The study used nationally representative data from British teens and their parents alongside official E.U. and US ratings of game violence. The findings were published in Royal Society Open Science. 'The idea that violent video games drive real-world aggression is a popular one, but it hasn’t tested very well over time,' says lead researcher Professor Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute. 'Despite interest in the topic by parents and policy-makers, the research has not demonstrated that there is cause for concern.

The study is one of the most definitive to date, using a combination of subjective and objective data to measure teen aggression and violence in games. Unlike previous research on the topic, which relied heavily on self-reported data from teenagers, the study used information from parents and carers to judge the level of aggressive behaviour in their children. 'Our findings suggest that researcher biases might have influenced previous studies on this topic, and have distorted our understanding of the effects of video games,' says co-author Dr Netta Weinstein from Cardiff University. An important step taken in this study was preregistration, where the researchers publically registered their hypothesis, methods and analysis technique prior to beginning the research.

'Part of the problem in technology research is that there are many ways to analyse the same data, which will produce different results. A cherry-picked result can add undue weight to the moral panic surrounding video games. The registered study approach is a safe-guard against this,' says Przybylski. 'This would be an interesting avenue for further research.

'Researchers should use the registered study approach to investigate other media effects phenomena. There are a lot of ideas out there like ‘social media drives depression’ and ‘technology addiction that lowers quality of life’ that simply have no supporting evidence. These topics and others that drive technological anxieties should be studied more rigorously – society needs solid evidence in order to make appropriate policy decisions. The data was drawn from a nationally representative sample of British 14- and 15-year olds, and the same number of their carers .