I want to make some distinction between the idea of Aggression and the idea of Violence. I have had various talks about how violent video games cause an increase in aggressive behaviour and even violent behaviour.
Firstly, I hear people speak of how violent games cause increased aggression in the players. To be honest I would say anything where competitiveness is a major factor (games included) would lead to increased aggression. Think about it, being aggressive doesn't mean to grab a gun and kill people, it means to be more forward, more confident about the action you are doing and is by no means violent by principle.
The only way to win a competition is to be the most aggressive, whether it be chess, where the more aggressive of analyzing the board and understanding your opponent will be the winner or soccer where the team who is more aggressive with their training, more determined not to give up, the most aggressive tacklers, to learn and perfect new techniques etc. wins out.
When described in this way I really doubt many would argue that giving players a virtual channel to learn how to control and focus this aggression is nothing but a good thing that would help them in many other aspects of competitive life.
What society is really scared about is the violent behaviour. I've always believed that violence stems from frustration. I see friends play Halo 3 online and I see one of them die multiple times obviously due to latency issues and then watch him as he gets tense, blames the latency for giving other people an unfair advantage over himself and is generally frustrated about the situation. As he does this he speaks in an angered voice and throws his controller to the floor. Both actions which could be considered violent, but were created out of frustration rather than aggression. It could be said that the reason for his frustration was because he was playing aggressively to win and that is true, but doesn't mean that his violent actions were due to aggression.
In terms of how video games could ever possibly make their players become violent, the only way then is to frustrate the player and as game designers know well, good game design comes from giving the player the perfect balance of making it not too easy, but not so hard that it is frustrating.
The only other thing games could do to provoke violent actions would not directly provoke them as such, but rather give those with the direction and ability already (before playing any games) an glimpse to what these violent actions may feel like to do in real-life; to basically “enable” the player to understand from this perspective. Only those with a predefined fixation would have a higher chance to do violent actions from video games. However if these people can be manipulated by video games then they can also be exposed to books, real-life events and film in the same way, removing any blame on video games as a medium for creating violence in our society.
