FIFA makes users ‘more aggressive’ than COD

Call of Duty, Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto – these are the familiar names of killer games sewing their evil seeds in the minds of children across the nation.

But little did we know that a far more dangerous threat has been lurking on our kids’ shelves for years in the form of EA’s FIFA and Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer series.

At least, that’s what the latest piece of sensationalist mainstream news reporting will have you believe.

Today’s Metro carries a story entitled "Football video games make players more aggressive than violent ones". In the paper version the headline is "Anger over goal 1, Call of Duty fury 0".

It cites Dr Simon Goodson and Sarah Pearson of Huddersfield University who conducted a study measuring the heart rates, respiration and brain activity of 40 male and female subjects.

They found that conceding a goal generated more brain activity than shooting someone. Or, to phrase it in a more exciting way, football games make you MORE AGGRESSIVE. And as aggressive people are bad, games must be bad.

Just in case the implied link isn’t clear enough, the paper also cites "a 24-year old Dutchman who killed six people and wounded 17 in a shooting spree last month had been playing Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2".

Of course, he’d also been illicitly sourcing an automatic weapon. Oh, and in 2006 spent time in a Dutch psychiatric institution (which I’m guessing was as a result of playing PES 5). Metro doesn’t mention this, however. There’s only so much space on those pages, after all.

And if COD made shooter Van der Vlis him that angry, imagine the hideous atrocities people will commit after a session on FIFA. IMAGINE!

"As participants reacted with more agitation during the football game it seems the effects of violent video games have been misrepresented in the past," Dr Goodson stated.

I’m presuming that you, like all intelligent readers, have come to the same grim conclusion.

We’re all going to die. And games are to blame.