Violence in Video Games

Violence in Video Games

Video games are now considered a sub culture and effect other popular mainstream cultures such as books, films and the internet. Their widespread influence means different opinions have developed over their effect on society, specifically if they cause violence.

Games seem to be targeted more for causing violence than any other form of media, such as TV or movies. This is down to the increased immersion that comes with playing and controlling a game compared to merely watching something.

There have been several large scale crimes, mainly mass shootings, that many have put down to the influence of games. Even though there is no clear link to video games they are still blamed by the media and given a bad reputation among parents of children who play games and among adults as a whole.

People in and out of the media have decided that violence in video games is polluting minds of younger audiences and when representatives of the games industry try and defend the games with arguments including the PEGI rating system and how it shows parents and people what age groups should be playing these games, people decide to ignore that rating. But then they cant blame the video game for being violent. An example of this is Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and I have chosen this example due to the fact that 1 specific mission in this game is looked at in a very controversial way and even though you can choose to skip this mission before you play it doesn't mean you have too. The mission contains you shooting civilians in an airport. This mission isn't suitable for younger children but this is why the game has an 18+ PEGI rating but if people choose to ignore this then developers can't control that.

The only reason people may see video games as more harmful to people in our society compared to movies and TV is because instead of just watching like in TV or Movies your actually doing the things in Video games. So there is a difference in the harmfulness that video games can output to younger audiences in a comparison to movies and TV. But even though you can say that video games can cause more harm to audiences than TV or Movies both of these other media forms also have their own rating system, people seem to respect these other ratings more than that of video game ratings.

Games can be beneficial to society in small ways such as if someone didn't have very many friends but played games that individual could potentially make friends through playing these games with them whether they are over the internet friends or people he knows in real life that he could build a better friendship with.

Parents have a big responsibility when it come to video games as to making sure that their children are playing the correct game for their age and not letting them play too violent games. If a child is consistently playing games that aren't suitable for them they could potentially become desensitised towards other things in life.

Games do have the potential to desensitise children and by this I mean if the child only ever plays violent and gore filled games then after a certain amount of time they are no longer going to keep being disgusted or scared by it any more. But if children play games that are suitable for their age then they wont see this sort of thing as much so it has a much lesser chance of desensitising them.

Not all games are bad but due to the media games are all being generalised as a bad form of media that are seen as violent and destructive towards children. But not all games are bad, some games are even harmless. For example, in FIFA there isn't any violence involved in this game its just multiple games of football being played over and over again so how could a game like this with a PEGI rating of 3+ be harmful? One of the main defences for video games is the Byron review, this was a review done in 2008 and shows that games can have a variety of different benefits such as learning and development. The review also talks bout the need for a better classification system for games and how a better system could help people understand that video game ratings are on the same level as movie or TV ratings.