Are Video Games Making Us Desensitized To Violence?

A huge controversy in today’s society is violent video games and their behavioral effect on the children and adults who play them. Violent video games have been blamed for bullying, school shootings, and even violence towards women. Many have fought that violent video games desensitize players to real-life violence, and that they are teaching the youth that violence is an acceptable conflict-solving strategy. Other sources have stated otherwise. The 2004 Secret Service has stated that only one-eighth of attackers have exhibited interests in video games. Violent Video games do not cause violent behavior or behavior problems because it has not been proven that there is a link between violent video games and behavioral issues, playing video games provide a safe outlet for aggressive and angry feelings and reduces violence in young children, and violent juvenile crime has actually gone down since the violent video game popularity has increased.

In “Is video game violence bad” written by Christopher Ferguson. The author proposes there is no correlation between violent video games and real life violence. He lists several studies suggesting violent video games and violence are not linked. Within the first few paragraphs of Fergusons article I noticed the straw man fallacy. This fallacy appears when the author uses terms like “studies show” along with “scholars” without providing citations. The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a writer misrepresents a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. To report as though these “scholars” show definitive evidence that there is no link between video games and behaviour is a massive overreach. While the studies themselves are interesting, there is particularly little that can be said about their relevance to real life gaming. Throughout Fergusons article I observed the either/or fallacy. Fergusons argument only makes sense if we assume that the only factor affecting rates of violent crime is video games. However, if we accept that there could be other factors increasing the rate of violent crime, suddenly, the whole argument falls

Prolonged scenes of massive violence, graphic sexual content, and animated blood are examples of statements that the Entertainment Software Rating Board uses to depict the content in over fifty- five percent of the video games rated yearly. The debate of whether the aggressive nature of these video games influences youth violence in our country has been heatedly battled for decades. Since the mid 1980’s, it has been suggested that high profile cases of violence are due to an aggressor’s excessive video game use. However, much like a cold case the type of connection between video game use and youth violence remains without a definite answer. Most believe that video game use negatively influences child aggression acts in our country. Others firmly declare that video games provide a realm of opportunity for child development. Ultimately, it is impossible to say that video game use affects every child the same way. New studies suggest that video games do not affect every child that plays a game. Although violent video games are innocuous for the majority of adolescents between the ages of twelve and eighteen, the effects of these games are aggravated in those with pre- existing antisocial or depressive traits.

Technology is an important aspect of change in our world. As time goes on, we are introduced to more and more technology every year, which includes media such as video games. The increase of technology has also increased and improved the world including ways of communicating and distribution of information. More often used outlets of media are those used for entertainment purposes, like television, internet and video games. The ones who are most likely to engage in these media outlets are millennials and the most recent generation Z, because they have been introduced to these outlets from a young age. In fact, a study found that children spend around 9 hours a week playing video games (Polman, de Castro, & van Aken, 2008). It is evident that video games are progressively becoming more violent in nature, and with children spending as much time as they do playing video games, there are questions that must be asked, is the violent nature of video games effecting today’s youth? And if so in what ways?

Adam Lanza was a twenty-year-old individual with a dream of wanting to become a Marine. When Lanza’s mother, Nancy, told him that he couldn’t be a Marine due to him never wanting people to touch him, Lanza became even more obsessed with the military. Lanza transformed his gaming room into a replica of a military compound. By cutting paper into targets and placing them around the house, Lanza was able to practice his shooting skills with a pellet gun that he learned to shoot my playing video games. Nancy started to worry about her son’s behavior and decided to investigate on her own. Days before an unwanted historical event, she called a friend about finding pictures of bloody corpses of children under her child’s bed. Along with the gory remains,

It is agreeable that there are some correlation between teenagers playing video games and how it affects the youth mentally. Heavy consumption of violence video games does indeed stimulate a change reaction in the brain waves, but there is no hard evidence stating that those changes causes teenagers to act aggressively and violently. On the contrary, it is a popular beliefs that violence video games does indeed causes teenagers to displayed unpleasant behaviors and actions because that is what they learned and observed from the games. Therefore, parents should limit and regulate the amount of time their teenagers are playing violence video games so that they can protect their children from negative behaviors.

According to Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia, desensitize is define as the diminished emotional responses to a negative or aversive stimulus after repeated exposed to it. In other words, video games have always been an aspect of entertainment and humans have used video games as an outlet to escape the harsh reality of everyday life. The consequences of violent video games have been school shooting, bullying, violence among young children, and drugs and alcohol abuses.

A video game is “an electronic game in which players control images on a television or computer screen” (Merriam-Webster). Video games have been entertaining and challenging gamers since the Game Boy to modern console games. Despite the simplicity of the definition of video games, a video game, especially ones containing violence can have a large effect on the gamer. Because of the realism and advancements in the video game industry, video games can influence the player, and can make the gamer more aggressive, even if the game is not a violent video game. Even though video games have grown in popularity over the past decade, some have not been too popular with parents, for the reason that they are too violent. Violent video games affect

Because of new technology, contemporary youth is exposed to extreme and intense content each day. In video games, kids fire virtual guns at people. They see it as a victory to have the most kills. Parents should avoid exposing their children to violent video games because this desensitization to brutality leads to dehumanization of others.

The last and final supporting argument is why exactly a violent videogame changes people in a negative way. It was said that there is an increase in aggression in individuals who play games, but there is no sign that it increased violence and crime to that person. This means that the people playing the games will have somewhat of a “hard” personality. For example, when these aggressed behaved kids play a game of football, they would rather play tackle football than flag or two hand touch football, but this doesn’t mean if they are actually playing flag/two-hand touch football that they will deliberately tackle and try to hurt someone, just because they hurt someone on Grand Theft Auto. For instance, listen to what this fellow had to say about

Whenever there is a mass shooting, it does not take long before videogames are to blame. Some politicians and family value groups have said, "Censorship is the bastard child of technology." What is to blame for such a quote? The answer is: the realism of gaming software. Gaming software realism has grown tremendously from being pixelized. While this is amazing to some, others have major complaints about the effects of the games on their children and other people around them. One half of the peoples complaints are that the video games need more censors which will limit things that are able to happen in the game, better known as video game censorship. The other half of complaints believe that the increase of sex and violence in video games is

Can violent media images and video games result in violent behavior? The answer is yes. For a few decades now hundreds of researchers have take time to research the relationship of media images and video games to violent behavior in children. In the next few paragraphs I will discuss why media images and video games result in violent behavior in children. This paper will also provide some important factors that adults should know about media images and video game violence.

As more video games has these sort of styles such as: fighting or shooting control; many people believed that violent video games could cause them to become aggressive while others refused to believe such nonsense. Each side of the arguments both has collected very good fair amount of data ranging to other people’s views, facts, and statistics along with interviews from professionals who did studies on this topic.

Victor Chau Professor Myers ENGL-1301 Video Games: Can it cause violence? Any action against violent video games should be met with more research and that any banning of violent video games should come under more significant scrutiny. For sometime, many people consider violent video games to be the cause of violent behavior in the younger generations. However there are also people who would refute such claims that violent video games are the causes of tragedies, and would point to another reason why anyone would perform violent actions. The concerned peoples who have put stock in the notion that violent video games has caused youths of today to perform school shootings and/or suicide have only been lightly educated about the positive impact that video games have done for the younger generations, as well as the older generations. In fact, people would say that it is coincidence that a killer who have just happened to play video games could have been inspired by the virtual simulations that video games can provide. A what if example would be to say if a person who is set on shooting people in a certain drove to the location of his designated shooting spree in a particular brand of car. Is the company who produced such the car at fault for making and selling it to the perpetrator? Of course not. To quickly address also, all video games forgo a rating system created by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB for short, in order to determine which audience a certain

Video games have been around since the early 1950s and since their conceivement, there has been many advancements in technology which has cause them to be more realistic. Due to their constant plummet into realism people have begun to equate their realism to real life scenarios such as mass shooting and terroristic acts being performed. What if the correlation between violent video games and violent acts performed was nonexistent? There has been multiple studies and research done on the topic that state these accusations are completely false, but the public media programs continue to put out a false narrative. Where did their claim originate from? Well one game series may be to blame. In 2001, one of the most controversial games of its time would be released, Grand Theft Auto 3. Grand Theft Auto was despised for its depiction of violence and its sexual content, grand theft auto (GTA) would become one the best selling games of that year and was renowned as one of the best getting tons of awards and critical acclaim while its successors would go on to sell upwards to 80 million copies. So with a bad taste left in the public's mouth, people would begin to say these games weren't suitable for children. Most gamers are considered to be children and teens which isn't true but that's just it, these games aren't made for children that why there is the entertainment software rating