Violence in Video Games

3 December 2011

Association Between Violence and Video Games

Video games have been progressing every year towards better graphics, more fluent game play and more recently increased levels of violence. Millions of kids play these violent video games every day and are soaking up whatever they see and hear. I for one have played games with drastic levels of violence such as Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty. In these games you go around and kill people. Some games are much more violent in a social manner than others. Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed represent games where you are the hero and kill people that are trying to kill you. With the amount of violence we see in the world today with the wars and what not, this doesn’t seem that bad. These games still cause some violence issues though. One game that has received a lot of criticism is Grand Theft Auto. This type of game where you are an individual that is in the streets of a city where you can kill citizens at will and go on killing sprees has brought a fear from a lot of people. They think there is an association between these video games and violence in children playing these games. There have been instances in the past involving killing sprees and child violence and they think it has to do with all of the violence that they see in these games. They are given control of a player and command them to fire on other people in the street at will. Kids do this with ease and don’t relate any wrongdoing with it because it is just a video game. But some kids have taken the violence from this fantasy world and implemented it into real life. Violence has been increasing among children because of these video games.

Aggressive behavior is a sign of this controversy. Many kids who play these video games are more aggressive than their peers who do not. It leads us to a question of are aggressive kids attracted to video games or are video games the source of the aggression? In a CNN...