I can kill foxes but I can't kill wolves. Not in real life, obviously – in real life I send emails eight hours a day – but in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, where every animal is an arrow away from becoming a fortifying meal. Shoot a wolf and you'll be rewarded with a thick red slab of raw prime meat, but I can't do it, I just can't do it, even though they often attack me in packs. They look too much like dogs. I can kill a fox – even though they never attack me, and they often let out sad little yelps – but many other gamers can't.

If you've spent any time playing Dead Island 2, chances are you've noticed the game's progressive damage system. The Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids, or FLESH, as developer Dambuster Studios call it, is a procedural tool that makes dismembering, melting, or burning zombies look more realistic, as signs of trauma correspond to the attacks you perform, visibly chewing through skin, muscle, organs, and bone. Of course, Dead Island 2 applies all this gore to schlocky, slapstick effect. But FLESH may make you wonder how such gruesome detail might translate to games with more serious themes. Questions around violence in games have a long history, spanning tabloid moral panics to concerted academic research.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. Remember how, in the wake of yet more awful shootings in the US this month, Fox News decided to blame video games rather than, you know, the almost total absence of meaningful gun control? Remember how I said last week that the video-games-cause-violence "argument" was so mendacious and nakedly manipulative that I wasn't going to dignify it with a response? Well, here I am, responding, because the supposed link between video games and real-life violence is one of the most persistent myths that I've encountered over the course of my career, and it has an interesting (if also infuriating) history.

Violent video games are often blamed for people behaving aggressively in real life, but a new study claims that there is no clear link between the two. They found that, while people who played video games as a child were more likely to get into fights as an adult, gaming could not be pinpointed as the cause. Other factors such as gender and environment may have just as important role to play in people becoming violent as adults, the researchers claim. 'While the data show that fighting later in life is related to playing video games as an adolescent, most of this is because, relative to females, males both play games more often and fight more often,' said Dr Michael Ward from the University of Texas Arlington, who authored the study. 'Estimates that better establish causality find no effect, or a small negative effect.'

Video games are one of the most misunderstood forms of entertainment. In one sense, it's easy to see why: if you haven't had much interaction with them, watching someone play one can be a pretty unsettling experience. Gamers can often give the impression that they're glued to the screen, absorbed in what feels like the digital equivalent of junk food. At best, it seems like a pointless thing to do; at worst, we worry that games are socially isolating, or actively harmful. One of the longest-standing tropes about video games is that violent ones – like Call of Duty or Fortnite – can cause players to become more aggressive in the real world.

Trump opened the meeting with a highlight reel of clips from the last decade of gaming, ranging from goofy to excessively bloody violence. Some attendees didn't expect any significant resolution, Glixel reported, and saw the meeting as an opening foray into a larger conversation...on gun violence in America. Critics of the industry called for regulations that would make it difficult for youths to buy violent games, and some asked Trump to widen the discussion to include violent movies and TV shows. But beyond sharing opinions during the closed-door summit, there was no commitment from attendees or the White House on concrete action. Instead, it seemed a stage to reframe the post-Parkland debate around video games' influence on school shootings.

Republican lawmakers and conservative media critics pressed President Trump on Thursday to explore new restrictions on the video-game industry, arguing that violent games might have contributed to mass shootings like the recent attack at a high school in Parkland, Fla. In a private meeting at the White House, also attended by several video-game executives, some participants urged Trump to consider new regulations that would make it harder for children to purchase those games. Others asked the president to expand his inquiry to focus on violent movies and TV shows too. Trump himself opened the meeting by showing "a montage of clips of various violent video games," said Rep. Vicky Hartzler, a Republican from Missouri. Then, Hartzler said the president would ask, "This is violent isn't it?"

President Trump is set to pit the video game industry against some of its harshest critics at a White House meeting on Thursday that's designed to explore the link between violent games, guns and tragedies such as last month's shooting in Parkland, Fla. Following the attack at Marjory Stoneman High School, which left 17 students dead, Trump has said violent games are "shaping young people's thoughts." The president has proposed that "we have to do something about maybe what they're seeing and how they're seeing it." Trump has invited video game executives like Robert Altman, the CEO of ZeniMax, the parent company for games such as Fallout; Strauss Zelnick, the chief executive of Take Two Interactive, which is known for Grand Theft Auto, and Michael Gallagher, the leader of the Entertainment Software Association, a Washington-focused lobbying organization for the industry. Three people familiar with the White House's planning, but not authorized to speak on the record, confirmed those invitees.