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There have been discussions ever since these occurrences, of whether an ordinary person would be able to go out and commit a murder after seeing a violent content in a video game. In year 2012, psychologists had therefore decided to carry out a longitudinal, long term study of effects of video games on the behavioural development of 165 teenagers over the course of 3 years. This study has taken things such as pre-existing emotional, family and social issues into consideration. After the 3 years of investigation, they have found out that the accounted factors have changed the independent variable of the violence caused by video games as there was no increase in aggression effects of the video games. This suggests that children who have previously experienced violence on their own skin (whether it was caused in the family or socially) have a much better control of their emotions and their aggression levels are not caused/do not increase rapidly when playing video games with violent content. .
However, Teena Willoughby and colleagues, from University of Brock, Canada, have in 2012 gathered a sample of 1492 children aged from 8/9 -17/18 and have also looked into the effect of video games on the behavioural development of these children over long term. They found that children who do play video games over a long period of time clearly showed increased development of aggressive behaviour. This study suggests that the frequent demand of video games and their constant use can cause a change in child's behaviour over long term for eternity. Although, a short-term study carried out by Seth Gitter and colleagues on Aggressive Behaviour has looked into the issue of positive goals in a violent video game. The participants of the experiment have been asked to play a violent game with a positive purpose of doing so in mind. In one case, the participant was asked to protect a friend from zombie attack.