How Do Video Games Affect People?

Video games have evolved tremendously since they were released in the early 50’s. The 2D ping pong has evolved into 3D virtual realities that immerse us into another world. There are different genres of games, but the one we’re going to focus on is the action genre. These games are known for their violent content and graphic nature. These games promote harming other individuals to beat the game. Violent video games influence people to behave violently, desensitizes people to violence and makes them see the world as a violent place, and it causes people to act aggressively when interacting with others.

There are a lot of reactions that take place in your brain when you play violent video games. Gamers replay what they see in their minds and then physically try to reenact those memories in real life. Anderson and Warburton provide evidence that there are mirror neurons in humans and primates that represent a mechanism in the brain that facilitates imitation (69). Imitation is essential to human life. We learn significant behaviors from watching others and unfortunately, that is a double-edged sword. Just as we can imitate good behaviors, we can also imitate the bad ones. They also suggest that people sometimes copy what they see in the video game. “An 18-year-old youth in Thailand stabbed a taxi driver to death trying to ‘find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game’ (Reed 70).

A factor in imitating someone in the game is through identification. This is a gamer finding common ground with the character in the game. “The aggressive central character is usually glorified and portrayed as heroic,” (Anderson & Warburton 72). The aggressive character is being rewarded for his violent acts and therein, inf...

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...s done to see the correlation between the two. The study consisted of 47 undergraduates playing “Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance” for 15 minutes. Afterward, a test was administered to test how aggressive students would be. They were told to administer any amount of hot sauce to another student who didn’t like spicy foods (this student did not exist). The students who played the violent video game gave bigger portions of hot sauce than those who played the nonviolent video game,’ (Carey)

Violent video games affect your mental, physical, and social being. You become desensitized to violence; start acting aggressively, and you become and aggressive person with aggressive responses. These effects are directly tied to the amount of game play, so an effective way to stop or at least slow the development of aggressiveness is to cut back on the amount of time spent playing.