Violent Video Games

Playing video games does not cause violent behavior. Don’t get me wrong, some video games show horrific acts of violence. “A recent survey found that 92 percent of U.S. kids--ages 2 to 17--play video games, and their parents bought 225 million of them last year to the tune of $6.4 billion.” (Sider 79).What’s here to argue is that violent video games do not cause violence among children, but the blame for violence should be on the individual and people who should have taught the individual better. If kids are not able to see the difference between reality and fantasy, then they really can’t be blamed for committing acts they see in a game and then imitating, not fully understanding the consequences of doing it in the real world. Parents should be the overall deciders of what they want their children playing, watching, and doing. Being left with the right to raise their child in their fashion, parents should find out what the child is playing and limit or restrict them, so then parents can’t blame anything on video games if their kid commits a violent act. With video games as the new part of our pop culture, many adults find it hard to understand why children would want to spend so much time playing with these “idiot boxes”. With this lack of understanding comes fear, for, as humans, we fear what we do not know. So all that will come of this cycle is people will continue to play video games, something new in our pop culture will come and replace video games, and it will be radical for our pop culture and taken on as the root of all evil due to lack of understanding.

With the high rise in violent video games in the last few years, adults see certain acts of violence portrayed in some video games to be a cause of violent acts committed by kids. This is such an easy decision to make, lay blame on something that is new, something radical like violent video games. People don’t even take a look back and remember “Novels, films, radio, and television have all been accused of leading young people astray and inducing violent or antisocial behavior. The fuss about video games may be just another case of curmudgeons complaining” (Walling 1436). If they saw these then they would see a pattern and might not think of pop-culture as harshly. Unfortunately many people do not, and then they blame it on everything but themselves. These arguments are fueled b...

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...pe you will step a little out of the box, look in on this situation and laugh, and then find something more worthwhile to go argue over.

Works Cited

Walling, Annie. “Do Video Games Lead to Violent Behavior in Children?” American Family Physician 65 (2002): 1436

“The Video Game Factor, Teen Violence & the Blame Game” Brandweek (1999)

Gillespie, Thom “Violence, Games & Art - Part 1” Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology (2000)

Gillespie, Thom “Violence, Games & Art - Part 2” Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology (2000)

Dietz, Tracy “An examination of violence and gender role portrayals in video games: implications for gender socialization and aggressive behavior” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research (1998)

Collins, Glen. Video Games a Diversion or a Danger?. The New York Times, 1983.

Gerdes, Louise. Media Violence Opposing Viewpoints. Michigan: Greenhaven Press, 2004

Sider, Don. “Virtual Vice? This holiday season, some video games come wrapped in sex, gore and controversy. What can parents do?” Time, Inc 58 (2002): 79

Zarozinski, Michael. “Video Game Violence”

Louder than a Bomb! 12 Sep. 2001

Louder than a bomb! Software. 14 Feb, 2005.