Fantasy: The Positive And Negative Effects Of Video Games

Fantasy is a word most people are very familiar with. It is seen about every day through video games and movies. According to the Merriam-Webster, fantasy is, “something that is produced by the imagination.” Children grow up on fantasy. It is seen through the movies they watch and the video games they play. It is also common for a child to create another person with the use of their imaginations. Fantasy movies and games have both positive and negative effects on children. Although some fantasy movies do help with things such as eye sight and multitasking, there are many negative effects. Some of those effects are desensitization to violence and emotional attachment to the games or movies. First of all, most people who are not involved with

This is extremely bad when children spend most of their free time being entertained by them. Children watch things such as cartoons or fantasy movies that contain violence or fighting scenes. Without knowing, they are becoming used to the images being shown. So the next time they see the same scene they become unfazed by it. This is the same with violent fantasy video games. With concern levels rising, there have been many psychologists doing their own research on the topic. Social psychologist, Brad Bushman at Ohio State University, started his experiments by showing a group filled with children and adolescents, violent pictures. One of the pictures he showed them was of a man shoving a gun down another man’s throat. While the second picture was of a man holding a knife to a woman’s throat. Bushman says, “What we found is for people who were exposed to a lot of violent video games, their brains did not respond to violent images.” In other words, Bushman described them as “numb.” Nicholas Carnagey, who was an Iowa State University psychology instructor collaborated with Bushman. Carnagey found that, "The results demonstrate that playing violent video games, even for just 20 minutes, can cause people to become less physiologically aroused by real violence.” He also discovered that, "Participants randomly assigned to play a violent video game had relatively lower heart rates and galvanic skin

Without some restraint in fantasy games, the player may begin to ignore reality. Why would they want reality when they have whatever they desire in their world of fantasy? In today’s society, a major thing people lack is control. For many things, people cannot control the outcome. This is especially true in the lives of children. They cannot control injuries, or even their parent’s financial stability. With that in mind for anyone, fantasy games allow an escape from reality. This may allow them a chance to forget that they are being bullied in school or that their parents are about to get a divorce. The fantasy video games forces their attention to be on the tasks within the game instead of the difficulties of their current reality. Imagination can be a powerful thing. In the end, it is all an illusion. Some people know that from the beginning. However, there are some people who tend to forget. This causes them to lose track in the difference between reality and fantasy. The same thing happens in fantasy movies. In Media and Children’s Aggression, Fear, and Altruism, Barbra J. Wilson mentions that, “In one nationally representative survey, 62 percent of parents of two- to seventeen-year-olds agreed that their children had “sometimes become scared that something they saw in a movie or on TV might happen to them.” According to The Association for Natural Psychology, “If a