Violence in video games

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.