Research: 'Non-gamers more anti-social'

A $1.5 million dollar US study into the global video games industry has found that non-gamers are more prone to anti-social behaviour.

The Government-backed research, headed up by PHD Lawrence Kutner, surveyed around 1,300 young people across the US and concluded there is "absolutely no evidence" that video games lead children to a life of crime.

Most interesting is that the study revealed that playing games gives young males "social confidence", while those who don't play video games had a "significantly greater risk" of becoming anti-social.

Kutner told X-Play: "It seems that playing video games for boys is a marker of social confidence. That surprised us.

"It's interesting if you look at what happened a year ago at Virgina Tech... [the attacker's] suitemates who he shared a dorm room with said that he didn't play video games at all and that struck them as really odd because everyone else did. And that fell right in line with our research findings, that the kids who don't play at all are actually at greater risk... It says something about their social relationships.

"If you look at violent crime in the US over the past 20 years among teenagers, it's gone down and gone down significantly, and if you look at video game play, it's gone up significantly."

But Kutner noted that youngsters who play adult-rated violent video games for more than 15 hours a week could be at greater risk of getting into trouble.