I may wind up doing an article on the new studies proving violent video games affect the teenage brain because I’ve got a pretty good feeling we’re going to be seeing more and more of these.

The Reuters story making the rounds claims scientists were able to show that violent games trigger the “fight or flight” mechanism and it apparently stays triggered for some time after playing the game. Now, since I own a great many of these games and enjoy them, I have a knee-jerk reaction to call bullshit. And there’s lots of ways to do it, beginning with the question of why a violent video game would have such an effect while a violent movie or TV show or novel doesn’t.

But… in the theory that you can make yourself wiser only by thinking about things you hate to think about, maybe a better question to ask is what should be done if they’re right.

Say, hypothetically, they go on to do study after study after study and time and time again it comes down that violent games lower impulse control (or whatever) and eat up the reasonable part of your brain. What then? If they can prove a cause-effect link, parents can go right to court on it, right? How much evidence would it take for you to back the anti-gaming activists’ side, even if it mean’t giving up your hobby? Could you ever be convinced? What would it take?

The first thing somebody’s going to say is that the vast majority of violent game players commit no violent crimes. Case closed.

But remember, the vast majority of smokers don’t get lung cancer. They never had to prove all smokers got sick; they just had to prove that more smokers get sick than non-smokers. And they do. You may go from having a 5% chance of getting lung cancer up to 20% if you smoke. But there’s still the 80% who don’t get sick. Same here, they only need to show that gaming has an effect, not that the effect shows up every time. That’s important because the latter won’t be proven, the former might be.

Feel free to discuss this in the forums.