchers finding a relationship, either causal or correlational between video game violence and aggression and there are some saying there are benefits of video games.

Video games have been researched heavily in regards to the effect that they have on the brain and the outcomes are quite excellent.

First things first they can actually help improve motor skills. Australia’s Deakin University have found that pre-schoolers who play interactive video games, such as the Wii, have better motor skills.

The results showed that object control motor skills, such as kicking, catching, throwing a ball, were better in the children who played interactive games.

Dr. Lisa Barnett, lead researcher on the study, stated that adults who play video games have also been observed to have better motor skills than non-gamers.

Another study on how video games affect the brain saw German researchers ask 23 adults with a median age of 25 to play “Super Mario 64″ for 30 minutes a day over a period of two months. A separate control group did not play video games at all.

By examining the brains of the two groups using an MRI machine, they found that the gaming group had a rise in grey matter in the right hippocampus, right prefrontal cortex and the cerebellum — areas of the brain responsible for spatial navigation, memory formation, strategic planning and fine motor skills in the hands.

Study leader Simone Kühn said that “while previous studies have shown differences in brain structure of video gamers, the present study can demonstrate the direct causal link between video gaming and a volumetric brain increase. This proves that specific brain regions can be trained by means of video games.”

Kühn and her colleagues concluded that video games could potentially be used as a therapy for patients with mental disorders that cause brain regions to shrink or be altered. Such diseases include schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s.

Researchers from the University of Iowa found that playing a brain-teasing game for just two hours a week may help slow the degree of mental decay associated with the natural aging process.

The study tested 681 healthy individuals aged 50 years and older revealed that playing 10 hours of a specially designed video game was able to stall the natural decline of different cognitive skills by up to seven years, in some cases.

Contrary to popular belief, recent research has suggested that antisocial behaviour in video games actually may make players more morally sensitive, rather than less.

Previous research has found that committing immoral acts in video games can elicit feelings of guilt in players, but a new study led out of the University of Buffalo has found that “performing evil deeds in games can also increase moral sensitivity in players. This, in turn, may lead to these players displaying more prosocial behaviour in real-life”.

Far Cry 4 allows players to throw corpses in a truck. I felt horrible after doing this.

Basically, killing a bunch of dudes in a game makes you feel really bad about it so you’re a lot nicer to real people.

The recent co-op shooter by Bungie, Destiny was the first online game that I played. Now I don’t say this often but this is my all-time favourite game and this is mainly due to the co-op aspects of the game. I have made friends through Destiny that I will have with me for hopefully the rest of my life and the game has helped me develop my communication skills.

In the raid which requires six people to go through three levels of intense shooting and requires all players to work together to achieve the goal, you have five other people talking to you at once so communication becomes vital to the success of the mission.

The goal is to kill Atheon and get a tonne of awesome loot but that’s only the cherry on top. Having five other voices in your head can get a little distracting but with the right people, the experience of working together is something I will have with me for the rest of my life.

Video games and video game culture have often been seen negatively in the mainstream media. But what people need to understand is that, like many groups, there are a select few who give the rest of us a bad name.

In the gaming culture these people intentionally go out of their way to hurt another person or group by verbal abuse and can sometimes end up in physical threats. Unfortunately for the rest of us, we are the ones who get the flak for their behaviour as mainstream media picks up on this and creates panic in the mainstream public. Most recently this can be explained by the ‘Gamer Gate’ controversy.

What started out as a hashtag used to shed light on ethical corruption of video game journalism, quickly turned into a frenzy of death and rape threats. Developer Brianna Wu and game critic Anita Sarkeesian have been the main target of these threats and even had their home addresses and numbers hacked and revealed to the public. Sarkeesian recently had to cancel a talk at Utah State University after a threat of a mass shooting and Utah state law prohibits the university from screening the audience for weapons. Adi Robertson, who writes for the technology website The Verge, told PRI that the people who are making these threats and giving the industry a bad name are just “an incredibly tiny fraction. Even if you’re talking about people who tend to call themselves ‘hardcore gamers.’ I’d still say it’s a tiny fraction.”

Further research has found that in order to diminish the stigma attached to video games, researchers must address how video games enter into people’s everyday lives. Normalising video games for all audiences, finding ways to emphasise their ‘everydayness’ in contemporary media culture, is a more productive approach to demands for representation of the genre.

It has been proven that while violence in video games can promote violent behaviour, there are also positive benefits of video games and they should not be shunned but monitored so as to create a safe environment for all gamers.