Week 8- Violence in Video Games

Since the dawn of video games in the 1980's the amount of violence and aggression in video games has increased dramatically and it eventually became a normal part of games. Violence in video games are being blamed by a lot of critics for the violence that is happening in reality, but statistics are saying otherwise to these accusations. Between the dates 1995 and 2008 arrest rates have decreased by 49.3% while game sales have risen significantly, if what the critics are saying is true then violent related juvenile crimes should have risen exponentially. What these critics do not get or take in is the fact that a lot or the majority of the offenders behind major shootings like the Sandy Hook shooting that occurred in 2012 had other small things that contributed to them that allowed that shooting to happen like for instance the offender had a mental disorder for his whole lifetime also in addition to that weaponry was easily accessed and wasn’t secure enough and he didn’t really play any violent video games even though he had access to them. These so called critics should really do some major or further research into these issues instead of putting the blame on video games for being the major influence for these shootings. Also another thing is that these critics are in fact not putting such blame on the parents for being irresponsible and letting their children to have access to games they do not approve of. Also to fortify the point that violent video games does not contribute to real life violence a research conducted by the U.S Secret Service comparing the amount of homicides or rather shootings and the relation of offenders being influenced by violent video games the result was that they found that only one-eighth of offenders were actually interested in violent video games and less than other violent materials like books, films etc. the report in the end showed that they found no relation between violent video games and school shootings. So in the end violent video games doesn’t really contribute that much to the violence that’s happening in the human society or does it have much influence in making a person more violent more rather it depends on the individual themselves if they are going to commit such violent acts.