Violent video games

Violent video games infiltrate our society to create more violent people and less desirable person to person contact. Video games promote violence in teenagers. With video games becoming more realistic, people are better able to project the violence towards society. This in turn causes societal norms to become accustom towards violent tendencies. Just because a person does not immediately imitate specific violent acts found in video games, does not mean the games will have no long-term negative impact on a person's views and behavior. Playing violent video games adversely affects psychological health by physically addicting players. One of the problems of video games is the medium’s remarkable ability to fixate a player’s attention in short bursts, decreasing their ability to stay focused.
To begin with, a number of authorities claim that playing a violent video game does present a threat to the user’s psychological health. As early as 1983, Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus, in their book Mind at Play: The Psychology of Video Games, warned about the dangers of violent video games: “Although we can never be sure in any individual case, a substantial body of evidence indicates that viewing excessive violence on the screen is associated with aggression and violent behavior among children and teenagers” (98). More recently, "studies have measured changes in behavior and emotional responses to video games, ranging from assertiveness" (Ivory, James D., and Sriram Kalyanaraman 3). and withdrawal (Möller, Ingrid, and Barbara Krahé. 2 )to “aggression, anger, and hostility” (Lam, Lawrence T., ZaoHuo Cheng, and XinMin Liu.1). While Mediascope, the publication of a nonprofit research organization, concludes from its survey of research on video game playing that there are not sufficient studies, especially of current games, to make any definitive statements about the dangers of video-game use, parents should be concerned--maybe more so precisely because so few studies have been conducted.
James Ivory and Sriram Kalyanaraman (5) compared the "effects of playing versus observing violent video games on young adults' arousal levels, hostile feelings, and aggressive thoughts." Results indicated that college students who had played a violent virtual reality game had a higher heart rate, reported more dizziness and nausea, and exhibited more aggressive thoughts in a posttest than those who had played a nonviolent game do. A study by Lawrence Lam, Cheng ZaoHuo, and Liu XinMin (6) sought to identify "effects of playing an aggressive versus nonaggressive video game on second-grade boys identified as impulsive or reflective." Boys who had played the aggressive game, compared to those who had played the nonaggressive game, displayed more verbal and physical aggression to inanimate objects and playmates during a subsequent free play session. Moreover, these differences were not related to the boys' impulsive or reflective traits. Ingrid Möller and Barbara Krahé (7) also investigated the "effects of playing a violent versus a nonviolent video game." After playing these games, third- and fourth-graders were asked questions about a hypothetical story. On three of six questions, the children who had played the violent game responded more negatively about the harmful actions of a story character than did the other children. These results suggest that playing violent video games may make children more likely to attribute hostile intentions to others.
In another study, "violent video games were considered to be more harmful in increasing aggression than violent movies or television shows due to their interactive and engrossing nature." ( Möller, Ingrid, and Barbara Krahé 8) The two studies showed that aggressive young men were especially vulnerable to violent games and that even brief exposure to violent games can temporarily increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants. The first study was conducted with college students with aggressive behavior records in the past and who completed a measure of trait aggressiveness. They were also reported to have habits of playing video games. It was found that students, who reported playing more violent video games in junior and high school, engaged in more aggressive behavior. In addition, the time spent playing video games in the past were associated with lower academic grades in college, which is a source of frustration for many students, a potential cause for anger and aggression as discussed in the previous paragraph.
The U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop once claimed that "arcade and home video games are among the top three causes of family." Although there have been studies that have found video game violence to have little negative effects on their players, there are also many studies that have found a positive correlation between negative behavior, such as aggression, and video and computer game violence. Thus, "in order to totally assess the effects of game violence on its users, the limiting conditions under which there are effects must be taken into account, which include age, gender, and class/level of education." ( Möller, Ingrid, and Barbara Krahé 10) However, violent games do affect children, as the studies show, especially early teens, and there needs to be a stricter regulation regarding the availability of these games to young children.