Why Video Games Are Not The Cause Of Violence In America
Imagine a teenager is playing video games, and within the next week he’s shooting up his school, and the video games get blamed. This is what the media is trying to convince people is the real problem, which has never been shown to be true. Video games are not the true reason that violence exists in America, violence has existed for hundreds of years without video games. The media plays a big factor in this because they are incriminating video games without looking at the facts about what video games do to the brain. Violent video games are not the reason for violence in America.
Video games help inhibit crime and violence, not cause more people to commit either. Violence and crime has been shown to go down when a new, anticipated video game comes out which shows that criminals play video games, but it helps them to keep their mind off of their criminal activities, not do more of them. This shows that crime and video games do have a correlation, but video games aren’t the causation for crime. There will always be crime and to blame one thing that has been proven to be mostly beneficial by psychologists all over the world, like Lisa Bowen who works for the American Psychological Association, doesn’t work from a logical standpoint. Video games have been proven to be beneficial by psychologists all over the country. The studies that these psychologists have made show that video games are beneficial because they help to develop memory, spatial awareness, and problem solving skills. These skills will come in handy in a lot of jobs and can have real-life applications. Crime and video games do not go hand-in-hand, but there is a correlation because of the fact that crime does go down when a new video game comes out.
Video games have been shown to make people happier, not more violent. There have been reports that people who are unemployed are happier staying unemployed because it means that they have more time to play video games and not work at a job they don’t want to pursue. That person might never want to get a job because every place he goes to rejects them, so then they go to something that will never reject them: video games. There were also studies that video games make people slightly more aggressive, but that same aggressiveness could be the same as someone playing a sport, not one that’s going to be a mass shooter.
You can’t only blame video games because video games aren’t the only problem that could be a factor because if they were then TV shows and movies would be part of that problem too. The reaction one has to the video game is not the video game’s fault because there are movies and TV shows that can get the same reaction and they aren’t getting blamed. Actually, there are quite a lot of movies and TV shows that are acclaimed for their accurate portrayal of violence and the “real world,” and video games sometimes get critically acclaimed for that, but most of the time they just get blamed for someone else’s problems.
The media is incriminating video games by blaming them for the mass shootings and school shootings in America. There is so much more coverage in the world today that we think that there is so much more evil in the world than there used to be, but this isn’t true. In fact, even though there have been more mass shootings, there has been no evidence of a violence increase since the 1990s when video games were becoming more popularized. There have been reports from the news and other sources that show more of a violence decrease, and the media is trying to incriminate video games by saying that they are the reason for the anger in the young people and everything bad with young people. This is simply not true because everything points against it: psychologists, media sources that aren’t biased, and the people who play video games.
If one believes the media blindly, then video games will look like one of the main reasons that shootings, and violence, happen. There was a news article that was about a mass shooter that played video games for most of his day, but that news article didn’t mention that the guy that did the mass shooting played Dance Dance Revolution for most of his day, not the violent video game that they were trying to imply he played and that was the reason he became a mass shooter. The media is trying to incriminate all video games, not just violent ones, even though there are a lot of video games that give you real life skills, like teamwork, strategy, and critical thinking skills. The guy that shot all those people was more likely to become a mass shooter from a rogue TV show or movie than he was from playing Dance Dance Revolution.
The only difference between video games, TV shows, and movies, which aren’t being blamed for the most part, is that video games cause you to be involved in the character’s life because you are actually playing as that character, not just watching them from a third person perspective. This could mean that you think you are that character and get mad at the wrongs that are going on in that person’s life, but the same could be said for TV shows and movies because you are still witnessing wrongs in a person’s life, and while some video games can make you frustrated, there is no way that the frustration you’re experiencing is cause for wanting to kill someone. Scientists have found little-to-no connection that there is a massive increase in hostility after a consumption of video games, which means that video games do not make a person more hostile, and therefore more violent. They might make a person want to put hot sauce on their burger, but it has been proven that it doesn’t make them want to kill a person. The reason the person would want to kill another human is, possibly, partly because of video games, but mostly because of other factors in that person’s life that don’t involve video games at all.
The people that usually incriminate video games are parents because they grew up with sports and TV, so they don’t want their kids to play video games because they want their kids to be like them. This means that they have no connection to video games and can’t say what it does to someone’s brain, they just know what the media has told them which, for the most part, hasn’t been good. Video games are not to blame for the violence in America because there are many countries who have close to the same consumption of video games that are nowhere near the violence levels that America has. The problem that America has is with the people in the country and with the gun laws that the country is run by, and people need to learn that there’s never one source that makes someone violent, it’s almost always a combination of different things coming together and culminating over time. Even, the Supreme Court has gone on record to say that video games are not the problem because there are a lot of other factors to consider and that is why a person might have a certain reaction to a video game. There have been studies that show that children channel their aggression into video games and away from real life scenarios where they might get angry. They use all their pent-up feelings in the video game to release aggression from third-party sources like school, peers, and parents.
Video games do not cause crime, they’ve actually been shown to hinder crime and violence. Blaming violent video games for violence in America is like blaming war-based video games for war in the world. There has been no proof that video games are the cause for violence, the opposite of this has been seen as true through psychological tests and reasoning, and just because there’s one factor that might have a correlation to it, that doesn’t make all video games bad. Video games do not cause violence because, if they did, then it would most likely be proven by now and video games would probably be banned, or strongly prohibited, in a lot of countries.
