Do Video Games Lead Violence?

Do Video Games Lead Violence?

Introduction

The occurrence of events of violence among teenagers in schools and other social settings have raised a concern on the need to find the source of such behavior. One of the most important contributors of this kind of behavior is violence in video games. Professionals as well as the parents of young children have vehemently brought the issue to light many times. Considerable among of work has been done by psychologists to study the relationship between video games and violence. While some of the psychologists believe that violence in video games have psychological and physiological impact on children and leads to aggressiveness. Others believe that there is no sufficient evidence to prove a direct relationship between violence and video games. In fact, these argue that such video games can even lead to pro-social behavior.

Discussion

Research suggests that video games are played by children in their developmental phase. This is the phase where they are undergoing developmental and cognitive changes. The exposure to violence in video games is the reason why some children have been found to develop aggressiveness in them. Violence in video games only affects those who are naturally more aggressive than ordinary children. However, this cannot be farther from reality in that there is no single group that has shown a no affect of video games. The affect of violence in video games on the physiology and psychology of children depends on the time children spent on video games. The more time a child spends on video games the higher will be the probability of the child being affected by violence in video game. Anything above 4 hours of exposure to these video games a week means negative impact on children. Most children who play these video games have a far ...