If you have been keeping up with much of anything in the gaming community, you have most likely heard some conversation surrounding the topic of “video game violence” and I am going to say what I think about this interesting theory that video games cause violent tendencies. I would first however like to add that these are my opinions and my opinions only, they have nothing to do with the thoughts that anyone else on this site has, and I would be glad to see other peoples’ opinions in the comments.
Great, now that we have that out of the way, I would like to say that I do not believe video games have the amount of influence that some people say they do, mostly because the people who use this argument have never really played many (if any at all) video games. This does not exactly put their argument out of the question though, because there have been some tests that say the kids they let play video games became more aggressive the more they played. I think it all has to do with how you perceive the things that are given to you. In other words, if I play Call Of Duty, will I be able to tell the game apart from reality? Yes, yes I will. I think that you just need to think about the video games you are playing. Basically all you have to do is to be able to tell reality and fantasy apart.
This is exactly what the ESRB rating system is for, to keep 7 year olds from playing games like Prototype and Splinter Cell. Unfortunately there have been a lot of parents completely disregarding the ESRB system, thus leading to a lot of younger kids playing games like this, which I think is bad because there should at least be some caution along the “how violent is this game?” question. I have no real authority on this topic as I am a 13 year old kid, but seriously letting a smaller child do horribly gory things to NPCs in various games is where you might want to consider drawing the line. For people who are within the level of maturity needed for the games they play should generally be fine because they can perceive things decently enough to know that doing things in video games does not mean you should do these things in real life.
The entirety of the “video game violence” question is generally caused by some sort of crime committed by someone who supposedly played too many video games and became violent. I do not understand the real argument here because none of these people are exactly “mentally sound” and most likely were set off by the video game they played with the already violent tendencies. This does show that video games are not for everyone but I don’t think that people can really do anything about this because no matter how hard we try to stop things like this, there will always be violent people in the world. My argument in a nutshell is that if Surgeon Simulator doesn’t make me a master surgeon, than Call Of Duty won’t make me a murderer.
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