Reports claiming that there is no connection between violent entertainment and violence in real life, and vice versa, will very often pop up and scare parents half to death. The latest, written by psychologist Christopher Fergusson, however, is one of the few that spans a longer period of time. He has studied violence in entertainment since the 1920s and compared these results with the development of society. You can, among other things, see that movie violence increased during the 1900s while social violence actually decreased in the same time.
The same applied to games. Fergusson has studied games from 1996 to 2011, and then compared the amount of violent content with reports of youth violence and even there it can be seen that the fictitious increase is in fact a decline. In the report, published in the Journal of Communication, he also criticised the studies that say they see a connection. He argues that these are often carried out in the laboratory and that they do not reflect real conditions.