The Impact of Violent Video Games on Teenagers

The impact of Violent Video Games on Teenagers

Along with the rapid development of computer science, people’s entertainment styles have been largely changed, especially the prevailing computer games. After decades, it has become an accepted entertainment. However, statistics proved that as many as 89 percent of video games contain certain violent content, and half of which include bullying or murdering behaviors towards other game characters (Gentile&Anderson, 2007, P.133). The expression of violence is completed through the action of the users and a majority of teenagers are even addicted to video games, which influences their growth in a large scale. This report is mainly to explore the impact of the violent video games on teenagers. The hypothesis of this report is that violent video games greatly threaten young people’s attitude and behavior toward violence. Therefore, violent video games exposure highly related to the aggressive behaviors and the serious forms of aggression and violence are caused by repeated exposure to violent video games.

The term video game is currently defined as “people can play electronic games on consoles such as computers and other hand-held video game devices (e.g.,GameBoy)” (Gentile&Anderson, 2007, P.133). It goes without saying that nowadays video games on computers are the mainstream among the above three (e.g. CS, WOW). Media violence can be described as “the violent content that communication through different media. It mainly shows that “depict intentional attempts by individuals to act violent behaviors on others. An ‘individual’ can be both a nonhuman cartoon character and a real person such as Saturday-morning cartoons (e.g., “MightyMouse,” “Road Runner”), which can be regarded as media violence (Bushman& Anderson, 2001, P.354).

Why children and teenagers are indulged in video games? In 1975, Katz and his colleagues first outlined the basic assumptions of a uses and gratifications approach,...