| Home History of Video Games Video Game Genre Sample of Violent Games Video Games are Not good Pro-Video Game Articles |
Violence
in Media and Video Games: The Two Sides of the Coin
Ma.
Carmina Felizco
Media had always been filled with violent images of war, disaster, and
death. At the start of the 1900s,
cinemas laid out an intimate view of how life can be so viciously ended for
quite a number of people. The
execution of Mary, Queen of Scots showed the swing and the rolling head on the
ground. Films like ‘The Great
Train Robbery’ in 1903 showed several murders (Goldberg, 1998, p.49).
By the 1920s, media was more often applied on news and photography,
showing, for example, Ruth Snyder sitting on an electric chair.
By the 1930s and 1940s, it was Weegee who produced an oversupply of
pictures of the murdered gangsters for use in the presentation of tabloids. This
led to violent films of death that extended until the time that video games
entered the media.
Violent video games were said to be “firearms trainers at best, murder
simulators at worst” (Byrd, 2007, p.402).
Patrick Byrd (2007) said, in his Houston Law Review article, that
“children are turning not only into brainless zombies, but brainless zombies
with a disturbing penchant for gross violence” (p.402). Out
of the 92% rate of children ages two and seventeen who play video games, and the
20% rate of adolescents who play rather spontaneously (Byrd, 2007, p.402), a
controversy erupted on whether playing violent games increases the likelihood of
acts of violence in children.
As early as 1972, U.S. Surgeon General Jesse Steinfield stated before the U.S. Congress how the Scientific Advisory Committee reported that “televised violence, indeed, does have an adverse effect on certain members of our society” (1972, p.26). Only recently, the Congressional Public Health Summit in July 26, 2000 revealed that
“[E]ntertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values, and behavior, particularly in children… overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children.” (Joint Statement, 2000, p.1)
Especially with the marketing of violent video games, such as Death Race, Custer’s Revenge, Night Trap, Duke Nukem, Mortal Kombat, Doom, and War Craft, youngsters get to play the role of drivers who get to run over human bodies, with huge amount of graphic carnage, fighting arcades, fantastic deaths, and first-person shooting that is more realistic in the virtual environment since mid-‘90s.
On the other side of the coin, many researchers claim that violent video
games do inflict a more aggressive behavior on active players, but it does not
necessarily imply that they become violent killers in the future.
John Timmer (2007), in his article entitled ‘Meta-Analysis Uncovers No
Real Link between Violence and Gaming’, described how Dr. Christopher
Fergunson conducted a meta-analysis research to set the link between violence
and gaming. In a study that sets a
high base rate of 98.7% of adolescents playing violent video games and a very
low base rate of the total number of adolescents that do rare, violent acts like
school shootings, for example, there is a big question on whether an act as
universal as gaming could be linked to an act as rare as the school shootings. When
Fergunson counted only the incidents that reflected actual aggressive behavior,
it turned out that “there was no significant link between the games and
aggression” (Timmer, 2007). Actual
violence
was too few to set a direct causal link
on the two cases.
In Geoffrey Gorer’s essay in 1955 entitled ‘The Pornography of
Death’, he said that “While natural death became more and more smothered in
prudery, violent death has played an ever-growing part in the fantasies offered
to mass audiences” (Goldberg, 1998, p.51).
In the production of violent video games, many people question the
effects of violent images of war, disaster, and death that are being instigated
in the minds of youth players in the game.
Somehow violent
games appear to be good trainers in fields that require aggressiveness and
ferociousness. As entertainment
violence leads to aggressive attitudes and values, they appear only useful in
actions that need battling and the use of force, wherein violent video games
appear to be useful and acceptable; otherwise, it will only inflict
aggressiveness in an environment where violent acts have no place in the world.
References
Byrd,
P.R. (2007). It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt: the effectiveness
of proposed video-game legislation on reducing violence in children.
Goldberg,
V. (1998). Death takes a holiday, sort of. In Jeffrey Goldstein’s Why
we watch: the attractions of violent entertainment.
Joint
Statement. (2000). Joint statement on the
impact of entertainment violence on children. Retrieved September 17, 2008,
from the
Slocombe,
M. (2005, December 14). Brain response
altered by violent video games claim. Retrieved September 17, 2008, from http://digital-lifestyles.info/2005/12/14/brain-response-altered-by-violent-video-games-claim.
Steinfield,
J. (1972). Statement in hearings before
Subcommittee on Communications of Committee on Commerce (U.S. Senate, Serial
No. 92-52, pp.25-27).
