The negative impact of video games on youth has been a hotly debated topic since before Pac-man ate his first Pac-dot. Recently though, due to horrific school shootings and record sales of violent video games such as the Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty series, video games as a whole have been put under a microscope. The question now is: Are violent video games really such a significant factor when it comes to youth violence? The current research and information points to no. Although some research reveals that violent video games may cause temporary aggression, there has been no evidence that it causes violent crimes such as assault or murder. Christopher Ferguson, an associate professor at Stetson University and researcher into the effect media has on young children wrote an article titles“ Video Games: The Latest Scapegoat for Violence”. In his article, he states:
My meta-analysis concluded that there was no evidence to support either a causal or correlation relationship between video games and aggressive behavior. My impression is that social science made up its mind that video games cause aggression before many data were available, and has subsequently attempted to fit square pieces of evidence into round theoretical holes. (qtd. in Tamiu.edu)
Brad J. Bushmann and Craig A. Anderson are highly recognizable psychology professors that agree that violent video games has a significant negative impact on youth including teens to become more violent. They have both published numerous articles on the effects media has on its audience and testified in front of many hearings including Congressional hearings . In 2002, the collaborated and published a report titled Violent Video Games and Hostile Expectations: A tes...
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...t Video Games and Hostile Expectations: A Test of the General Aggression Model.” Personality and Social Psychology bulletin (2002): Print.
Ferguson, Christopher and Cheryl K. Olson. “Video games do not make vulnerable teens more violent.” Springer (26 August 2013): Web. 23 October 2013
Ferguson, Christopher “Video Games: The Latest Scapegoat for Violence” Tamiu (2009): Web. 10 October 2013
“How Much Do You Know About Video Games?” Entertainment Software Rating Board. 2013. Web. 23 October 2013
“The Final Report and Findings of The Safe School Initiative: Implications for the prevention of school attacks in The United States.” United States. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. May 2002:Web. 23 October 2013
Youth Violence National and State Statistics at a Glance. United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (19 June 2009). Web. 25 October 2013
Today’s youth is heavily influenced by the media. Video games, television, and movies make up a large part of the lives of children in America. These easily accessible forms of entertainment are lightly regulated by parents and the government; children and adolescents are exposed to extremely violent media everyday. “By the time the average American child reaches seventh grade, he or she will have witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on television. Some people say so much violence on television makes American society- including its children- more violent” (“Causes of School Violence” 1). Among the violent media, video games are the current trend. Although video games are rated by ESRB (the entertainment sof...
The allegation that videogames cause violent behavior in children has been present as long as videogames themselves. Some researchers said that the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, was one intense gamer. “Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech Shooter was seen by his roomates as odd because he never joined them in video games.”(Beresin) This debate will continue to go on in this country as long as there are horrific crimes that occur. There is much written in the research regarding this issue, and many differing views. The research that is presented in the next few paragraphs supports the theory that it is not the graphic video games that produce aggressive behavior, but other factors in a child’s life that create violent actions.
One of the fastest growing sectors in the United States economy, with sales over six billion dollars in 2012 is the video gaming industry ("Games: Improving the Economy’). Technical innovation has given the video industry power to create exciting realistic worlds, turning video games into the vast entertainment business that it is today. Setting sales records, Violent Video Games (VVG) are now a common staple in many households. One of the most argued topics in media studies, investigation on the impact violence has on society from mass media continues to rage on. Parents look to the media for reliable studies to confirm or distinguish the effects VVG has on children. Even more menacing than violence on television or in movie theaters, VVG have created enticing graphic worlds created to slaughter fellow players. Modern video games allow players to take an active role within the game. Enticing players to engage in realistic assault scenes that are meant to be entertaining. Worthy playing is then rewarded with: trophies, bonus points and extra lives.
“The Columbine shooters played violent video games; that has to be a factor in their decision to brutally murder their classmates!” Society is quick to point fingers and approach unknown situations with a causal mentality that often results in a false accusation of an innocent bystander. With the advent of the video game era, psychologists have debated their effect on the minds of their youthful audience. Throughout the multitude of studies and the perpetual debate, society still lacks an absolute answer. With this knowledge, when it comes to video games and their impact on the minds of children, researchers must consult a wide variety of subjects with an open mind about the potential outcomes. I conducted my research by examining my personal experience, analyzing studies refuting both sides of the argument, trying to view the American fascination with violence through an outside perspective, and reviewing the thought processes that lead the members of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in order to gain a full perspective of the issue. What correlation exists, if any, between violent video games and the violent tendencies that children exhibit after exposure to said media? Throughout my research, I have discovered that a trend does exist, but it manifests after the child has encountered puberty because of the heightened levels of testosterone that accompany this phase of development, and the trend relies heavily on other factors in a violent disposition. The age factor generally fails to exist in the violent tendencies argument; this is intriguing in that the majority of violent videogames are targeted toward an older audience. In order to truly understand the violent tendencies of mankind, we must first analyze these ...
Anderson, Craig A., and PhD. ” Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts, and Unanswered Questions.” American Psychological Association (APA). N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Nov. 2011.
According to Henry Jenkins, an American Media Scholar and professor at MIT, “young people in general are more likely to be gamers —90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play.” That is an overwhelming amount of young people. In recent years, there have been incidents such as the Columbine school shooting which have shown young people committing terrible acts of violence. In the case of the Columbine shooting, the teenagers who committed the shooting were both found to be avid players of a violent computer video game known as Doom (Ferguson, 26). This has raised lawmakers and concerned parents to begin opposing violence in video games. These people believe that video games (and violent video games in particular) can cause young people to become extremely desensitized to violence, and in turn cause them to commit acts of violence that they would not have committed otherwise. However, these people fail to realize that our youths have been exposed to violence far longer than modern media has been around. For example, Wired.com writer Michael Venables points out that many of our classic fairy tales deal with violent conditions. He reminds people that “Cinderella’s evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves.” and “Hansel and Gretel kill their captor by baking her in an oven.” People who oppose video games pose a major threat to the development of youth in our modern society, because video games can have many positive effects on young people.
To begin, it is unquestionable that youth show more aggression when playing violent video games. According to the Director of the Center for the Study of Violence, Craig Anderson notes in his article, “The results, overall, have been fairly consistent across types of studies (experimental, cross-sectional, and longitudinal) and across visual media type (televisions, films, video games). There is a significant relation between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior. Exposing children and adolescents (or ‘youth’) to violent visual media increases the likelihood that they will engage in physical aggression against another person…” (FAQs on Violent Video Games and Other Media Violence, 2009) Clearly, Anderson notes in his article how the level of aggression is a direct relation to the amount and intensity of the video games they play. It also teaches that violence is an acceptable method of problem-solving and a necessary way to attain a goal. According to a 2009 study, youth who pla...
All of the sources for this essay contain findings from the experiments that deal with violent video games’ effects on adolescents. The first article, Gabrielle Unsworth’s The effect of playing violent video games on adolescents: Should parents be quaking in their boots?, concurs the types of effects of violent video games on adolescents’ aggression, and that these participants show the different levels of angers during the experiment. The second and third articles, Krcmar’s Retaliatory aggression and the effects of point of view and blood in violent video games and Nicholas Carnagey’s The Effects of Reward and Punishment in Violent Video Games on Aggressive Affect, Cognition, and Behavior, are related to each other since they both have similar results that violent video games increase adolescents’ aggressive cognitions. They are all related to each other except the fourth article, Marjut Wallenius’ Digital Game Playing and Direct and Indirect Aggression in Early Adolesce...
Diverse surveys have presented uniform clues suggesting that publicity of violence is a vital risk component pertaining to hostile attitudes. Aggressive video game controversies are consequential on irregular grounds, ranging from the depiction of hostility, sexism, as well as ethnicity, alongside constructive portrayal of offensive conducts among others. Video gaming has been undeniably, evaluated for its connections to addiction along with hostility however, traditional varying assessments notably attained conflicting results. On the contrary, contemporary analysis have reported that exposure to insensitive video games would impose particularly a gradual rise in hostility, which might accordingly integrate with the actual collective brutality, to nurture unoptimistic civic attitude. Similarly, an opposing research on intense hostile manners further reported that, video game lapses might not advance the actual extreme capital offenses. Besides, scarcity of reliable intelligence to verify the aggressive impacts of video games has definitely, been identified among other obstacles facing the gaming industry.
In our society we have many issues that plague our youth. Problems such as substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, and verbal bullying are just a few of the issues. There is one issue that has been on the rise for many years, and is relatively new to the world; and that is violence due to exposure to violent video games. Research done by a panel of scientists led by Professor Rowell Huesmann found “Unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts” (qtd. in Anderson et al. 4). This research is very profound, but it does not state that a child will go to a school and shoot children because he played the game Call of Duty. While a child might not show major aggressive behavior because of violent video games, he will show minor increases in aggressive behavior because of the games he plays. These statistics are the same for adolescents as they are for children. Whether they realize it or not, everyone who plays a violent video game is effected in one way or another. Even though there is a rating system for games, that system is lacking in what they let younger children watch and do in these games. The question that must be asked is, “Why are these children being exposed to such violent content?”
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)
The article “Do Video Games Kill” written by Karen Sternheimer addresses the widespread question; are video games the cause for “young killers”? (220) Sternheimer believes concern for the influence of video games may have on youth is spiraling out of control. She puts most of the blame for this out of control concern on the media. She also writes some about the politicians and the Juvenile Justice System. Sternheimer suggests that there are other factors to blame for violent behavior: poverty, the neighborhood, unemployment, family violence, divorced parents and mental illness (218). While it may be that juvenile crimes have declined, and personal backgrounds effect actions, it cannot be proven that video game violence has no to little effect on
One of the more famous incidents where video game violence impacted the lives of youth and their environment is the case of the Columbine massacre. The incident preceded several studies linking media violence to violence in young men. In an effort to dismiss the claims of video game violence association to childhood aggressive behavior a number of myths became associated with the connection of video games violence and its effects the players, particularly the
“Contrary to the claims that violent video games are linked to aggressive assaults and homicides, no evidence was found to suggest that this medium was a major (or minor) contributing cause of violence in the United States.” (Markey, 290)
Video games first appeared in the early 1970's. It all started with a simple white ball bouncing back and fourth on the screen. In 1986, Nintendo introduced its first line of home video game consoles. With the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) on the market, the home video gaming industry surged and immediately became popular among children. Since then, not only have video games increased in popularity, but there have been vast improvements in graphics, game play, and forms of gaming. Today, video games have become the preferred choice of entertainment among children and teenagers. Research done in 1998 has shown that kids who own video games spend an average of 90 minutes a day playing them. Clearly the video gaming industry is a profitable one. With the increasing competition between gaming companies, the advancement of technology and content of games began to change. One of the most significant and concerning changes in gaming is graphics. With the improvements in graphics the content of the game became more and more detailed and realistic. Visually violent actions can now be displayed on the screen. Images of blood, flying body parts, and gore have been integrated into every aspect of today's video games. Violence has always been a common factor in many games, but with the improvements in graphics and capabilities of gaming consoles, a growing number of people are becoming concerned about the effects on our children and society.