Essay on The Negative Effects of Violent Video Games

While he is successful in some respects, his attempts mostly fall flat due to a lack of evidence to back the claims and connections he is making. John Leo discusses two mass shootings which were still fresh in his audience’s mind: the Columbine High School massacre, and the Heath High School shooting in Paducah Kentucky in 1997. When discussing both shootings, Leo connects the actions of the shooters to video games. In the Columbine High School shooting, the shooters finished their spree in a way Leo suggests was inspired by the video game Postal which had come out a year and a half earlier. The Heath High School shooter hit five of his victims in the neck or head. As Leo mentions, “Head shots pay a bonus in many video games.” However, when describing both of these events and their supposed connections with video games, Leo fails to support his claims. He never tells his audience whether the shooters in Littleton ever actually played Postal, although there is evidence showing the two did play the videogame Doom, and he never mentions whether the shooter in Paducah played any violent video games. At one point, however, Leo successfully appeals to logos as he describes how the Army wanted to desensitize its recruits and make them more violent. “During World War II,” Leo writes, “only 15 to 20 percent of all American soldiers fired their weapon in battle.” The Army wanted this number to increase and found that shooting games can make them more violent. This realization is why the Marine Corps is “adapting a version of Doom, [a] hyperviolent game, [...] for its own training purposes.” Leo presents this as proof that video games makes people

“I feel like getting a baseball bat, breaking it over his head, and then STABBING him with the broken end!!!!” vents Eric Harris about his local weatherman on his web page (Anton 5). Harris, being one of the killers in the Columbine High School shooting, was called a “die-hard gamer who loved the interactive bloodbath called DOOM” (Anton 2). Doom was thought to be one of the factors in Eric Harris’ violent tragedy. The question is: did playing Doom lead to him being a violent child, or did being a violent child lead him to playing Doom?

Violent video games have been blamed for school shootings, increase in bullying and violence towards women, thus making many consider that games creates criminals. Steven Kirsh, author of the article “Seeing The World Through Mortal Combat Colored Glasses: Violent Video Games and Hostile Attribution Bias” believes that these types of video games desensitize players to violence, reward them for performing violence, and teaches the youth that violence is an acceptable way to resolve conflicts. Due to the graphic nature of violent video games, researchers have maintained a focus on them as a possible source of aggression. Video games advocates

Following the April 1999 Columbine High School shooting, the April 2007 Virginia Tech rampage, and the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, considerable debate has emerged regarding the impact of hyper-aggressive, violent video games as a causal agent for such murderous behavior by young adults. In a videotape recorded before the Columbine shooting, Eric Harris, one of the two teenager shooters, expressed enthusiasm for the planned shooting, saying it would be "like [profanity] Doom.” Seung-Hui Cho, the twenty-three year-old who killed thirty-two people at Virginia Tech University was a big fan of violent

Shooting games are surrounded by lots of controversies. This game genre is often accused of negatively affecting the minds of young children with its violence and encouraging youth to participate in the crime despite a lack of evidence to support that view. Despite all this controversy these games still remain one of the most popular genres around and are the largest sub-genre of Action Games. The majority of games have an element of shooting in them, not just games like Doom. Best-selling games with exciting stories such as Tomb Raider or Grand Theft Auto both involve shooting.

Did you know that according to Dr. Bret Conrad, the majority of gamers believe that video game violence has few, if any harmful effects on them personally? Well, many people today play games with simulated violence ranging from games like “Killer” to games like Grand Theft Auto. One example, “Killer”, takes place in multiple New York City high schools at the end of the year. It consists of two teams, each student is assigned a person to shoot and they have to shoot them before they are shot. The students have to use water pistols to shoot their person. Once they are killed, their game is over. While some agree that games with simulated violence are perilous for teens, games with simulated violence are beneficial for teens because they help kids with problem solving skills, keep them busy and helps them help others.

The most extensive argument many have argued toward violent video games affecting one’s behavior can simply be described as that many shooters were fans of violent video games before committing the shootings. A common example people making this argument raise are the Columbine shooters, who were big fans of the video game Doom. While many believe that Doom’s excessive gore and violence led the two teens to perpetrate the mass shooting, that is not the case. What those who argue against video games fail to realize that those who commit these crimes had a history of other conditions. After many mass shootings, researchers often discovered in autopsies that the suspect had a long history of aggression or mental health problems that gaming was not responsible for. Patrick Markey and Christopher J. Ferguson, writers for US News, wrote

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,

Studies have confirmed that dramatic learning does occur through video game playing. Chris Crawford's book, The Art of Computer Game Design, states that the primary motivation in game playing is to learn (Crawford). In his column about the Columbine Massacre, Jon Dvorak, a well-known computer columnist, stresses the educational nature of games. "Whether its Doom teaching you how to do maximum damage in a "kill them all" situation, a racing game teaching you how to handle a car, or a skeet shooting game, skills can be transferred from games to real life situations"(Dvorak). Dvorak's examples were all personal, but other studies have confirmed that dramatic learning does occur through computer/video games.

In 2012, 77 people were killed by Anders Breivik, who admitted to using Modern Warfare 2 for training, an extremely graphic video game. Not only did this mass killer use a vulgar video game to train him for his killing spree,but youth in juvie for violence and murder also openly admitted to playing and obsessing over violent games, such as “Doom” and “The Evil Within.” Evan Ramsey, a highschool student in Alaska, told news reporters “I lost my touch with reality. You shoot a guy in ‘Doom’ and he gets back up.” He said in an interview with Fox News. “You often have to shoot him 8 or 9 times to make sure he’s dead.” Ramsey snuck into his school with a 12-gauge shotgun, where he killed a student followed by the principal, and soon after wounded

I wrote “Violence, Video Games, and the Serious Game Movement,” that was published in the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education in 2009. Mainly because with all of the mass shootings that have occurred over the years that have left many different families devastated. Critics behind these type of crime always seem to wonder “what is influencing these aggressors to perform such a violent act?” It has become common today to dismiss the issues of family history and mental illness but focus on video game violence and the exposure to adolescents. Many people assume that videogames are the direct cause of real life violence, because in incident like the Columbine School Shooting where both Klebold and Harris shared common interest in both

First off, violence and video games are two things that seem to share a close relationship with each other. These two ideas are what researchers believe can cause someone with pre existing psychiatric disorders and a love for violent video games to go down a path of violence later in their life. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are two individuals that I'm sure everyone has heard of, if you haven’t then there is one word that I need to tell you, Columbine. The Columbine High shooting was one of the deadliest shootings in the US during its time in history.(Repetition)[Pathos] Later analyze of the psychological health revealed that Dylan and Harris were experiencing mental hardships. Not only that but later interviews with the parents of Eric and Dylan, federal agents allegedly reported that, “Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out their rampage after their parents took away their video games.” (Source D)[Logos] Although this may just be only one case of video games being an attribute in a Mass

Video Game Violence has been a controversial topic for many years. It is easy to shift the blame for school shootings, and other crimes on to video games; an example of this is the Columbine High School massacre, a school shooting that occurred on April 20, 1999, where two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went to their school and killed 12 students, one teacher, and wounded 21 others. Because Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were fans of video games and actively played games such as Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Duke Nukem, this pushed the blame on to these companies and would lead to lawsuits and sour the mouth of the public view of video games. That is only one of the many that would paint a bad picture into the mind of the public. This

They discuss the argument between people who agree that video games results into violence and those who disagree. Fox News, a political organization, is notoriously known for associating mass shootings with video games such as Call of Duty, Counterstrike, and Grand Theft Auto V. All of these video games are set for mature audiences because of the murder, blood, and gore that are present in these titles. Seung-Hui Cho, infamous for the Virginia Tech Massacre in April 2007, spent hours playing the first-person shooter game called Counterstrike. Modern Warfare 2, a game that had much praise and anticipation in November 2009, had major controversy about a specific level in the story where you played as a Russian terrorist and killed countless innocent people in an airport. Fox News argues that this level in the game is where players can train for mass murder. There were also reports of this level having an impact to Adam Lanza, the person responsible for the Sandy Hook shooting. The most infamous incident of video games causing violence was Evan Ramsey in 1997. He shot a person and didn’t realize he was going to die because he thought it would take several bullets to kill a person. His idea came from an old video game named Doom where it took 7-8 bullets to kill a person. A major question of debate is if video games are the main causes of these

“Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end” (“Video Game Quotes” 1). Over time researchers, psychiatrists, and parents have often wondered how damaging violent video games can be to the youth in society. This is an important matter to people with children in their personal lives or work environment. These games have become a large risk factor for aggressive behavior in children. Researchers have been saying that video games do affect adults as well; however, they have even more effect on younger brains in early development. Video games have negative effects on childrens’ behavior. Some effects that video games have are reduced academic performance, aggression, obesity, and emotional disorder.