Critical Approaches to Creative Media Products
- Audience Theory
Do violent video-games turn under 18's into violent people?
The mentality that some people have towards violent video-games, especially elders/older adults, is ridiculously biased - they believe that these realistic feeling, violent video-games are bound to turn every single child into psychopathic, serial killers, and they keep linking real-world catastrophic events, such as school shootings, to the gaming addiction. While some games may strike a nerve here and there, I am going to talk about violent games and how instead of turning you into a criminal, how good they are for you and how they may save your life one day.
The people I've mentioned above can almost even be considered as gaming haters. They will seek out specific, brain-washing media reports, research biased results and alleged facts in order to attempt to make their points valid - Gratification Theory. They will also blindly accept every word that their favourite media says without questioning it, regardless if it is right or wrong or even made up - Passive Consumption.
The people arguing against them believe that violent video-games do NOT turn anyone violent, some saying that the catastrophes that have and will happen are super rare anomalies and even then, there isn't enough evidence to link them. Some of them also argue that video-games actually benefit you. Similar to the other audience, they may also use biased media reports and made-up facts to make their points, although not as often. Last but not least they may and may not question research results - Active Consumption.
- Effects Debate and Responses
- Children can socialise if they play together - meaning they can learn from each other and build friendships as well as basic social skills.
- Quantity is more dangerous than quality - the other audience often forgets this. When people spend a lot of time doing a certain thing, the chances of there being frustration increase. This translates to gaming in a way that playing games for hours MAY be more of a problem than just playing for 1 hour for example, regardless of game genre.
- "Studies potentially linking violent games with aggression do not always compare them with games involving similar levels of competition and difficulty" - most of the times, children and teenagers don't choose a game because it contains violence but for other additional aspects such as competing against other people or because it's challenging. Again, these will cause frustration which may lead to aggression.
- Other media such as films and TV shows contain just as much, and most of the time way more violence and disturbing scenes which are titans compared to video-games, yet there is no fuss about that. - This is the wining point right here, and it only goes to show that people arguing against are just throwing a tantrum because the concept of gaming, technology and the future in general hurts their elder morals. Everyone said that the invention of telephones were the Devil, yet here we are.
- Action games help you with split-second decision making. - This is a great skill to have and can be very useful in real-life situations such as car accidents or self-defence. Action games also stimulate your sense of awareness and ability to multi-task.
Negatives
- Too much time playing can cause children to care less about academic work.
- Some violent scenes can cause mental scarring. - Then again, so can films.
- In some rare cases, the person might commit a crime, all the way from minor to heavy.
- Violence is just not appropriate for children. It just simply shouldn't be apart of their life so early.
- Some violent games may also contain sexual and even drugs which may lead the person to get a wrong idea of what being an adult and growing up is like.
I came up with a survey addressing teenagers/young adults about violence in video-games and the impact that it has on people's way of thinking/behaviour. Below are the questions along with some answers.
Personally I think that from the 18 participants, there were a lot of a anomalies and alternative opinions, some of the answers not correlating with others, meaning the results aren't the best. Although, conclusively the majority agrees that violence in games isn't that big of a deal and don't necessarily impact people's decisions in life. They do mostly agree, however, that whether or not it may affect them, it depends on the person.
In conclusion, it is a very rare occasion that video games have a heavy enough impact for children to do something awful later in their lifes, even rare for their behaviour to slightly change. Even though there are negative side-effects of playing violent games, the positive effects out-weigh them.
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