The BBC's 'Horizon' series recently aired a video game related episode, called 'Are video games really that bad?'. The show investigated the idea that video games can cause violence that would otherwise not happen, because of many violent events being blamed on the effect of video games on people.
The episode featured people such as Craig Anderson of Iowa State University, and Brad Bushman of Ohio State University, who spoke of their studies and what they have found in relation to video game violence and other effects. They both say that video games are not responsible for violent acts, but can cause small increases in real-life aggression, and change how people think about violence. They state that this is because of the tendency of video games to reward players for doing violent acts in the games.
I believe this to be true, as sometimes after playing a violent video game, or a game that can make you angry and frustrated, in the short term you may be more likely to lash out or be aggressive towards people or things in the real world. Although I don't think a violent act would be committed unless you were already prone to doing so beforehand.
Professor Chris Ferguson of Stetson University has said that video games have actually led to a decrease in violent acts, especially in young people. Ferguson has a 'routine activities theory', which states that if you take people that are prone to aggressive and violent acts, and give them something else to do such as video games, then they will be less likely to commit acts like bullying out in the real world because they are occupied and kept away from opportunities to be violent.
An experiment was conducted by Dr Doug Gentile, in which a group of subjects competed in a timed reaction test. The winner was given the chance to choose the level of punishment for the other participant, which was the volume of an obnoxious sound that would be played. It was found that people who played violent video games were more likely to choose a much louder sound that those who hadn't, which would show they have more aggression.
Later in the program, two video game developers called Ian Livingstone and Tim Shafer spoke about the subject. Livingstone said that the people that accuse video games of causing the violent acts have never played a single video game in their lifetime. He also said that video games cause aggression in the same way as many other hobbies and activities, such as sports matches. Tim Shafer said that the same accusations about violence and video games were made about comic books and films when they were new to the world.
A researcher at Oxford University, Dr Andrew Przybylski, used the game 'Bastet' (an extremely frustrating version of Tetris) to see how much frustration impacts aggression. In his experiment, he had half of the subjects play a normal game of Tetris, while the other half would play Bastet. At the end, the results showed that those who played Bastet had more aggression than those who played Tetris.
I believe that frustration is a big part of increased aggression. A poorly made video game that does not work properly could make the player just as frustrated as someone who is playing a violent game, and could result in a similar amount of aggression.
Dr Valerie Voon then came on the show to discuss how video games can be addictive and the effect it can have. Dr Voon performed an experiment on a subject who played video games for around 20 hours a week. She wanted to see whether they would accept a smaller reward immediately or a larger reward at a later date. Then the subject was asked to play a game while hooked to an MRI scanner. The subject would press a button as quick as they could when a star appeared on the screen. Every time they pressed the button quick enough, they were rewarded with money. At the end, the theory of video game addiction was disproved, as the subject had fallen into the healthy category of game addiction.
Some people believe that video games can be used to help people, instead of just being used for entertainment. A video game called Underground was created, which used a specialised controller to train keyhole surgery, after it was found that surgeons that player video games seemed to have better skills in keyhole surgery.
To conclude with my own opinion, I don't believe that video games cause violent acts, and they can actually be used to benefit people in many ways, such as memory training and reaction times. I think that people that commit violent acts and blame it on video games would have been likely to commit the act anyway, without the influence of video games. Or perhaps video games were the final trigger for them to commit such acts. Video games can cause slight aggression, but for the majority of people this is only for the short term, and after some time they return to their normal state of aggression.
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