First Person Disaster: The Effects of Violent Video Games on Children

There’s a lot of research going for and against the presence of violence in video games and the effects it can have on children. I personally share that thought that the violence can be harmful to a child and think that there should be stronger regulations put down on the distribution of these games. The fact that these games are becoming more and more normal in society and to American children is slightly unsettling. Desensitization to violence is not good and people have used that as an argument for the light regulations on the games that are currently out. Desensitization makes children think nothing of violence when it is, in fact, a big deal.

Have you ever played games like Call of Duty, Destiny, Grand Theft Auto, or Left 4 Dead? If you haven’t, they are very violent first person shooters (played from the first person point of view) so you get the full effect of the violence. It puts you in the shoes of the person doing the killing or committing the violent crime. It certainly makes the game feel more real, like you’re doing the actions, and it really puts you in the game. I play those kinds of games and I can tell you from experience that it feels more real playing in first person as oppose to third person (you have a full view of the character you are playing and are not seeing things from their point of view).

Look at the picture that is posted above. It literally shows you in the first person point of view and it tells you to hit RT (right trigger) to punch a man that it being held by one of your allies. I’ve played this game before and this scene is an excerpt from the first Black Ops and you are trying to get information out of this man that it is telling you to punch in the face. You really get the firsthand look at the violence whenever you look at that picture, and that doesn’t even give you the full effect. There are sounds and other things that contribute to the overall violence factor.

Ratings of video games range from eC, meaning early childhood, to Ao, meaning adults only and each rating gives you a slight insight to what exactly is in the game. For example, if you pick up a game that has the rating Ao, it would probably be a pretty decent guess that there is a lot of violence and blood and gore along with possible drug and alcohol use, and sexual themes with nudity. Does that sound like a child’s game to you? Not exactly. Those ratings also come with age restrictions. If you go and try to buy an M rated game, if you have a baby face like me, you will most likely get carded for it. They check your ID to make sure that you are of age to be buying whatever game you are looking to buy.

We’ve all heard those parents going around talking about how they regulate what their children play and watch on TV. There have been surveys that have been taken and a large amount of parents say that they always monitor how long and what their children play, but when a survey was taken ofteenagers 9 out of 10 said that their parents almost never monitored what they were playing. So if that’s the case, and parents aren’t watching what their kids are seeing, then what exactly is stopping them from seeing the violence in these games? That’s right.

Nothing.Have you ever heard of Bandura’s Bobo Doll experiment? It was performed in 1961 and it basically showed that a child will follow a model that is set for them. There were two groups of mixed genders, each group had a ‘leader’, and there was a Bobo Doll for each group. The two models were each told to treat the Bobo Doll in a different fashion. One was to be nice and gentle with the doll and the other was to be mean and aggressive toward it, then they let the children play with it after having seen what the adult model did. In both groups, the children followed exactly what the adult model did. If the model was mean and aggressive toward the doll, so were the children, and if the model was gentle and nice to the model, then the children followed their lead.

Children modeling the behavior in games may just be my opinion, but there is mounting evidence that that is exactly what will happen. Children are young and impressionable, so it would be nothing for them to model the behavior presented to them in a video game.

#videogames #children #violence