Whether it’s fighting the belief that all gamers are antisocial weirdos or advocating for more inclusiveness in the medium’s protagonists, we here at OGN have always been dedicated to telling the truth about games. That is why we have undertaken a historic and undoubtedly forbidden investigation into one of the most common misconceptions about gaming: The idea that they make gamers more prone to violence. To do that, we adopted a young infant from a local orphanage, locked him inside of a cabin in the woods, and exposed him to nothing but violent video games for the past 12 years. The end result? It turns out critics are dead wrong. The child didn’t turn out violent at all, even though we have to admit he became an extremely weird individual.
We’re calling it now: Any naysayers out there who have painted games as the source of society’s violence need to admit their mistake, because while there’s definitely something off with this kid, it has nothing to do with violence.
The boy—whom we named “Sonic” after the titular hedgehog and because that is the one word he ever learned to speak—has never once attacked or even threatened another human being. In fact, he seems mostly content to just continue playing the games that have constituted his entire life since he first developed object permanence. That being said, Sonic can mostly only speak in gibberish sentences, and even a small amount of eye contact often ends with him foaming at the mouth and hiding in a closet for hours. But still, no violence.
To create a perfectly controlled environment for our experiment, young Sonic has been kept in a windowless room for his entire life. For years, he’s been fed nothing but mashed bananas and oatmeal and has never been allowed contact with any humans other than our one OGN researcher. In fact, to ensure he has a constant view of a violent video game, Sonic hasn’t even seen daylight in his decade on this earth. In this perfectly controlled environment, he has been either playing or watching some of the goriest and most bloody games ever produced from Mortal Kombat and the Postal series to Manhunt and Gears Of War.
Then came the long-awaited culmination to the experiment. Last month, we brought Sonic out of his locked habitat and into the OGN offices, where we enrolled him a local public school. What proved incredible to both us—and any detractors of the gaming medium—is that he has not shown a single impulse to harm another living thing. Even when he has been bullied for his name or translucent skin and feral appearance, he has never lashed out, instead electing to press his hands against his ears and shake his head wildly or run out of the room in this strange, toddling walk that’s almost akin to a penguin.
He’s also been dry-humping things and masturbating a lot. Even for a teenager, it’s way too much. We’ve tried to get him to stop, but he just starts wailing and throwing himself into the wall. The doctors we’ve gone to haven’t been much help at giving us a cure, either.
So there you have it, the most comprehensive study into the psychology of violent video games has a clear answer: There is no correlation between them and kids acting violent themselves. There does seem to be some form of connection between them and a fixation on collecting shiny metal objects and women’s hair, but we will leave that to the next study to sort out. For now, if anyone wants to adopt Sonic, we are dropping him off on a street corner in Milwaukee. He won’t hurt you, we swear.