Video Game Violence and Its Effects on Children

Video Game Violence and Its Effects on Children

As we enter the 21st Century, video games are becoming more popular each and everyday. People of all ages can and do enjoy video games as a way to spend there free-time. These games allow the player to live in the game whether it’s about sports or a role playing game. The problem with the video games in the market is that they are becoming too violent in some people’s minds. Also, many of these violent video games are being advertised and directed to America’s children. This is my question for America; can video games influence violence and aggression in children? In this paper, I will include American’s view on this issue, what tests have shown and what the video game industry has to say about this accusation.

Sissela Bok, author of Mayhem, has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. Bok continuously comments on ethical issues in government, media, and public life. In her book Mayhem, Bok explains how media influences violence. Bok also points out how video games include way too much violence especially to our children. In Mayhem, Bok mentions video games such as Mortal Kombat, Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem in which players are rewarded for slashing, gouging or shooting their opponents. In recent years, video games have become increasingly graphic and highly realistic. Questions about degrees of reality and about the role of real-life, imagined, and reenacted violence in our lives are crucial to our learning to understand and to deal with violence. But these questions cannot be dismissed, much less resolved, by making tidy distinctions between the real and the not real.

Another source from Jody M. Roy, Love to Hate, also agrees with the idea that video games influence violence in children. Roy feels that the Columbine shootings are connected to the media and video games that the students were influenced by. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the shooters, enjoyed and played violent video games such as Doom and Duke Nukem. However, Roy also says that Duke Nukem does not kill anyone. Him and his victims are nothing more than computer-generated images (86). Video games can also lower the violence