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Violent Video Games Research Paper

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Video games themselves have been around at a very early age of technology. Beginning in 1958, video games have revolutionized the world and everything on it. The first violent video game made its first appearance in 1976 with the release of the video game, Death Race. This consisted of a car shaped blob running over stick figures and having them turn into tombstones. Other popular violent video games that appeared in 1993 were Mortal Kombat and Night Trap. People, such as Senator Joe Lieberman, were outraged by these two games that they proposed federal video game regulations and had Night Trap taken out of stores. They most likely understood the effects that violent video games would have on the user and therefore took action against them. …show more content…
Violent video games can be linked to an abundance of tragic events and can even serve as a manner in which someone can take out their anger. It has also been known to affect the way in which a user may interpret a situation. Violent video games do affect human behavior by being able to be linked to shootings, making the user more aggressive and heartless, and it can be also be linked to the decrease in prosocial behavior.
Before all else, there are multiple cases in which violent video games have been intertwined with certain negative situations. Some cases of major importance that have caused a large amount of pain, such as school shootings, have been found to be traced back to a violent video game that the shooter may have been in possession of. This can be observed and proven true by looking at some cases such as the Columbine school shooting. In the Columbine school shooting, two boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, attacked Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. According to the History website, they attempted to have a propane bomb explode in the cafeteria and when it failed to detonate, they went into the school themselves and began …show more content…
Researcher Dr. Craig A. Anderson, from Iowa State University, believes that violent video games are a direct link to child aggression and that the more a child is exposed to violent video games then the higher they are affected. Approximately 90 percent of kids ranging from 8 to 16 in the U.S. of A are exposed to more than 13 hours a week to video games. This was proven true in an experiment that was conducted using children from both the U.S. and Japan. The study was conducted using181 Japanese students from ages 12 to 15, 1,050 Japanese students aged from 13 to 18, and 364 U.S. kids ranged from 9 to 12. The researchers then had the Japanese rate their own aggression based on hitting, kicking, or physical aggression aimed toward other children. The same steps were taken with kids from the U.S. but the teachers and peers accounts of those kids were also taken into consideration. In every group, the more a child was exposed to violent video games, the more aggressive they were with their peers who had less exposure time with the games. Even the researchers took notice of the amount of aggression each child had from the beginning to the end of the study. Violent video games therefore have a negative effect on the mentality of children and provide children with a sense of aggression and violent behavior towards

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