What Are They Thinking Analysis

Hundreds of studies have been done to determine whether violent video games will really make juveniles more violent. Randomized experiments were used in several studies to examine the short-term effect of violent video games (Anderson and Berkowitz et al. 90). In these studies, children were randomly assigned to play violent or nonviolent video games and then were observed when given an opportunity to be aggressive. The result was that children who played violent video games usually behaved aggressively.

A ponderous medium of media is video games in co-relation to violence. Video games encourage violent behavior in children as they are at a crucial stage of adaptation.

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.

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,

Additionally, although violent video games might expose children to violent behavior, the amount of violence are not as great as the ones in movies and television. The news is filled with stories of war and murder, and nearly every movie contains some forms of violence. Plus, these two media are different from games in a very important way because they involve real people, not computer-generated characters. One of the social psychological science faculties in

Have you ever wondered if a game or a movie can actually influence you to be angry? What changes in our mind when we watch violence? Imagine that you are playing a game of Mortal Kombat or watching a movie like The Punisher in your room on your beanbag chair and when you wake up in the morning and you go to the kitchen to talk to your sister and you yell at her all of a sudden for no reason. The research paper that you are about to read is going to tell you how and why it is affecting young children’s brain waves. My thesis is that violence in movies, shows, and games do influence children to change their behavior from happy to angry.

In recent years our society has experienced many tragedies in which teens have committed heinous crimes for no apparent reason. What inspired these attacks by teens on innocent victims? We live in a violent world and young people are exposed to this violence whether it's by television, music or the Internet. Video games have come under increased scrutiny as to whether or not the simulated violence in video games numbs children and teens to the consequences of real-life violence.

In their research of violent videogames and the effect on children, they have found that “the simplistic belief that exposure to media violence will lead directly to individual violence is clearly wrong.” (Kutner, Olsen, 2008) I am going to ask you to look deeper than this. I assert that although violent video games are thought to encourage real world violence, they actually help to prevent it.

For many teens, simulated violence games are apart of their daily lives. Research has shown that teens who participate in simulated violence games are more likely to experience problems in the future. Simulated violence games are highly problematic and push teens to be more aggressive and more mean than those who choose not to participate in these games. Simulated violence games should be avoided because the games could potentially teach these teens that violence is normal and killing isn’t a bad thing. The games could distract them from school assignments, and could teach teens that using negative emotions is okay. Simulated violence games could also teach teens to be too aware of the world around them.

There are indicators that links playing violent video games to increasing aggression in young people. Teenagers who are expose to violent games are more supposable to increase the likelihood of experiencing aggressive thoughts, in which turns into the likelihood of engaging in physical aggression against another person. Furthermore, violent video games produce an emotional desensitization to aggression and violence to the youth (Anderson). Based on the observation teenagers are exposed to when they are playing violent video games, they will reenact almost immediately in real life if the situational contact is sufficiently similar to the ones in the games. Therefore, consumption of violent video games produces negative behaviors that are controlled by negative

Students are acting more cruel to one another, than in the past. Shooting in the Dark claims, “Some studies in schools have found that over time digital warriors get into increasing numbers of scrapes with peers — fights in the schoolyard, for example. In a report published last summer, psychologists at Brock University in Ontario found that longer periods of violent video game playing among high school students predicted a slightly higher number of such incidents over time.” There’s more fights in schools with students who play violent games. Do Games like Grand Theft Auto V’ Cause Real-World Violence? claims, “I believe strongly that the media we consume can and does impact our lives in other more subtle ways. “You are what you eat” is an adage that applies equally well to the images and experiences we code into our brains. It may not make us killers, but I find it hard to believe we are simply immune to the things we do on a daily basis.” If “impressionable” children are fed these thoughts from a young age, they could grow up with a more violent

After analyzing the text from Looking Glass House and the article by Paradiso and Dublon titled Extra Sensory Perception provided by the stimulus packet, I was inspired to look into the effects of violent video games on adolescents by asking the question, “Do violent video games contribute to youth violence?” The advancing technology making virtual scenarios more lifelike that was mentioned in Extra Sensory Perception combined with Alice’s active imagination in Looking Glass House made me question how impactful the use of violent video games might be on an adolescent’s mind. The impact of violent video games is becoming a more common debate because, over the past few years, the sale of video games has skyrocketed and therefore, so many teenagers and children are being exposed to the content of these games. The advancements in technology have further enhanced the appeal of video games.

In Grand Theft Auto, you run a round picking up jobs in an imaginary city. These jobs range from killing union workers to stealing pricy automobiles. In Conker’s Bad Fur day, you play as a playful cartoon squirrel that drinks beer and urinates on the enemy to defeat him. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, 90% of the games played today actually reward the player to injure another person and these were the games rated Teen. These types of gratuitous violence portrayed in video games transfer over into the everyday lives of these children. Studies of children exposed to violence have shown that they can become: “immune” or numb to the horror of violence, imitate the violence they see, and show more aggressive behavior the more they’re exposed to violence. Some children accept violence as a way to handle problems. Studies have also shown that the more realistic and repeated the exposure to violence, the greater the impact on children. For instance, a child in Kentucky ended up bringing a revolver to school and shot 8 students. Police ended up pin-pointing the source to the video games the child had been playing. The child ended up raking in more than 10,000 hours of a shoot em’ up style game that rewarded bonus points for headshots.

Risky behavior by children and young adults can include violence against others or lack of remorse for consequences. The type of faulty thinking creates stressors in children which can lead to the onset of many symptoms. Children who partake in video game violence are more likely to have increased feelings of hostility, decreased emotional response to the portrayal of violence, and injury that lead to violent behavior through imitation. A new study employing state-of-the-art brain-scanning technology says that violent video games can cause an individual to become violent. Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine say that brain scans of kids who played a violent video game showed an increase in emotional arousal and a corresponding decrease of activity in brain areas involved in self-control, inhibition, and attention. In short, when playing a violent game, an individual’s brain processes the game playing as “fictional”, but later can project some of the unknown effects as violence or aggression.

Violent video games can desensitize children. Studies show that most video games in today’s society contain some type of