How Grand Theft Auto prevents crime and violence

It was about a week ago, at 8 p.m., when our blackout happened. In the 1980s people would have headed for the bedroom or out to loot the local off-licence. In 2013, however, our first reaction was to check the battery health of our mobile phones.

This relationship between sex, crime and consumer electronics may be important. The recorded fall in sexual activity among those aged 16 to 44 in the recent National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles was widely attributed to the ‘growth in social media’ and to our new habit of taking smartphones and tablets to bed. Plausible as this sounds, I don’t think the survey proves any such causation. It might be an effect of multi-channel television. Or perhaps the sequential adoption by women of Crocs, Ugg boots and the onesie during the period of the survey has led to a collective national detumescence.

Evidence to link falling crime rates and the growth of computer games, however, may be more significant. There is convincing data suggesting that computer games, even (or perhaps specifically) violent games such as Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, have brought about a fall in crime levels. Expert opinion differs mainly on the reasons why. The more sophisticated theories speak of people ‘rechannelling violent urges’ through game play. Others take a simpler approach: since these games occupy an enormous amount of a young male’s time, they keep him indoors and out of the way of places where crimes take place. These two explanations are not of course mutually exclusive.

Having been told for years that simulated violence must lead to violence in the real world, we may find these findings surprising. Perhaps we shouldn’t. After all, anthropologically speaking, most sports and games probably owe their evolutionary origins to a kind of damage limitation exercise.