Video Games and Violence in Children - Research Paper Example

Video Games and Violence in Children The improvements in home computing technologies in the last twenty years have resulted in a great change in theway that children in developed societies engage in play. For the first time in history they spend many hours staring at screens and interacting with moving images, some of them pre-programmed by game software, and some directed by other child or adult players over an internet connection. The educational value of much child-oriented game software is not disputed, but one area continues to provoke controversy: a potential link between violence in computer games and violence in children’s behavior. Some studies have maintained that playing violent video games desensitizes children to blood, killing and violent behaviour, and that this in turn causes children to be more violent in real life after playing such games. Games like “packman” were considered very violent when they first appeared, and then first person shooters like “Doom” attracted negative attention. Each generation has found different games to criticize, whether because of violence, racism, nudity, or other moral domains. There have even been claims that school shootings and some gun crime has even been inspired by video games. While some of the literature is convinced that video games cause children to become more violent, other studies claim that there is no causal link between the first person shooter type of computer games and real life acts of aggression, arguing that what happens on the screen is in fact cathartic, and allows children to work out their natural aggression in a safe and creative way. An unbiased review of the literature reveals that there are considerable methodological difficulties in conducting empirical search in this field, and that even where these difficulties are addressed, the case for a causal relationship between children’s use of video games and violent behaviors is certainly not proven. Some of the most vociferous complaints about the harmful effects of video games have come from psychiatric and medical quarters, often using parallels drawn from real life situations like military training. Dave Grossman, for example, a Colonel in the American army, draws an inference from rising crime figures between the 1960s and the 1990s, that this is the result of increasingly violent media being used by children and young people. His point is mainly that exposure to guns and methods of killing is itself harmful, and that it makes children more effective killers, once they have taken the step to get involved in gun based or any other kind of violence. This point of view is held also by psychologists like J.B. Fink (1993) and K. E. Dill & J. C. Dill (1998) who argue that violent video games desensitise children, and positively reinforce violent behaviour through frequent repetition. It has even been claimed that “The scientific debate over whether media violence has an effect is basically over, and should have been over by 1975” (D. Gentile and Craig Anderson, 2003, p. 134) . These last two authors claim that aggressor effect, victim effect, bystander effect and appetite effect are all demonstrable in connection with media violence, and that they are even stronger in the case of video games because there is more identification with the aggressor, there is more active participation, which encourages learning, whole behavioral sequences are practised, and violence is continuous, repeated, and rewarded in video games (p. 135-136). There is a considerable amount of accurate observation in these studies, and it is certainly true that video games depict violence ranging from cartoonish blobs to very realistic representations of blood and gore. One of the difficulties in evaluating studies on this topic is the vagueness of terminology used, and the difficulty in defining what is violence, and how realistic or “serious” it is. Opinions on this differ widely, depending on cultural background and individual taste. It is also very difficult to make comparisons between crime figures and video gaming habits, despite what ex-military men might think. The causes of violence in people are very complex, involving a great many variables. Poverty, drugs, home and school problems, and poor parenting are far more likely to be significant factors than video games. It is also somewhat doubtful that the type of activities that children can do with a computer mouse and pixels are in any way useful in a real life shooting scenario. The psychological situations are entirely different, and even the hand-eye co-ordination required in each situation is of a different type. There may come a day when computer games can create a very lifelike simulation of real killing, but at the moment the connection is extremely vague. Shooting pixels on a computer screen is nothing like shooting a real person. Royal Van Horn (1999, p. 176) concedes that there may be over use of video games in some families, and perceives this not as a problem of the video games themselves, but of the parents, who do not supervise age appropriate purchasing, or regulate the amount of time that their children spend on video games. Clearly extreme overuse is harmful, but this is true of almost any toy or activity which upsets a healthy balance between childhood activities like schoolwork, homework, indoor and outdoor play, friendships and computer mediated recreation. Christopher J. Ferguson believes that there is too much “moral panic” from parents and politicians keen to plant the blame for children’s problems on the media industries, in order to cover up failings which lie elsewhere in society. Tracing back from offenders who have committed acts of violence, and reviewing the literature over a large number of academic disciplines they conclude that there is no causal relationship between video game playing and violence. They make one interesting qualifying statement however, namely “most research done on violent games is conducted with ‘normal’ children or adults” (Christopher J. Ferguson, 2008, p. 27). There is a serious issue regarding vulnerable children, and this may not have been fully addressed in the research. Some scholars maintain that the tendency to blame video games for instances of violence is evidence for the fear of social and technological change which exists in some quarters (Karen Sternheimer, 2003). Others see no difference between video games and traditional books and films like fairy tales which also contain some gruesome instances of violence: “From a childs perspective, an electronic evil gnome fighting a powerful knight, for example, may in fact be little different in consequence from a grandparents use of alternating voices while reading (Daniel McDonald and Hyeok Kim, 2001, p. 243) This line of thinking assumes that children are very well aware of the “mediated” or “fantasy” element in their video game playing and that they are entertained by this pretend kind of fighting. There are a number of benefits in engaging in online video game playing, even of the most violent first person shooter kind, because children learn the norms team play and co-operation, and they distinguish between attacks on non-player characters, or on characters created and manipulated by humans, and there are many different layers of role playing potential. The point is that no-one is physically harmed by the pictorial violence, and the player to player communication is likely to be at least as well regulated, if not more so, than peer to peer communication in the playgrounds of real life. There are many opportunities to learn rules, and to see the consequences of breaking them, or to discuss different potential actions with other players: “Games are good or bad to the extent that they provide players with meaningful moral situations that can improve their decision making.” (Marcus Schulzke, p. 130) It seems likely that the debate about violence and video games will continue well into the future. It is interesting that those who are in favour of the games are usually those who have most experience of actually playing them. Those who are loudest in their opposition are usually those who know least about the activity and have not experienced the positive aspects of game play such as tactical reasoning, social contact with other people, and the challenge of solving puzzles or learning skills in order to achieve fictional goals. Everyone likes to be a hero sometimes, and video games stimulate the imagination in ways that books and films used to do. In conclusion then, it seems that there is a great deal of extreme and unfounded over-reaction to video game violence in some parts of society. Clearly there must be come regulation of sales according to the age of the children using the games, but the responsibility for controlling access to adult oriented games must surely lie with the parents and carers. More education of older citizens who do not understand the nature and content of video games would be desirable, along with some public debate about warning signs to identify vulnerable children. While we can assume that the vast majority of children will not be harmed by violent video games, and most will learn useful communication skills from them, it is possible that some individual children because of age, mental processing capacity, mental illness or other psychological or social factors may be at risk of adverse effects. There is no evidence that children become more violent because of video games, but there may be some evidence that they become withdrawn and over-dependent on them. The literature shows that there are many benefits to be gained from first person shooter games, with no clear evidence for an increase in violent behaviors. References Anderson, Craig, , Gentile, D., & Buckley, K. Violent video game effects on children and adolescents: Theory, research and public policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Cooper, J., & Mackie, D. Video games and aggression in children. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 16, (1986), pp. 726-744. Dill, K.E., and Dill, J.C. “Video game violence: A review of the empirical literature.” Aggression and Violent Behavior (1998) 3(4), pp.407-28. Ferguson, Christopher J. “The School Shooting/Violent Video Game Link: Causal Relationship of Moral Panic?” Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling 5 (2008), pp, 25-37. Funk, Jeanne B. Re-evaluating the impact of video games. Clinical Pediatrics (1993) 32(2), pp. 86-90. Gentile, D. A. & Anderson, Craig A. Violent video games: The newest media violence hazard. In D. A. Gentile (Ed.), Media violence and children. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishing, 2003. Grossman, Dave and Gloria Degaetano. Stop Teaching our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence. New York: Random House, 1999. Jones, Gerard. Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-believe Violence. New York: Basic, 2002. Kutner, Lawrence and Olson, Cheryl K. Grand Theft Childhood: the Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games and What Parents can do. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008. Mcdonald, Daniel G. and Hyeok Kim. “When I Die, I Feel Small: Electronic Game Characters and the Social Self.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. 45 (2) 2001, pp. 241-258. Schulzke, Marcus. “Defending the Morality of Violent Video Games.” Ethics and Information Technology 12 (2) (2010), pp. 27-138. Sternheimer, Karen. Its Not the Media: The Truth About Popular Cultures Influence on Children. New York: Westview, 2003. Van Horn, Royal. “Technology: Violence and Video Games.” Phi Delta Kappan. 81. (2) (1999), pp. 173ff. Read More