Professional Documents
Culture Documents
NMSU
Videogames, they are played the world around and in some cases, quite
intensively but do they cause more harm than what would appear to be the case. It would
appear that ever since videogames first came out in the seventies they have had their
detractors. First they made children go blind because they sat too close to the television
while playing. Then, they were causing Americas youth to become lazy and lose
coordination. Most recently and most importantly, videogames are now being accused of
an even greater crime. Nowadays, videogames are being accused of turning our children
away from being assets to society and into a nation of unknowledgeable, unmotivated,
violent and socially inept burdens on America. Some argue that games are a very large
factor in why students do not do their homework in school and receive bad grades. But,
do they really cause so much disaster in students? Are the videogames being turned into a
scapegoat or are they truly to blame for things such as school violence, bad grades and
social misfits who find it hard to interact with actual people in school.
One may wonder when the crusade against video game violence really gained
steam. This person may wonder what catalyzed this whole movement against video
games. Well, I believe that the answers to this can be found in articles written about the
Two teenage students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, carried out a shooting rampage,
suicide. It is considered to be the United States' deadliest school shooting, and its second
discovered to be avid players of the game Doom, a game where you the protagonist goes
around shooting Demons while in the first person perspective. Needless to say, the fact
that you shoot things in doom and that the pair of students shot a number of students in
the school, was not a correlation missed by investigators and certainly not a theory
untried by the media. Soon after, a bevy of different outspoken blowhards looking for
something to blame latched onto this explanation and accused video games of corrupting
their youth. Since then, many studies have been preformed in order to learn about the
“Video games have become one of the favorite activities of American children. A
growing body of research is linking violent video game play to aggressive cognitions,
2003). These are the first words written in an article I read that was published by TAPSA,
and the violent images desensitizes youth slightly, I doubt that Videogames and the
media create monstrously violent people. Yes that particular study showed that some of
the people who played those violent games had violent attitudes, but in a school one
Notice the study said there was a correlation between aggressive attitudes, not
actions. Sure the person is going to feel aggressive playing the game, the person is
supposed to be drawn into the game world. He is supposed to feel as the character feels,
but the feeling passes once the console is shut off. Actual human aggression is actually
natural and not caused by games, take bullies for example. Bullies do not pick on you
because some game made it seem cool; they do not dip kids’ heads in toilets because their
favorite video game character does it. They instead behave in that way because there is
most likely something wrong with them. There have always been school bullies, and
there has always been school violence. Violence in schools has existed long before
violent video games and if they were somehow banned, it will exist long after. Games are
The other main problem that people attribute to video games is that they make
those who play it full of bad characteristics that create bad students who behave violently
and receive poor marks in school. This is not the case, according to Eugene Provenzo, of
Harvard University, “No correlation has been found, for instance, between the amount of
time spent playing games and negative personality measures. Nor does it appear that
participation in active sports. Game playing seems to bring families together in common
activity more than any other form of recreation.” This notion is certainly supported by my
experiences. Some of the smartest kids at school loved video games and all of the athletes
In the end I believe that Videogames have virtually no effect on your attitudes and
behavior at school. I know that there is the occasional time where playing games does not
help certain situations, but in the case of violence, it does not take much to make a violent
person become violent. If we had no games said person would just find something else
which feeds his nature. In the case of students who prefer to play games rather than study,
if they had no access to games they would find something else to distract them, perhaps