Video Games and Violence: Both Sides of the Argument

Background Does playing a video game make you prone to commit real-life violence? This question has been an issue since the very early 90's when violent games like Doom and Wolfenstein were released, but only in the last half a decade or so (mainly since the incident at Columbine, Colorado, 1999 – when it was revealed that the teenage shooters were avid video game players) has it really come to the majority's attention. The key issue that both sides can't agree on is whether people should be allowed to play violent games or not. I think both sides agree that extremely violent video games should not be played by young children, who have a harder time separating reality from fiction; also, the media does indeed only report one side of the argument. There have been numerous studies claiming both that violent games correlate to real-life violence, and that there is little or no such correlation. The problem is that there is no concrete evidence of a causal conclusion between video game violence and real-life violence. If there was such a conclusion, both sides would likely be able to come to an understanding, but as it stands now, they are in a stalemate.
Article 1: Report In the article "Violence in Video Games," (Anonymous, found on 123helpme.com) the writer is adamant about the fact that violence in video games/music/movies is not to blame for violence in society. He/she believes that the violence in games actually decreases violent tendencies in individuals by allowing people to vent their frustrations without hurting anyone. Also the media is just latching on to the idea that violence in games promotes violence in real life to gain ratings, because it's an easy scapegoat. The media glorification of the psychopathic violence that sometimes occurs (and is supposedly related to video games) actually gives the perpetrators the attention they want. The writer explains that people blindly believe that playing violent video games makes the player violent, but from

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