Video games have come a long way since the days of Pong. Advances in technology have allowed games to present state of the art graphics and surreal like qualities to its consumers; from four star simulated battle scenes to enhanced real live fire shoot outs. With all these innovations added to violent video games it attracted the visual needs of our teenage youth. Although video game violence has been blamed for high profile school shootings, video games and its creators should not be held accountable for these tragedies because there is not enough credible evidence to absolutely link video games to outburst of violence amongst juveniles.
Video games have made a killing in the world of entertainment, it is a multibillion dollar industry. Games like Call of Duty, God of War and Grand Theft Auto contribute to this segments popularity targeting energy drink filled teens and college students alike. Video games involving violent content have often been referred to as “murder simulators” and are constantly blamed for poisoning the minds of the youth and causing them to revolt and lash out. Video games are used as a scapegoat for the Medias reasoning behind high profile school shootings like Columbine and the most recent Sandy Hook case. School shootings are a rarity and do not occur often enough to make that an accurate claim, history has proved their timing to be sporadic. Trying to peg a motive for a “typical shooter” is a difficult task given these circumstances, the only fact known to most officials investigating these cases are all or most suspects played video games. This one factor has caused a public outcry for stricter regulations and censorship of media content. “When there’s violence in the streets, the cry becomes ‘blame ...
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... actual acts of violence; alone it is not the only cause. Parents need to be aware of the inherent risks video game violence and media content in general presents on their teens but it shouldn’t be the sole reasoning of why high profile shootings occur.
Works Cited
Ackley, Katherine Anne. Ed. Perspectives on Contemporary Issues: Readings Across the Disciplines. 5th ed. Boston: Wadsworth. Cengage Learning. 2009. Print.
Sternheimer, Karen. “Do Video Games Kill?” (Ackley 204-210)
Thompson, Clive. “You Grew Up Playing Shoot ‘em-Up Games. Why Can’t Your Kids?” Wired.com. “N.p”, 9 Apr.2007. Web. 26 Feb.2014
Walsh, David. “Video Game Violence and Public Policy.” The Digest (2001):n.pag Web. 7 Jan.2007.
"Videogames under fire, Hollywood lays low after school shooting." Reuters. Issues & Controversies. Facts on File News Services, 19 Dec. 2012. Web. 4 Mar. 2014.
Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Adam Lanza, Steven Phillip Kazmierczak, and Seung-Hui Cho all have a few things in common, they are all school shooters that have killed and injured a combined total of 149 human beings and are or were believed to be avid violent video game players, who also committed suicide immediately after carrying out their attacks. To the public, school shooters seem to share a direct connection to playing violent video games and that playing them leads to violent behavior. Violent videogames have become a highlight in the media and national debate for this very reason but, there is no scientific evidence to support the existence of a causative connection between participants of violent videogames manifesting violent behaviors. The media provides biased information that misleads citizens into believing that said link is well established and accepted. I argue that parents should make responsible and well informed decisions in regards to their child’s videogame activities in spite of the lack of scientific research.
Since the 1970 video games have become more popular than ever before. Generating 11.7 billions of dollars of sells every year or more, the video game industry is considered one of the largest industries in this century. However, video games have been a topic of controversy. With the sales of violent video games going up and the increased violence in schools and teenagers, video games are always to blame. Many people speculate that video games are the cause on why many teenagers have developed aggressive and violent behavior, are desensitize to violence, and the increase violence in schools and public places. In contradiction, video games have little or no fault in teenagers’ violent behavior and shouldn’t always be blamed.
With all these violence that had been going on within 2011 and 2012, the media question the safety of children playing violence game. Can the shooting that occurred at Sandy Hook and Columbine be a link to violence video game? An article from Parenting.com, Sasha Emmons, 2013, discuss about the December’s horrific massacre in Newtown questions about guns in media and their connection to real-life violence. They brought up the topic about the killer of Sandy Hook, Adam Lanza play the violence game Call of Duty. They question how much should parents focus on their child concerning on their child aggressive copycat behavior (Emmons, 2013). Parents all over the world are concern about their children watching and playing violence game. Some parent report about their child behavior. Should they worries when their child would image that house hold supply to be a gun, going around the house making shooting noise?
This debate is increasingly important in today’s society because of the recent gun control debates in response to recent mass shootings -- is it the guns that spark violence, an outside force, or nothing at all? Due to the desensitization that occurs, the encouragement and rewards that video games give, and simulation that triggers real-life behavior, video games cause violence.
People have always been looking for a reason why horrible things happen. The media is quick to blame video games as the target and cause of many shootings that have occurred, ever since Columbine and Quake. People have been blaming video games for violence for years now, ever since violent video games have been made. News reports blame video games more and more for each shooting, telling the public how this person played video games for x amount of hours a day, and that video games caused him or her to shoot people, and how video games encourage and reward violence. Anti-video game lobbyists have been campaigning to have violence removed from video games, citing resources that they themselves have created as reasons for such, poorly done studies where they confirm that kids are more aggressive through how much hot sauce they put on someone’s fries. While unbiased studies of video games and their links to violence are hard to come by, recent research has shown that video games do not in fact have a casual link to violence, and may even have the opposite effect. Violent video games have nearly no link to violence in teens or adults.
Whether violent media content leads to real-life violence is always debatable. And in recent years, school shootings have made video games a new focus of public concern and scientific research. In public opinion, video games cause more aggression in comparison to traditional violent media contents because video games have more features of interactivity, "due to the active engagement and participation of players" (Hummer and Wang et al. 137). But more and more reports tell us that video games are not the main cause of school shooting issues; rather it is the negligence of parents, schools, and communities.
Do modern video games contribute to the increasing level of violence that we see around us? Can we really attribute the shootings and bombings we see on the news to the increased violence and realism of video games? Every day, people are exposed to violence through the TV shows and movies they watch, the video games they play, and national media networks who bombard us with graphic information portraying violent and hard-hitting global events. To top it all off, the media frequently loves to make outrageous claims that video games either “inspired” or “trained” the culprits of many of these violent acts. In the article “Are Violent Video Games Harmful?,” Guy Porter and Vladan Starcevic claim that “while playing video games outwardly appears to be an innocuous activity, the limited data available suggest playing violent video games may be related to aggressive and/or antisocial behavior” (4). I strongly disagree with their statement; not only do I believe that violent video games do not directly cause aggression, but I also feel that gaming is a very social activity that is commonplace among today’s youth.
In 1998, the US software industry sold $6.3 billion worth of video games (see Unknown). Not bad for an industry that didn't exist 25 years ago! Yet despite its continued growth, all is not well in the video game industry. School shootings in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Conyers, Georgia and many other towns have shocked the nation (see Malcolm). Understandably, grieving parents and sympathetic citizens are searching for a cause for this "outbreak" of youth violence. It is natural to assume, "when children, the symbol of innocence, commit the severest of crimes, then something must be going wrong with society." (see Maker)
The attention that has been drawn to violent video games and the discussions on whether they should still be released or not has been the only positive outcome of the many school shootings that have happened (Anderson et al. 3). All of these school shootings were done by boys with a history of playing violent video games. In the short narrative “Playing at Violence,” from American Scholar, author Pacifique Irankunda tells of his life in Burundi and how t...
Many people believe violence in video games result in violent outbreaks and unhealthy behavior in real world. Since the first Nineteen Eighties, violence in video games became a part of a political issue leading advocates to create theories that these styles of games are corrupting society. Studies have been created to seek out if there's a link between violent video games and violent behavior. Are these video games shaping today’s generation of youths to be violent? I believe that there's no correlation between violence in video games and violence in our society. I think this first of all, improves a large form of general skills, secondly, there are several alternative factors that contribute into creating society violent and finally, crime rates decrease because the quality of those forms of games increase.
Flanagan explains throughout her article that out of the American youth today, 97% of them play violent video games for at least two hours per week. Also in the article “Imaginary Guns Don’t Kill People, either” by Scott Shackford, he explains that since violent video games have become such a popular activity, it is considered surprising if one hasn’t played one by now. Violent video games show teens that shooting people is acceptable. In “Is video game violence bad?” by Christopher J. Ferguson, he states that the trigger of violent video games causes at least some of aggressive actions that happen throughout the world, including school shootings. For example, in the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, two students carried weapons into the school and proceeded to kill thirteen people. Unsurprisingly, the roots to their actions were speculated to be prior bullying experiences and violent video games (History.com). Also, Ferguson states that violent video games are correlated with mass shootings across the nation. Teens that have been influenced by violence are a dangerous factor to themselves, classmates, friends, and
Walling, Annie. “Do Video Games Lead to Violent Behavior in Children?” American Family Physician 65 (2002): 1436
Although violent video games are thought to encourage real world violence, they actually help to prevent it. I am focusing on violent video games and how they affect juveniles because I feel that this issue needs to be looked at in the criminal justice community. It is an unnecessary distraction to blame the actions of a disturbed youth on a form of entertainment that has been used by millions of people without incident. A review article published in The Psychiatric Quarterly found that many studies which claim to indicate an increase in aggression due to video games are, in fact, biased! Once the bias is taken into account, the studies no longer find any correlation between youths who play violent video games and youths who demonstate aggression and violent behavior. (Ferguson, 2014)
Adams, Jill U. Effects of Violent Video Games. The Los Angeles Times. May 3, 2010.
Over the past years, video games have been a way to escape reality for some people. Video games vary from fantasy, romance, and role playing games to violent games. However, vicious video games have been blamed for school shootings, growths in bullying, and violence concerning women. Various people argue that these games numb players to violence, recompense players for imitating violence, and educate children that violence is a suitable way to resolve conflicts.