Do Video Games Cause Violence?

Today I will be discussing the argument that video games cause violence.

There is a common argument going around recently that video games cause violence this argument is discussed wildly across social media and in American broadcast news.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/09/18/do-games-like-grand-theft-auto-v-cause-real-world-violence/#3d6247553241

This article states that "it's kind of hard not to make a connection [between games and the Navy Yard shooting] when you hear [the shooter's] friend saying that he would watch on a life size screen these violent video games for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours." this article backs up the argument that video games cause violence by claiming that the shooter was addicted to video games and "Not everyone can draw lines between fiction and reality." however it also sees the argument that these cases could be a coincidence and could be due to "untreated mental illness" which the article says was a common thread between lots of the shooters.

However, the arguments that were brought up in this article are only really taken through a thought process and don't have any really ideas to back them up, other than a loose connection that someone who committed a mass shooting played lots of video games.

This video by AsapSCIENCE addresses the discussion by using a couple scientific studies completed in the past, the first experiment tests to see whether people have a higher recognition speed of vehicles or animals depending on the type of game that the person had played beforehand, they found in the end that there seemed to be no correlation between what game they played and the recognition speed, indicating that video games don't have a long term affect on the mind.

A problem I see with this argument is how shallow it is, it doesn't go into enough depth and only tested the effects of gaming in the short term, as they only played the games for short while rather than testing if long term exposure to games that are actually violent rather than cat and mouse.

This meme found on Reddit by u/ChurchofPancake pokes fun at the exaggerated idea that video games cause violence as not all video games are violent, FarmVille is a game about peacefully tending to and harvesting crops, and the idea that this could cause somebody to be violent is preposterous to ChurchofPancake, leading him to create this meme.

Obviously this is meant for comedic purposes first and is not a serious argument but, this does raise the point, when do we class a game as violent enough to cause real world violence? Does it differ from person to person? if someone plays candy crush for 5 minutes and commits a mass shooting is the game still blamed as much as if they played Call of Duty?