Video Game Argumentative Analysis

Video games in the last few decades have turned from a niche market into something that dominates the entertainment industry. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 42% of Americans played video games for 3 or more hours per week in 2015. With such widespread usage, parents and researchers alike are trying to discover the impact that these virtual realities can have. First-person shooter games, one of the most popular subgenres of video games, have become a highly politicized and controversial topic. On one side, there are those who believe that exposing our children to a glorified version of war and destruction will lead to adverse psychological effects, namely aggression and anger. On the other hand, we have those who argue
In 2015, a first-person shooter video game company Activision, released Black Ops III: the next game in their Call of Duty franchise. They generated over half a billion dollars in just the first 3 days of launch (Makuch) and became the top-selling game of 2015. Graphic violence, gore, and death are some of many themes one sees throughout games such as this. Moreover, players have the option of playing ‘multiplayer mode’ where the objective is to find and kill other real players using guns, knives, grenades and drones. With such graphic gameplay and widespread usage, it’s easy to see why many researchers flocked to discover potential damaging effect first-person shooters can have. Ironically, the negative effects of these games have turned out to be inconclusive, while there are several conclusive positive effects that researchers have
A meta-analysis, a review method designed to combine many qualitative and quantitative data from different studies to develop a single conclusion, was conducted on this topic. In it, it concluded that even after adjusting for publication bias, there was a significant relationship between playing violent video games and visuospatial cognition (Ferguson 314). In contrast, the same meta-analysis found there to be no relationship between aggression and violent video game usage when adjusted for publication bias. In other words, the link between cognition and first-person shooters is evident and consistent. These findings aren’t just the result of a biased video-game company, but the result of the accumulation of several studies that reached the same