Video Games Is Not the Cause

Violent Games Are Not The Cause.

Second to the movies industry, video games or electronic games industry is on a rapid development with billions of dollars made. Among them, categories such as Point-and-Shoot, RPG (Role-playing game), RTS (Real Time Strategy) games and some others are often branded too violent for their violent acts and blood and gore scenes. Generally, many people in Canada and the United States believe that media violence, a category which violent games fall into is a major cause of violent crime. Although it is true, that today's games are more violent, they have not killed one. More important, people who play these violent video games have not killed others because of its violence. The fact is that because games violence does not make the gamers to have aggressive behaviors towards other people in their real life. Recently, federal judge in Michigan has knocked down a law restricting the sale of violent video games (McCullagh). The same thing has happened in California, Washington and Illinois before. These wins for the video games industry is an indication showing that violent video games are not the cause of aggressive behaviors.

Understanding the basic of the games that many people consider too violent is essential. In Point-and-Shoot games or First person shooter like Doom, Half-Life or Unreal Tournament, gamers take the role of characters that use a variety of weapons ranging from knife to heavy firearm such machine gun and rocket launcher to kill monster and other villains to archive some certain goals. Blood and gore excessively exit in these games as you fire a rocket into a human body. Role-playing games for instance Final Fantasy, World Of Warcraft have the same idea with Point-and-shoot games, but players use old-age weapon such as swords, bows and arrows, lance, etc and magic instead of modern weapon. These games require players to utilize all the characters' skills and strength to take down the other enemies while they are trying to do the same. RTS games such as Starcraft, Command and Conquer series are different. They focus on military war as players take roles of commanders of an army planning a way to win the battles and wars. Of course, most of the firearm and war tools are there in the games for use. All different violent video games categories have the same point: killing to win and it is cool to kill in order to win the games.

First, opposing to the public's belief, there has neither a research nor evidence that proved a connection between violent video games and aggressive behaviors. Dmitri Williams, an assistant professor in the Speech Communication Department at the University of Illinois and expert on the effects of online video-game play, has led the first long-term study of online videogame playing. The results of the study contradicted to general opinions and previous researches. They found that players exposure to highly violent online games hardly caused any considerable real-world aggression (Lynn). They also found that the players' behavior neither increased in aggressive intensity nor were considerably more likely to argue with their friends and partners. Back to the case in Michigan, there was expert like Dr. Craig Anderson, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University to offer testimony that; simulated violence can become "automatized" with repeated exposure to violent video games (McCullagh). However, despite Dr. Anderson's claim, Federal judge Steeh stated that Dr. Anderson's studies have not provided any evidence that the relationship between violent video games and aggressive behavior exists. He added that Dr. Anderson's tests failed to prove that video games have ever caused anyone to commit a violent act, as opposed to feeling aggressive, or have caused the average level of violence to increase anywhere. Federal judge Steeh's decision was strengthened by the fact that academic studies have not established a link between simulated violent video games and real life situations (McCullagh). In addition, studies conducted on the association of violent game play and real life aggression by two health experts Bensley L and van Eenwyk J showed that there were very little evidence to support the claim against violent games (L., J.).

It is no doubt that killing is the most violent act of humankind. However, games violence is not real violence. According to Grey Costikygan, an award-winning author of many popular science fiction and fantasy role-playing games, "violence is perceived as cool, not real violence but violence in games" (Costikygan, 245). Because it is only violence in games, players only become aggressive in games. In other words, players are not likely to express and act violently towards others in their real life. When playing a game, one has to be aggressive in order to win the match or a goal. If the player does not kill others, the others would kill that player. Nevertheless, after the games stops, the fierceness of players also stopped because there is no more struggle to remain the aggressiveness. One such example came from the article of News.com reporter David Gale, "many of Ben King's roommates and friends have spent hour playing 'James Bond: Nightfire' and similar games, and none could be considered violent people..." (Gale). In his article "Evaluating the Research on Violent Video Games", Jonathan L. Freedman, a psychologist of University of Toronto, who has prepared several government-level reports on media and games violence, gave a conclusion that players of violent games do have aggressive thoughts and are aroused after playing violent games. However, he added that there was not evidence to say both the thoughts and aroused state may cause the person to act violently like in the games. This is the same with the case when one may think about food after eating a meal; think about war and violence after watching a war movie. Nevertheless, thinking alone does not mean it will lead to action such as eating another meal or waging war on the neighborhood (Freedman).

Moreover, while there is no law in the world of violent games, there are laws and real punishments in the real world that prevent people from doing harm to others. It is possible for one to be life or death sentenced for murdering act. Such punishments do prevent people from killing each others. On the contrary, violent video games encourage the act of killing. A normal people can easily differentiate those two worlds so that they do not kill people in real world while killing fake people in violent video games. That is one of the differences between violent games and real life that explains there are no people who become killers just because they have played violent video games before. Also from Gale's article "Research links