Although less research has been done on the impact of violent interactive entertainment (video games and other interactive media) on young people, preliminary studies indicate that the negative impact may be significantly more severe than that wrought by television, movies, or music. Playing violent video games has been found to account for a 13% to 22% increase in adolescents' violent behavior; by comparison, smoking tobacco accounts for 14% of the increase in lung cancer. Epidemiologists studying factors associated with violence, including poverty, racial discrimination, substance abuse, inadequate schools, joblessness and family dissolution found that exposure to violent media was a factor in half of the 10,000 homicides committed each year.
Based on the pronouncements of experts, video games would appear to be a major health hazard in the United States. Experts claim that these “murder simulators” and other violent media are a “major contributing cause of the high rate of violence in American society” and are a factor in 5,000 homicides each year. In fact, video games’ “negative impact may be significantly more severe than that wrought by television, movies, or music.” Further, it would appear from the pronouncements made by experts that the question of whether video game violence causes players to be aggressive is settled.
The use of video games has become tremendously popular among children and adolescents in the past decade. Over the years, numerous studies have been conducted investigating whether video games have positive or negative impacts. An increase in popularity has raised concern with the negative effects that may or may not be occurring. Video games exploit three fundamental learning strategies and therefore are easily able to influence children and adolescence.
The substantial impact that a game can have on a young person is dependent on various factors. Predominantly violent video games have been known to have the most negative impacts. After years of research, movies and video games have been proven to increase aggressive and violent behaviors. This study will primarily focus on the effects that violent video games have a child’s aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Examining research on violent video games will establish why and how video games are influencing children, the negative impacts, and possible ways to reduce these effects.
Interactive electronic gaming is becoming increasingly popular in today’s society. Youth are very vulnerable to what there are exposed to as they are still in the learning and development stage of their life and easily influenced. Children are very susceptible to their environment and their behavior easily impacted, therefore it is important for youth to be exposed to positive influences. Researchers learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games.
Violent video games can arguably to blame for the wilding of the youth all around the world. Researchers have studied students for aggressive behaviors in result of violent video game exposure. If adolescents are subjected to violent behavior they will intern be violent themselves. There is some truth to that statement, but that is mostly due to the atmosphere at home. Not a fictitious video game, if it is perceivable in real day to day life then that can become a learned behavior. But for the most cases adolescents know the differences between real and fake.
There are various kinds of negative effects, which are created from playing such games. There are more adverse effects than positive effects on the players and it can be categorized in two segments as long-term effects and short-term effects. The young and easily manipulated players are observed to show very disturbing behavior, which includes aggressive and destructive notions on their surroundings.
This research has been conducted to make everyone aware of the cause and effects of playing violent video games. The prime targets are the children and teenagers who are considered to be very naïve and vulnerable due to their age and lack of knowledge about playing video games.
Video game violence differs from violence in television or the movies because people playing the games are actively involved in the aggression, and in some games, receive rewards and incentives for committing virtual violent acts, according to background information in the study. Other research on video games and violence has tested gamers soon after they played a game might not reflect long-term effects.