Do Video Games make you violent?

[Is not JL]

Basically, the title. Video Game and its correlation to violence is brought up many times, whether in my own experience or from things I hear around news. I mean, we've seen politicians convinced that video games were terrible for people. We've had people blame video games in recent tragedies involving shootings.

 

I was intent on learning this in the first place; my school then forced me to do a project on anything, so I chose this. I have the poll up to be able to get a tally but I'd encourage you guys to share your opinion on this question. Try to be as unbiased as possible, but in the end, we are gamers, and when I make this poll, it's already factored that there might be bias. Thanks for reading, I hope you guys...well, respond!

[Zaguroth]

I stand by the belief that video games can only lead to violence if the person in question has a pre-existing mental condition. I play violent video games all the time, all my potential anger goes into them. I do not have violent tendencies after playing games..

In my opinion, the media and politicians simply blame video games because it's easier than saying "Well we obviously don't know a thing about our children so let's blame their violence on things that they own and interact with."

Edited September 9, 2013 by Zaguroth

[Caboose The Ace]

Angry rant starting proceed with caution !!!!

 

No they do not it has been proven time and time again the games are good for you in many ways they improve you're hand and eye coordination they help you're eyesight get better and so on But the thing that angers me the most about this subject is the damm MEDIA those stupid reporters have no idea WTF they are talking about at all. For example a father buys his son a bottle of beer for his child who is 14 the child then does some very stupid things and is found out so its it the beer companies fault or the father its the father fault. But when it comes to games oh no its the games fault there is worse thing in movies and on TV than a game for example a child kills his dad with a gun the police goes into the child's room to find a motive in the tv they see Texas chainsaw massacre and in his Xbox they see GT4 so of course the media report the story and don't even mention the movie all they just talk about GT4 and say how bad it is and It need to be banned. I may have gone off topic a bit but damm this subject drives me insane !!!

[Buns]

Basically, the title. Video Game and its correlation to violence is brought up many times, whether in my own experience or from things I hear around news. I mean, we've seen politicians convinced that video games were terrible for people. We've had people blame video games in recent tragedies involving shootings.

 

I was intent on learning this in the first place; my school then forced me to do a project on anything, so I chose this. I have the poll up to be able to get a tally but I'd encourage you guys to share your opinion on this question. Try to be as unbiased as possible, but in the end, we are gamers, and when I make this poll, it's already factored that there might be bias. Thanks for reading, I hope you guys...well, respond!

I play violent video games quite frequently and ironically I'm a pacifist(Well to be clear I don't like starting fights I perfer to avoid them as much as possible and so far I always do. I only think you should fight if it absolutely necessary) There has been dozens of studies on video games and violence and all studies provide inconsistent evidence(I read this on Kotaku forgot the article name) Like Zag said if you have a underlying mental condition then playing violent video games might actually provoke you to do violent things but it all depends on the person.So far scientific studies on this topic don't always find an answer they can agree on weather or not violent video games can link to violence. 

[RedStarRocket91]

I honestly don't understand why anyone would think videogames make people violent. When I was younger, if I wasn't playing a videogame, I could be playing with toy guns, toy swords, water pistols or even plastic soldiers, and all of those have fairly heavy links to acts of violence. As I got older, I started playing with things like airsoft guns and even went out paintballing on a few occasions, which of course about as close to the real thing as you can get without visiting a firing range.

 

You're probably wondering why I'm bringing up these kinds of things in a question about videogames. Put simply, it's because all of these kinds of things are much closer to the experience of actual physical violence than playing a video game, and yet whenever some horrible person goes around shooting innocents, we always hear about how they played a lot of Mass Effect or Call of Duty or Doom or whatever - never that they often went paintballing, or played Warhammer.

 

The other thing is that the media often tries to claim that playing video games at least makes us more capable of committing violent acts efficiently: if you spend all day aiming down ironsights and pulling a trigger to kill people in Battlefield 3, why shouldn't you be able to do that in real life? Well, let me answer by picking from another genre. I spent pretty much my entire teenage years playing the FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer series, and I can tell you right now that when it comes to playing football in the real world, I have literally no idea what I'm doing. On the PS2, I could place a ball perfectly between two defenders and then have a striker lift it easily past the goalkeeper. In the real world, I'm lucky not to trip over myself whenever I kick the thing.

 

Same thing with fighting games, which tend to be extremely realistically animated and controlled. I've knocked out dozens of opponents in wrestling and boxing games over the years. The last time I punched someone in the real world, they caught my arm and started laughing at me. I know exactly how to throw a punch thanks to years of watching fighting games - but actually going out and doing it with the intent to harm is an entirely different matter.

 

Because I can distinguish between reality and fantasy, I know whenever I'm fighting someone in-game that it's not real: that the only harm I'm causing is at worst a few minutes' worth of looking at a respawn timer or a loss mark being added to a big collection of statistics. I can gun down as many Spartans as I like in Halo 4 because I know there's absolutely no harm being done to whoever is controlling them. If I were to pick up a gun and shoot someone in the real world then I know that I'm doing something terrible, inflicting real pain and damage on another human being - not causing them a few moments' worth of inconvenience, but actually hurting them. If someone were to go back and count up every kill I've made in a video game over the years, the total would quite probably be approaching the million mark by now, possibly even higher - and even though that's as many deaths as you'd find in a fairly major genocide, I still hate the thought of doing something that would harm another person.

 

I also found a couple of graphs which you may find interesting. The first one shows the violent crime rates for the USA since 1960 - it might be interesting for your project if you were to add the dates various video games consoles were released to it. The second shows, by country, how much money people spend on videogames per capita, and how much gun crime there is per capita. Obviously, if video games really do cause violence, you'd expect the countries that have the most spending on video games to have the most gun crime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Caboose The Ace]

I honestly don't understand why anyone would think videogames make people violent. When I was younger, if I wasn't playing a videogame, I could be playing with toy guns, toy swords, water pistols or even plastic soldiers, and all of those have fairly heavy links to acts of violence. As I got older, I started playing with things like airsoft guns and even went out paintballing on a few occasions, which of course about as close to the real thing as you can get without visiting a firing range.

 

You're probably wondering why I'm bringing up these kinds of things in a question about videogames. Put simply, it's because all of these kinds of things are much closer to the experience of actual physical violence than playing a video game, and yet whenever some horrible person goes around shooting innocents, we always hear about how they played a lot of Mass Effect or Call of Duty or Doom or whatever - never that they often went paintballing, or played Warhammer.

 

The other thing is that the media often tries to claim that playing video games at least makes us more capable of committing violent acts efficiently: if you spend all day aiming down ironsights and pulling a trigger to kill people in Battlefield 3, why shouldn't you be able to do that in real life? Well, let me answer by picking from another genre. I spent pretty much my entire teenage years playing the FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer series, and I can tell you right now that when it comes to playing football in the real world, I have literally no idea what I'm doing. On the PS2, I could place a ball perfectly between two defenders and then have a striker lift it easily past the goalkeeper. In the real world, I'm lucky not to trip over myself whenever I kick the thing.

 

Same thing with fighting games, which tend to be extremely realistically animated and controlled. I've knocked out dozens of opponents in wrestling and boxing games over the years. The last time I punched someone in the real world, they caught my arm and started laughing at me. I know exactly how to throw a punch thanks to years of watching fighting games - but actually going out and doing it with the intent to harm is an entirely different matter.

 

Because I can distinguish between reality and fantasy, I know whenever I'm fighting someone in-game that it's not real: that the only harm I'm causing is at worst a few minutes' worth of looking at a respawn timer or a loss mark being added to a big collection of statistics. I can gun down as many Spartans as I like in Halo 4 because I know there's absolutely no harm being done to whoever is controlling them. If I were to pick up a gun and shoot someone in the real world then I know that I'm doing something terrible, inflicting real pain and damage on another human being - not causing them a few moments' worth of inconvenience, but actually hurting them. If someone were to go back and count up every kill I've made in a video game over the years, the total would quite probably be approaching the million mark by now, possibly even higher - and even though that's as many deaths as you'd find in a fairly major genocide, I still hate the thought of doing something that would harm another person.

 

I also found a couple of graphs which you may find interesting. The first one shows the violent crime rates for the USA since 1960 - it might be interesting for your project if you were to add the dates various video games consoles were released to it. The second shows, by country, how much money people spend on videogames per capita, and how much gun crime there is per capita. Obviously, if video games really do cause violence, you'd expect the countries that have the most spending on video games to have the most gun crime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ironic thing is that everyone sais more gun lead to violence and in the USA there are more guns than ever but there is less crime than ever before in the USA oh the irony. 

[D-38 Boss]

NHL doesn't make me a Hockey player, Rock Band doesn't make me a famous rock star, and the Sims doesn't make me god.

 

Following this line of logic, GTA doesn't make me a criminal, Hitman doesn't make me a contract killer, and Manhunt doesn't make me a sociopathic serial killer.

 

Maybe it's time to loo at the environment of those who commit violence (I.E. home and school life, friends, parents.) rather than a single object.

 

If you want to go by that logic, why isn't it possible Tooth paste is responsible fro violence? I'm pretty sure Timothy McVeigh and Ted Bundy had Toothpaste.

[Cooliest]

I actually just had a conversation about this with a friend last night. I was playing prototype (which if you've never played is very gory) and she said don't you see how senseless this is making you. So I paused the game looked over at her and tried to think of what to say. All I could think of was "I'm not becoming senseless." and the conversation kept going on and on, I ended up getting upset and walking away. As I thought about it this morning, I realized how much I don't believe it.  I think that truly honestly she had never seen a violent video game before and she was only judging her response off of what she has heard before.

 

So it seems that we have now come to a state of conditioning where if you were raised not playing video games and your parents or whoever told you that they were too violent you started to believe that. But if you took the time to sit down and play a game once and a while you would realize differently. It's just like back in the day when people said that rock and roll was a sin or whatever.

 

People become violent for other reasons and then they have a disposition within themselves where then maybe rap, rock, horror films, or video games worsen the disposition it's not what causes the violence. 

 

I know this was lengthy and may not all be coherent. lol. When I get lengthy I get bad at writing. lol.  But in my personal opinion, video games calm me down, make me less violent because I get the chance to take some anger out on a tv rather than a human. But I guess we are all different.

[The Director]

No. Videos games do not make me violent...

 

Lag does.

[Buns]

No. Videos games do not make me violent...

 

Lag does.

^ This

[HaloUnionPro]

I don't think that video games cause violence, though perhaps they can attract violent people.  A game isn't going to turn me into a killer, but perhaps someone who already had violent urges would enjoy a violent game.  Doesn't mean even close to everyone who does it is violent.  And if you are going to ban violent video games, let's ban violent movies and even the Bible (but seriously, let's not).

[The Stig]

In 1920 they thought alcohol that was the root of all evil. In the 40's they thought it was colored folk. In the50's they thought it was the sports, and cigarettes. In the 60's they thought was movies. In the 70's they thought it was the automobile. In the 80's they thought it was s** drugs and rock&roll. In the 90's they thought it was the Pop music and Rap music. In the 2000's they though it was pharmisutical drugs and medicine and television. And since 2010 they think it is video games and social networks. In 2020 they will think its the internet in general.

 

But let me tell you... its not ANY of that. Its humans period. We have em tions and everyone of us including saints is capable of commiting an act of true evil. Everyone has a dark side... Its those that can't control it who are the ones doing these crimes. Your either born evil or are raised, molded, and groomed to be evil. You can not adopt the darkness and let it shape you.