Video Games and Society
Video Games: A History of Violence?
HAHA! I KILLED YOU! I’M NOW LEVEL 30! How and why does mass media influence aggressive behavior? More specifically, does playing video games cause aggressive behavior? Because children and teenagers spend an increased amount of time each day viewing/playing video games, they are shaping their values, attitudes, and behaviors. For people who do act out aggressively, the results can be deadly. Monthly, the news is filled with blood-chilling accounts of crimes committed due to a copy-cat obsession with violent video games. Violent video games are changing the values that parents have taught their teens. Parents want their kids to have good values such as being kind, truthful, caring, and courteous to others. The video games that they are letting their teens play are promoting none of these golden values. What has the world come to? When a child can walk into a store and find video games where you win based on how many people you can kill or how many places you can blow up. Parents would not want their teens to go around in real life killing other people or using explosives in any way. So what’s the difference in letting them virtually do it in your house? Letting teens play violent video games are changing their values to the ones being taught inside the game as well as many across the world today.
For the past 40 years, since the first video games were created, the gaming industry has developed games that would surpass other games before it. Since the late 1970’s, when the first two games of “Pac-man” and “Space Invaders” were created, video games have changed tremendously over time. The late 1970’s through the 1980’s video game makers used what was called an 8-bit graphic system, which limited many features they could put in video games .Violence was not realistic, blood was not red, and so violence in video games was not incorporated into the new games that appeared on the market. In the early 1990’s, video game makers began
HAHA! I KILLED YOU! I’M NOW LEVEL 30! How and why does mass media influence aggressive behavior? More specifically, does playing video games cause aggressive behavior? Because children and teenagers spend an increased amount of time each day viewing/playing video games, they are shaping their values, attitudes, and behaviors. For people who do act out aggressively, the results can be deadly. Monthly, the news is filled with blood-chilling accounts of crimes committed due to a copy-cat obsession with violent video games. Violent video games are changing the values that parents have taught their teens. Parents want their kids to have good values such as being kind, truthful, caring, and courteous to others. The video games that they are letting their teens play are promoting none of these golden values. What has the world come to? When a child can walk into a store and find video games where you win based on how many people you can kill or how many places you can blow up. Parents would not want their teens to go around in real life killing other people or using explosives in any way. So what’s the difference in letting them virtually do it in your house? Letting teens play violent video games are changing their values to the ones being taught inside the game as well as many across the world today.
For the past 40 years, since the first video games were created, the gaming industry has developed games that would surpass other games before it. Since the late 1970’s, when the first two games of “Pac-man” and “Space Invaders” were created, video games have changed tremendously over time. The late 1970’s through the 1980’s video game makers used what was called an 8-bit graphic system, which limited many features they could put in video games .Violence was not realistic, blood was not red, and so violence in video games was not incorporated into the new games that appeared on the market. In the early 1990’s, video game makers began
Cited: 1. Ferguson, C. J. (2013). Violent video games and the Supreme Court: Lessons for the scientific community in the wake of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. American Psychologist, 68(2), 57-74. 2. Blascovich, J. (2002). Social influence within immersive virtual environments (p 127-145). In R. Schroeder (Ed.) The social life of avatars. Springer-Verlag. 3. www.researchgate.net/publication/...Are.../79e4150aad92560f34.pdf 4. history1900s.about.com › ... › Decade By Decade › 1990s 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/us/16cnd-shooting.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 6. http://tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/16/from-pac-man-to-wow-the-evolution- of-video-games/