Do violent games like GTA create violent kids?

While early reviews of Grand Theft Auto IV herald it as a masterpiece, some familiar anti-violence advocates are already up in arms.

Florida attorney Jack Thompson has called GTA IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio" and California’s state senator Leland Yee recently put out a press release in which he implored parents not to buy the game for their kids.

Are they right? Do violent video games fuel youth violence?

A pair of Harvard University researchers says no.

Drs. Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner conducted a three-year-long study on the effects of video games on young teenagers and concluded that playing video games is not as bad as it’s often suggested.

"If you listen to the politicians and the pundits, the relationship is blindingly clear: playing violent video games leads children to engage in real-world violence or, at the very least, to become more aggressive," write Drs. Olson and Kutner in Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do. "In fact, much of the information in the popular press about the effects of violent video games is wrong."

Drs. Kutner and Olson, co-directors of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media and co-authors of Grand Theft Childhood were online for an hour.

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