Why Do Young Adults Become Desensitized To Violence?

Americans have been blaming violent forms of entertainment since colonial times. From dime novels to music, to movies to television shows. The most recent medium are video games. Aided by crime-saturated news reports, a lot of people are convinced that video game violence transfers to real-life youth crimes like the school massacres. They think that violent video games make people violent, but that is not the case. Violent people play violent video games. Not everyone who plays video games are violent, but those who already are violent will play them as an outlet for their frustration and rage. If anything, video games keep violent people from going out and killing people in real life because they can vent in the virtual world.

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.

For example violent video games allow players to unleash any type of anger they have onto the game instead of acting out aggressively in the real world. A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that teenagers, especially boys, play video games as a way to control themselves when it comes to their emotions. 61.9% of the boys who were studied said they played to help them relax, ' 47.8% because 'it helped them forget their problems, ' and 45.4%p played because it helped them get their anger out. Teenagers can use these games to experience fantasies of power and fame, to explore what they accept as exciting and realistic environments to work through angry feelings or relieve stress. The games can serve as a substitute for actually rough and aggressive play. Also many studies fail to look for other factors that can contribute to why teenagers are aggressive, such as family history and mental health, plus most studies do not follow children over long periods of time. Video game experiments usually just have people playing a game for a few minutes, which is not how games are played in real life. Most teens end up playing their games for hours. What is not addressed in most studies that are against video game violence is the majority of well-adjusted teenagers who are also playing those same games, and are showing no signs of any kind of aggressive

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.

Over the past few centuries,video games have become a great leisure and hobby among kids of all ages and cultures. With the advancement of technology, video games have advanced highly in its realism and genres. This high type of advancement brought the video game industry to a multi-billion dollar industry. However, with realism, comes negative effects as well. Ever since the creation of violent or “mature” video games, there has been a constant debate on whether it will increase violence in the player. Although, not all video games are violent, and just increase skills in a player such as hand-eye coordination. Nevertheless, there is research going on for the link between violent video games and youth violence. The question is which event happens first in the sequence, do violent video games aggravate a person’s violent behavior, or does a person get rid of their anger through playing violent video games? Either way, violent video games are not beneficial to our society.

Many pundits believe video games that exhibit crude violence, blood and gore, strong language, use of alcohol and drugs and so forth, will influence young adults physical magnetism to deploy this ideal charisma in the real world. For example, in the news article Violent video games do not cause people to be violent in real life by Brian Sweeney, an argument was made, “Violent video games tend to raise more interest to other players to try out and experience things that normally people wouldn't do in real life, whether it be stealing cars and causing destruction to people and property in games like Grand Theft Auto or progressing through the story while killing nightmarish creatures using guns or knives like in Resident Evil or Dead Rising.” Though graphics are vividly improving each and every year, and explicit content seemingly encourages contributors to produce similar actions in tangible means, this statement is absolutely bogus and completely eschew in a sense of disputable genteelism. Violent video games does not really affect one's psychology, rather creates a virtual perception of freedom and reverie of diluted tension. The foregoing article introduces Jacqueline Huppuch, a senior is also a gamer who plays violent video games. She plays because it helps relieve her stress, for instance, “In

Most young children despise horror movies and dread waking up in the middle of the night due to daunting nightmares controlling their sleep. But somewhere in transitioning from a child to a young adult, many begin to acquire a love for horror movies. In “Why We Crave Horror Movies”,

Using violent or nonviolent content that are statistically controlled for their nonviolent aspects, the participants used an “emotion-related physiological indicator” to serve as a dependent variable, and lastly used real violence to study the participant’s emotions. The participants in the study were 257 college students, 124 men and 133 women, who received extra credit for their participation. The participants after completing their preferences for the video games and their traits of aggressiveness, for 20 minutes thereafter, played either a violent or non-violent video game. They then watched a ten minute film which contained real-life violent content whilst their heart rates and their galvanic skin responses were monitored. The participants then rated the video games on different levels. The results indicated that exposure to violent video games can cause people to be desensitized to real violence. At the same time, those who played the violent video games had lower HR and GSR when they watched the ten minute film of real violence. After detailing the research, Carnagey et al. (2007) argued how being desensitized to

Moreover, many kids deal with violence and can’t control it. As a result of having issues with violence some people play video games to let their violence and anger out. People need to understand that “ [b]ut overall, violent crime is down in the US-indeed, as violent games have become more popular, violent crime has fallen." (Erik Kain 1) The more popular the game is studies show violent

Call of Duty, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, and Doom. Many know these games for their violent nature, stemming from their graphic scenes or gameplay involving shooting or beating up opponents, and these factors have caused these games to stir up quite a bit of controversy. For the last few decades, people have debated the effects of these games on the people who play them. Many believe those who play the games become more aggressive as a result of their violent nature, while others argue that playing the games has no effect on one’s behavior. Society should realize that violent video games have, at most, minimal effect on players’ behavior.

Video Games and Violent Behavior Jessi Moffett CRJ 385 September 15, 2015 Intro 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?

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

As video game images become increasingly more realistic and graphic. Therefore, is there any link between the violence depicted in those games and violence in real life? Students are the main group people who played violent video games very often. Also, losing a game causes many people to have a negative impact. Last, the attitudes on violent game and antisocial. Games are everywhere around us, such as cellphones, televisions, or computers, but violent games are the most popular type of game. The scene inside the game may lead to real things happen, especially for children, who are eager to experience it. Therefore, violent games may cause many impact, such as crimes, antisocial, and negative effects.

“Head shot! That guy was destroyed!” These are just some examples of the dialogue spoken between children who play video games like “Call of Duty” or “Halo.” Children brag about the number of people they have killed in these games. Playing violent

“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.