Exposure to violent video games by adolescents has been proven to be linked to an increase in aggression

Courtesy of Daily Mail Online

In 2008, 97 percent of the children ages 12 to 17 in the United States played video games, with half of the top-selling games of that year containing violence according to the Entertainment Software Association. This topic has recently become under analysis by professionals such as Craig Anderson, who has found that this aggression has lead to less caring, less sensitive to pain and more socially awkward human beings.

The causes of this aggression come from adolescents memorizing and acting out certain violent acts that they see done by their favorite video game character in a virtual world. Through constant exposure with no adult guidance, these children start to believe that this type of violence and lifestyle is common in the real world, such as in the picture above that shows a child shooting and killing someone in the game Grand Theft Auto. Repercussions of this include not only aggression towards people and objects, but can even be linked to school shootings by adolescents.

Many of these researchers have used meta-analysis and the General Aggression Model as a way of analyzing the data and coming to conclusions about the behavior and thoughts of these children from repeated and specific exposure to video games such as Doom and Call of Duty.

The memorization of negative video game themes causes adolescents to respond to events much like how a video game character would

As children repeatedly play a video game, they start to act and perform like the characters of the game. According to the Director of Psychology at Iowa State University, Craig Anderson, this is caused by the learning, activation, and eventually application of the video game’s scripts and schema. A video game’s script is how the characters act in the game, and contains information on beliefs, morals and attitudes. What this does to children after long exposure to it is that it makes them think that this type of behavior is acceptable and that it is common to act in such a way.

It has also been stated that after children have acted and demonstrated this aggression towards others, it gives them some sort of feeling of excitement or satisfaction because they have “won the fight” as they would in the video game. This makes it hard for adolescents to distinguish the lines between fantasy and reality.

With violent games such as Grand Theft Auto, this presents a problem because the scripts and concepts to these games are to fight back whenever someone in the game says or does something you don’t like. The other problem with these games is that the player is most likely rewarded for fighting through money or increasing in status in the game.

Psychology Professor at the University of Maryland, Kent Norman, who specializes in cognitive behavior and human/ computer interactions, gives his input about violent video games and how it affects children.

Relating to a character in a violent video game leads adolescents to identifying and acting like said favorite character in a negative way

Courtesy of Instructables.com

In video games where you control only one character, children and teens become emotionally attached because they control the actions of the character basically becoming the character in a fantasy world. Another cause of this is that adolescents usually relate to the character that is the most aggressive, but this aggression is usually seen as a heroic deed in the game making them think that this is okay. The game Halo is one of these games where shooting someone is seen as a a good thing and this gets kids attached to where they are dressing up as character for halloween with a fake weapon by their side, as you can see in the picture to the right. 

This can affect the player’s emotions towards particular people or a concept by integrating the emotions the character feels into how you play the game. While these effects can still occur with people that do not identify themselves with a hostile character, identifying with one increases their chances of embracing aggressive behaviors.

These emotions can translate into real life and affect a person’s relationships and how they see the world. You can see where these acts of aggression come from because in certain violent video games you must protect the character, or yourself, from dying by fighting others. This does not mean that adolescents are going to be killing everyone that gets in their way, but they will show slight signs of aggression because it gives them the same satisfaction they get when they play violent video games.

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Constant exposure to violent video games can lead to acts of violence

Not only does constant exposure to violent video games cause aggressive behavior, but in addition it has been proven to cause adolescents to be less sympathetic and less sensitive to pain. The consequence to this behavior ranges from the breaking of video game consoles, to bullying other people, and even worse it can lead a child to bringing a gun to a public place or school and reenacting what they did in the video game. Kent Norman in his studies has personally found that adolescents tend to take their aggression out on the video game controllers, but says that it can sometimes be taken out on other people though he has never seen that in his studies.

In 1997, Evan Ramsey a student at Bethel Regional High School entered his school one day with a 12-gauge shotgun and killed two people, blaming his shooting on the video game “Doom” that he use to play. During a 2007 interview, Ramsey expressed his confusion when he said, “I did not understand that if I… pull out a gun and shoot you, there’s a good chance you’re not getting up.”

More recently in 2012 was the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting where shooter Adam Lanza was attached to violent video games including a computer game called “School Shooter,” where the player controls a character that goes into a school and shoots all the students. Besides having severe mental problems, CBS News indicates that Lanza would spend hours on hours playing video games in his room, where he did not let anyone enter his room and had blacked out windows.

Though we cannot completely blame violent video games for these acts of violence, there are many mental factors that lead to these irreversible acts that can be attributed to these games.

Results from scientific techniques show that there is data to back up aggressive behavior being linked to violent video games 

The data that backs up all of these claims comes from a technique called meta-analysis. According to Wayne Warburton, meta-analysis is a statistical method where scientific studies that have the same hypothesis and test the same outcome are combined to retrieve the average results of the studies. The hypothesis that Anderson investigated is that violent video game exposure compared to neutral video game exposure will result in increased aggression, with the outcome being aggressive behavior.

Anderson conducted a massive amount of studies that used meta-analysis to show the effect size of violent video games on six main categories. These categories composed of aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts, aggressive feelings, physiological arousal, desensitization to violence/ low compassion, and lack of pro-social behavior.This study was composed of different amounts of tests and participants and included how variable the findings were.

The results that they found were that after playing violent video games, the average effect for all the possible outcomes were increased. I asked Kent Norman what other factors are involved when talking about increased aggression in children with violent video games, and this is what he had to say.

Desensitization to violence was also increased in the meta-analysis, making the gamer think that these video games are normal, which again increases all of the other categories creating a never ending cycle as Norman mentions. The most interesting category that they saw a change in is that the participants become less social, a visible sign to detect mental problems or increased aggressive behavior.

The ten billion dollar gaming industry draws in its audience to spend at least one hour a day gaming

On an infographic from the Entertainment Software Rating Board, in 2010 the average gamer spent eight hours a week playing video games. These gamers are not only the stereotypical teenager, but are composed of players that are under the age of 18, which makes up 25 percent of all gamers in the United States. The chart on the right shows the 2010 age demographics of gamers in the United States.

Of these young gamers, 17 percent of their parents do not place time limits on the amount of time they play video games. This is a factor to think about when talking about increased aggression as well as the fact that 7 percent of parents are not present when their children purchase or rent a video game, which can lead to children getting a more violent video game because they know that their parents wouldn’t have let them get it if they were present.