Since the SEGA Mega Drive and Mortal Kombat joined forces in 1993: Letting you kick your little brother’s head off and ram the blood-soaked stump up his rear, people have been concerned about the effects of games on children. This spawned the ESRB, and there have been studies on the adverse effect of games on the modern youth ever since. The bearer of all that is unholy, entertainment was once again strung-up by parents, shocked to find barbarism was being smuggled in video games. Similarly to the mid-20th century with the Rock and Pop music of Elvis and The Beatles, horrified parents were on front-page exposes of tabloid rags once again. Though with a new enemy.

Almost 30-years on from those knee-jerk reactions, we’ve seen study after study. We’ve heard shrill shrieks of petrified carers, and we’ve watched tabloids and faux-sincerity from politicians. Yet, never a credible study confirming those splayed fears of irrefutable damage on said youth. In short: Isn’t it fun blowing the head off of a male prostitute with a shotgun while ramping off of the corpses of the elderly? Given we’re a mostly gaming-focused site, it probably doesn’t shock you to find that another study has concluded, and it is the biggest revelation on the planet.

The study, “Growing up with Grand Theft Auto: A 10-year study of longitudinal growth of violent video play in adolescents” is the latest to do such hard work, questioning the violent tendencies of today’s teenagers. Or rather, the effects on yesterday’s teenagers. As the name would imply, the long-form study aimed to track the behavior in a group of young people over a greater period of time rather than short-form with a larger number of participants.

The study focused on tracking participants from their early teens through to adulthood (aged 23) and using the person-centered approach to the data analysis. The approach will often use algorithmic data and cross-reference this prediction with the individuals themselves. The study used an initial group of predominantly white participants and featured almost no families of the relatively low socioeconomic group. The study broke down participants into three groups; high (4%), moderate (23%), and a low (73%) percentage of violence in their initial gaming experiences. Those with a low experience of violence in their initial play were found to have no additional aggression in their behavior than those in the high grouping.

Those in the small group of high initial violence did, however, display that they “were more likely to be depressed at the initial wave.” The high and moderate groups did appear to be male, more often than not. Those in the high and moderate groups also displayed an arched pattern of their violent play across time, peaking and troughing. Meanwhile, those in the low group would increase over time. Results finally displayed what would seem to be no heightened aggression on those who began playing highly violent games from a young age.

Once again, this is not a shocking discovery. In what seems to be the third high-profile case in just over two years of me writing on these studies, this one published in the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking Journal is once again confirming what I’ve said time and time again. I myself would have been lumped in with the high initial violence group, being of the perfect age for the study’s lengthy period. I would assess myself to feature relatively the same amount of aggression as those around me.

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