Psych 101
Showalter
Video Game Violence

To begin, I have a strong belief against video games that include violence in them. I believe that if children become accustomed to seeing murders, crime, and death almost every day during a video game then it will numb the effect of real murders, crime and death in real life. It becomes a routine for many to go home and sit and play violent video games like murdering innocent victims is not a big deal. In my experiences I have seen my friends and family laugh while playing certain video games when they kill a random person on the side of the street. But then we go out to run errands and I hear them making comments like “30 points if you run her over, oh wait she is pregnant make that 50.” Its comments like these that disturb me because the killing going on into the video game has entered into our reality and everyday life. If everyone playing these games has thoughts like these than I believe that some people may act on them. To me I believe that violent video games make people comfortable with violence and make them think that it is acceptable in the real world. To me I believe that violent video games have become so successful because it allows people to do tasks they would not be able to do in reality. It gives people a double life to live where they become “successful” in ways that they could not achieve in person. In the article they mentioned how crime rates have not increased as violent video game sales has increased but I believe that it doesn’t mean that no violence has occurred because of these games or that no violence will occur. Not many nine year olds are going to go steal a car and run over pregnant people. But I believe that after many years of playing these violent games for hours on end that eventually violence will be increased. So maybe the researchers should look at statistics of other ages since they have ben playing these games longer. On the other hand I do agree that the media is causing a moral panic by withholding all the information and using only data that supports them. Even though there is a limited amount of data available at this time studies have been going back to ancient times about the effect violent plays and poetry had on ones own violent tendencies. In the article the author made a good point by how it is hard to show true “aggression”. There are many factors that lead to ones aggression and there are also many things that may come off as aggression but are not entirely true aggression. Basically there are some studies that show a link to violent video games and aggression while others do not which causes controversy when trying to come to a conclusion on whether or not violent video games are affecting people in a negative way. The absence of clinical cutoffs was eye opening to me because I thought that when I was reading the research that it would be done just the same as other scientific experiments but in reality it was not. All of these biases have made me take a step and wonder if video games that include violence are a good thing or if in fact are still bad things? The author stated that studies have show that violent video games have an effect on one’s visuospatial cognition but the same problems arose here that were found with the aggression studies. Only a small, convenient sample was used in these test studies so to me this seems like the author is trying to use limited information to persuade us about that positives of violent video games just like the media is trying to say they are bad. Also, many people argue that