Ever since the first ever Mortal Kombat game
created the ESRB rating system, people have been complaining about how “Video
games are too violent” or that “Video games are responsible for all the
violence in the world” just take a look at the Dead Space 2 You mom hates Dead
Space campaign, however it seems that when people say these thing they are
either being ignorant, or are just looking for attention, the most well-known
offender of the former is Jack Thompson who is infamous for his rants about
banning GTA and calling gamers “Too brain-impaired to get it”.
But even though there are all these claims that
video games cause all violence in the real world, the actual truth is that
violence as a cause of video games are a minority, another thing people seem to
forget is that violence has been around long before Rare and Midway came out
with Conker’s Bad fur Day and the first Mortal Kombat. It’s possible the reason
people blame Video games and TV because people tend to blame new media instead
of blaming the perpetrator’s mental state or the lack of gun control.
Dr Chris Ferguson, an associate professor at
Texas A&M International University conducted an experiment on 11-18 year
olds to see how their minds reacted to violent video games and discovered that
there is no evidence that these kinds of games have an effect on their psyche
stating that “Whenever new media
comes out that last generation doesn't understand, it's always easy to blame
them," even the California court of law has denied a violent video game
law stating that “ These studies have been rejected by every court to consider
them and with good reason. They do not prove that violent video games cause
minors to act aggressively” scientifically proving that video games are
unlikely to cause the violence people say they do.
However, the media is also to blame for these
allegations that video games cause violence such as media news outlets blaming
violent games for the shooting at the Washington Navy Guard or that GTA
encourages drunk driving and car surfing, there are a few notable reasons for
the media doing this, however I believe the reason why the media blames video
games is because they need more ratings for their TV channels, the proof I have
of this is from a report on WBTV where they interviewed a man who claimed that
a line from Portal 2 “deeply affected his family” when the character Wheatley
tries to insult the protagonist by calling her “fatty, adopted fatty, fatty fatty
no parents” this resulted in WBTV turning this into a full blown report. And
why did they do this you might be asking, the answer is actually quite simple,
not because they care about what was happening, but because they had nothing to
report on, no I’m serious, they had nothing else to do, so they blew this
overreaction out of proportion, link to the article here http://gamepolitics.com/2011/05/18/parent-angry-over-adoption-joke-portal-2/
The final topic I want to discuss is that even
though video games are unlikely to cause violence, there have been events of
violence that were linked to video games, an example of this is when a 17-year-old
boy shot his parents as they slept because they took away his copy of Halo ,
the father luckily survived while the mother died from the wound, some would
say he killed them because violent games made him do it, however during the
trial it was clear that the boy Daniel Petric had his mind warped from his
obsession with the Microsoft console which possibly left him mentally unstable,
however it is also possible that it was the game that caused him to act
irrationally as he fled the house with the game in tow.
The point I’m trying to make here is that while
news hounds and over-reactive parents claim that violent video games are the
reason as to why people hurt each other in the real world, the fact is that
these rare cases of violence caused by video games is small compared to
violence caused by drugs or family issues, so please stop blaming video games and
instead focus on cleaning up the messes that the people made.
