A man leaps from a tall building, streaking through the air so fast that it seems as if he’s flying. His feet graze the concrete that he’s falling alongside of and he begins running, accomplishing a feat considered impossible by most people. He quickly lands from the thirty story fall after pulling off some awe-inspiring acrobatic aerials and causes a large cloud of dust to surround his crouching body. He smirks as he stands, completely unharmed, only to face another obstacle. Hundreds of demonic monsters are now charging at him, fangs bared and claws outstretched. He lets out a scoff and draws a large broadsword that is of such a size that no normal human being could hope to wield it and begins slaying every one of them while twirling the gigantic weapon as if it weighed no more than a feather. Blood splatters the land and shrieks of the monsters fill the air as they fall. It’s only after ending the lives of all of them the man sheathes his sword and move on to the next area.

The scene written above was loosely based on one of the more popular, and more violent, video games called Devil May Cry. The question is, does this scene–disturbing or not–cause the violent tendencies that some of the younger generations display? This topic was the one picked from my bag of choices due to the fact that I was at one point an avid gamer. I may be something of a jerk, but any of my friends will tell you I’m one of the least violent people they know. A couple of years ago I would make jokes to people who were annoying me to “be careful, I play video games,” but as I’ve seen more and more paranoia rise from this subject I wanted to see just how much that statement was true. Interestingly enough, I was thinking that what I would learn was exactly the opposite of the conclusions I had come to. I had thought that video games did increase violence before I researched it. What I came to the conclusion to was pretty simple; Video game censorship should be regulated by parents, not by the government.

If one tries to discover whether a subject is true or not the, most often used source would be research studies, or at least the newspaper articles that cite them. Some of these studies that are against video games are hastily done and are incomplete, and on top of that there have been no studies that have proven that in-game violence leads to real-life violence. This makes me wonder if it’s true that violent games cause violence, or if society is looking for another thing to hold liable for their faults.

Banning violent video games has been largely unsuccessful (Schiesel, par. 1). Apparently the 1^st Amendment is the cause behind why we can’t regulate video games via laws, and we as Americans are undecided as to whether it’s something that should be regulated by the government or if it’s something that parents should monitor themselves. One reason those who want to ban these games offer is the theory that games can increase violent tendencies in children. To make the situation a bit more complicated, there is information that supports that theory and information that contradicts it.

In a book titled Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do, many of the myths of video games are dispelled by the authors Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner who are both on the psychiatric faculty at Harvard Medical School. The book is quite in depth and reveals that “Olson and Kutner's findings didn't necessarily lead to blaming the games… [instead,] the kids who are more likely to want to play those games probably have somewhat violent inclinations to begin with” (qtd. in Stevens, screen 1). In this book, a two-year study was done where it was revealed that 51% of the boys who played M-rated video games, the equivalent of an R-rated movie, got into a fight at least once. This is opposed to the 28% of little fighters that played the lower-rated games. Another interesting statistic is that the number of kids under seventeen years old who committed murder decreased 65% between 1993 and 2004 (Kushner, par. 16). With an increase of violent video games Dr. Cheryl Olson argues that “if this was affecting all kids in a bad way, we’d see something,” (Knusher, par. 16). Such results are hard to ignore.

There have been studies with opposite results as well, some of which linked aggression with violent video games. However, there’s no way to allow an actual criminal act to take place in a laboratory so “instead, researchers are left to measure innocuous examples of so-called aggressive behavior… that doesn't remotely resemble criminally violent activity. This has ranged from having subjects punch an inflatable Bozo doll to, more commonly, blast opponents with a loud noise” (Kushner, par. 5). These studies prove not violence, but aggression. The study consisted of thirty-two undergraduate students playing two different video games, one titled Wolfenstein 3D—a video game about shooting Nazi’s—and the other titled Myst—a game focused on puzzle solving without the least bit of violence—both of which were made in the early 1990’s. Participants were each told to play the game for fifteen minutes and then were allowed to send a noise blast which one of the doctors, Dr. Karen Dill, stated was not even harmful. If we’re going to base video games and their link to violence on studies like this then let’s consider a snippet from an article written by Christopher J. Ferguson, an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences, and Criminal Justice at Texas A&M International University, which states “that some media-violence researchers recently published an article suggesting that reading passages from the bible [sic] with violent content increases ‘aggression’ in much the same way that video games supposedly do” (Ferguson, par. 8). So if we’re going to censor video games, the Bible may be the next scapegoat that causes violence.

Facts ignored in most arguments are the published results of studies that state violent games increase performance in some areas of cognition. If people are going to look at only the bad results, results that are usually pieced together by biased researchers, then of course things will look bad. The positive parts just tend to get ignored. Unfortunately there’s no way to stop people from publishing or broadcasting things from a biased view, especially not when it sells. Video games are viewed as violence instigators due to this, but even if we ignore the fact that there are studies proving otherwise, there are ways to avoid giving access of the really violent games to those who are very young. Parents need to look at the video games that they’re buying for their children. Every video game has a rating system on it. The basics are ‘E for Everyone,’ ‘T for Teen,’ and ‘M for Mature.’ These work like movie ratings you see (G/PG/R) etc. For parents who are raising five-year old children and are worried about exposing them to things they feel their children aren’t ready for, chances are those parents won’t take them to an R-rated movie, so they shouldn’t buy them a video game that’s rated ‘M’. These ratings do help and need to be looked at before buying a video game.

Using a rating system is only part of the solution; the children also need to be taught right from wrong. It’s granted that parents aren’t able to monitor children every second of the day. There’s always a chance they’ll to go their friends’ houses and play that violent game. However, if they know that what’s played in the game is not the right thing to do then chances are they’ll be less inclined to do it in real life. When we teach the future generations what right and wrong are to begin with, we won’t have to try to blame violence on things like video games or on the next scapegoat.

When children know in their core that killing someone is wrong, it’s something that they’ll keep with them the rest of their lives. Should we really try to blame the fact that the shooting at Virginia Tech happened because the student, Seung-Hui Cho, played a war game called Counter-Strike? A lawyer named Jack Thompson, one of the people who want to end all production of violent video games, tried to use this as an excuse for why the tragedy occurred. He also claimed that the criminal “trained for his killing spree on the counterstrike[sic] game” (Virginia, par. 3). According to the same source that Thompson got his information from, “there was a lot of evidence that, while Hui was on the computer constantly, he was usually writing, not playing games. The local Virginia Tech Counter-Strike players had never heard of him and he hadn't attended a recent Counter-Strike tournament held on campus” (Virginia, par. 6). Unfortunately people are reading or listening to people like Thompson’s statements and not actually going to the source or they’d find that he is skewing the information as if shoving it through a metaphorical kaleidoscope. If we only could take responsibility for our own actions a lot of these problems would disappear. It seems though—just like those that claim temporary insanity during a trial—there are some people will want to place the blame anywhere they can besides themselves.

Even though it’s been shown that violence can actually decrease with the playing of violent video games, there should be an understanding that a toddler more than likely shouldn’t be decapitating his enemies in a game until he’s quite some years older (Kushner, par. 9). If some parents would start instilling stronger morals into their kids, or at least stop using video game systems as a babysitter, it might be surprising at how much society would change. When we stop pointing fingers at objects that we ourselves are the masters of and start looking within we may not like what we see, but ignoring a disease usually won’t make it go away, it’s something that has to be addressed. Though all the worries about this subject are pretty rampant now, I have a feeling that someday our grandchildren will look at this debate over video games the same way my generation looks at the way our grandparents viewed Elvis’s “demonic hips” and think “what was the big deal?”

Works Cited:

Ferguson, Christopher J. "Video Games: the Latest Scapegoat for Violence. " The

Chronicle of Higher Education 22 Jun 2007: B.20. Research Library Core. ProQuest. Yavapai College, Prescott, Arizona. 27 Oct. 2008 <http://www.proquest.com/>

Kushner, David. "Off Target; We shoot holes through studies linking violent games to

aggression. " Electronic Gaming Monthly 1 Aug. 2007: 1. General Interest Module. ProQuest. Yavapai College, Prescott, Arizona. 27 Oct. 2008 <http://www.proquest.com/>

Schiesel, Seth. "Courts Block Laws On Game Violence." New York Times [New York, N.Y.]

21 Aug. 2007, Late Edition (East Coast): E.1. New York Times. ProQuest. Yavapai College, Prescott, Arizona. 27 Oct. 2008 <http://www.proquest.com/>

Stevens, Tim. “Video Games Don’t Cause Violence, Says New Book.”

<http://www.switched.com/2008/05/17/violent-video-games-dont-cause-violence-says- new-book/> 17 May 2008. Accessed 8 November 2008

“Virginia Tech killer had brief brush with Counterstrike.”

mood: contemplative tags: game, video, violence