The relationship between viode games and violent acts

In Nielsen's reading "Video Games and Risks" talks about a controversial issue that have been discussed for a long time: whether or not video games make people mor violent. To conclude if violent games and player aggressions are related, the author discusses two research perspectives: the active user perspective and the active media perspective.

First of all, I want to conclude the difference between the two perspectives that are discussed in the reading. In the active media perspective, "video games are conceived as having direct, objective, and measurable effect on players. However, in the active user perspective, "video games do not have the same effect on everybody but are mediated by a variety of factors like playing context, genre expectation, and the individual player's interpretation. In this case, the players are seens as active, selective, and critical user. According to Nielsen, the active media perspective mostly exists outside mainstream game research. And those who do the researches "do not consider themselves games researchers, do not attend game conferences, and do often not play games" (p224). Although the active user perspective has been less criticized in the reading, "it is almost always too small a sample given the full population it generalizes to", since observational study is the key to this perspective and it takes a lot of time to implement it (p240).

The author seems to be in the favor of the active user perspective since he argues that "the Active Media perspective wants to generalize researchers within the Active User perspective usually abstain from making general claims," and that "the Active User perspective wants to examine the specific influence of violent video games" (p226). However, just as the Media User studies are usually done by non-game players, is it possible that Active User perspetice can be biased too since most of the reserchers are unilaterally from specific fields like cultural studeis and anthropology, thus forget to take others' points of view into account?