Negative Effects Of Violent Video Games

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.

The main argument of this article is that video games have a direct link to short term and long term aggression. The author presents this argument by providing studies from peer reviewed articles that all conclude that video games do cause an increase of aggression. The main point of this article is to answer the question, “Do violent video games lead to aggression.” The article is about the effects of violent video games leading to aggression. The author uses recent examples, like the Sandy Hook and Washington Navy Yard shooting. In both of these examples, the author cites that both shooters had a history with playing violent video games. The author uses a study which selected individuals to play violent video games for a certain period of time. The study would then compare the results to a group who played non-violent video games. The study concluded that violent video games cause a direct link in aggression due to humans reenacting the actions the characters within the video games perform.

Some scholars argue however that violence in television, films and video games has in fact the opposite effect. As individuals become ‘saturated’ with violence, it can lead to a catharsis where videogames, television and films become a safe outlet to for aggressive feelings and emotions; as a result, individuals become less violent. Naturally, this argument goes against the idea that children are highly influenced by modelled behaviour as they try to replicate what they see (Freedman 2001). The influence of video games is therefore highly complex to resolve. Poole (2000) therefore argues that videogames may simply be part of many factors that lead to violent behaviour. Videogames as films and television may influence real life violence by having a particular style that is imitated. Pool argues that it is possible that the teenage murderers in America may have imitated the way in which people are killed in the video game Doom, however it is not possible to say that without playing the game they would not have killed their classmates. Research conducted in America reiterates this statement,

Steven F. Gruel, a former federal prosecutor, argues that the increasing advancements in technology are resulting in more realistic and graphic video games. With the increase in violent video games, researchers noted that the average time children and adolescents played video games also increased. Gruel emphasizes his concern that violent video games causes an increase in physically aggressive behavior, physiological arousal, desensitization, low empathy, and aggressive thinking. Compared to passively watching a violent movie, when engaged in playing a violent video game, the player is actively deciding to shoot and kill. Violent video games reduce the brain areas that are involved in higher thinking, thus resulting in low school performance. Gruel also noted his concern of violent video games justifying the violence. Players are rewarded for their violent actions. In the short run, violent video games stimulate aggression and in the long run it can increase the risk for aggressive behaviors later in life.

In conclusion, studies have shown the issues brought up by playing video games could lead to terrible tragedies in the United States as we’re the highest ranking of mass shootings.Violent video games are one of the reasons why there’s horrible shootings is there are issues, violence, and behavior problems that come along with that. Games such as GTA 5, call of duty and many more cause motivation to shooters to do this. This is why teens shouldn’t be allowed to play violent video games because it changes them and later in life they can do crimes costing people's

Since violent video games, like Mortal Kombat, were created, adolescents who play these games become more aggressive than before. To me, playing violent video games is unsafe for these people since they have the negative influence on these people. I believe that researching on that topic would help us get the sense of what problems to avoid. I wish to know what are the possible effects of violent video games on adolescents’ aggression. The independent variable is violent video games, and the dependent variable is adolescents’ aggression. My hypothesis is that adolescents who play violent video games become very aggressive than those who don’t. For this essay, I would like to present the findings from each article that will answer

This could be opening the doors to a plethora of other cases and assumptions that can lead to our youth potentially becoming killers. Research was conducted on the exposure of television violence and its effects on kids, organizations like the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association and the Academy of Pediatrics have concluded that there is a cause and effect relationship amongst those exposed. However, such studies does not demonstrate that media violence causes aggressive behavior, only that the two phenomena exist together (207). This finding was used to make the assumption that it would likely be the case with video games.

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

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

Violent video games have been a popular pass time for American teenagers ever since the first ones were released. The most popular of these games are Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Mortal Kombat, and Doom. It has become a popular belief that these games are directly linked to violent behaviors in our youth. Numerous scholars have set out to determine the validity of these assumptions through vast surveys and studies in America. All of these scholars share the belief that violent video games affect the minds of teenagers in some way, but they do not necessarily agree on whether the effects are constructive or deconstructive in the development of young minds. Russell Laczniak, author of Parental Restrictive Meditation and Children’s

Author, Steven F. Gruel, argues that there is an overwhelming amount of science and research that supports the claim that video games that are violent are indeed harmful to human development (Gruel 2010). It affects their development by causing them to act more violently. He begins by discussing that over time, usage of violent video games among youth has

According to the article “Shooting in the Dark” author, Benedict Carey, states that studies today on violent video games show no concrete evidence on actually long term negative effects on gamers. Mr. Carey is not a researcher or scientist but is a veteran writer of neuroscience, neurology, and psychology. Throughout this article he gives factual evidence and quotes from scholarly sources such as doctors and researchers in the fields of behavior and psychology. The author gives ample explanation on evidence used from his sources to give the optimal understanding to the reader of the results and/or findings given by the sources. The article connects to the modern age of gamers with examples from big name video

The studies show concerns about the effect of violent video games on young people who play videogames extremely (too much). However, it begs the question: Which comes first, can violent video games aggravate a player's violent behavior, or does the player with violent habits/desires is more easily able to be harmed or influenced by act out their violence through playing video games?

First, misconceptions and flawed studies have guided the public into believing that video games are the root of vicious adolescent crime. Past studies have indicated that in fact a link does exist between violent video games and violent crime; however, these studies have apparent issues. Many of these studies, failed to prove a legitimate cause and effect between the two variables. The largest problem is that these studies base their findings off means of testing aggression in children that do not correspond with violent in reality. For example, one study evaluated aggression by timing the duration in which someone would inflict a loud noise at another person. In reality, it is extremely difficult to assess a person’s aggression in a simulated experiment that will produce legitimate results because it is not a realistic scenario in the real world. Furthermore, the consequences of afflicting someone with a loud sound are not equivalent to the consequences of committing a mass shooting. Another major misconception is that school shootings are a direct effect of playing violent video games. The issue with that philosophy is that it fails to account for other variables that can lead to violent outbursts such as personality traits, genetics, and home environment. Overall, these misconceptions blame video games as the sole problem, distorting the view of video games

“On the other hand, considering a specific violent video game may have the reverse effect and actually reduce perceptions of negative effects if it is difficult to generate arguments for negative effects of the specific game” (Ivory, Kalyanaraman 4). Although you may believe that violent video games increase the youth violence rates, in actuality some violent video games can have separate effects on youth depending on the child for instance, one child could become more violent whereas another child will not have the urge to be violent.