LOL, I did a report on this once.
Its a fair amount of research on this... but most of the popular stuff involves games making people violent.... sad but true.
Maybe this will help shut the critics up for a bit....
Most of the popular stuff was done to prove that video games made people violent, not to find out if they really do. Even in those studies, they're not showing any causality, only a correlation between the two. Violent people tend to play more violent video games, but that doesn't mean that the video games made them that way.
I remember there was a study done by the FBI around 2000, that actually said there was no concrete evidence that video games actually caused people to be more violent; but the anti-video game proponents ignore the legitimate, non-biased studies that say there's no proof and focus on the bogus ones they paid for to prove what they wanted.
I also love the fact that apparently the only thing we can learn from video games is violence. They say nothing about improved hand-eye coordination, visual acuity, strategy/tactics, resource management, or any of the other multitude of benefits that video games offer. Even behaviorally, we don't get funnier playing a comedy game, we don't get more romantic playing games with heavy love stories; it's an all or nothing thing, and they completely ignore that fact just to make video games a scapegoat.
The wind's changing though, more gamers are getting older, video games are now mainstream entertainment. Eventually most of this talk will die out when the people who have never actually played a video game before aren't the ones in charge.
It's also ironic as hell, that despite the constant bitching from politicians about how bad video games are for kids; they keep shooting down the ESRB's suggested laws about restricting games to kids.
