Violence in Video Games

Violence in videogames is one of the main controversies around game content and its potential negative impacts on player behavior. However, just as we are still unsure about the significant link between smoking and lung cancer, there is no any definite result of whether or not violence video games can affect the players’ aggressive behavior and to which extent.

Why violence exists in video games? Why violence in video games causes more attention and debate compared with violence in other media products? Speaking to my first question, based on one of the social theory, everything exists in this world must has its own reason, I think actually violence video games provide one of ways to the players to release their evil emotions. Everyone has some negative and even evil emotions sometime in their life, but we all know that there is many laws and social rules in the real world that regularize and standardize our behaviors, which means there is lots of things that we cannot do in daily life such as beatings. While violence video games just provide people a virtual space which allow them to have some illegal and immoral behaviors without worrying about being punished (although there is also punishment in video games, it absolutely means different to people compared with the punishment in real world). So here I think violence video games may to some extent decrease the crime in our real world. Back to the second question, the reason why violence video games attack more social attention and debate is due to the first-person experience in video games. In other media products such as films and TV series, there also exist lots of violence but those media do not provide the viewers the experience of shooting and beating. Personally thinking, when we are watching the violence in films, we are more focusing on the story or the reason why one character wants to revenge and kill the other character rather than the behavior of shooting and killing. Also, there is no free  choices that are provided to the viewers to decide whom to kill and how to kill. However, in some violence video games there is not too much reason why those people should be shot and killed; as a player of those games, the thing you only know is you want to win, and killing those virtual characters is the only way that you can win the game. Besides, the first-person interaction in violence video games does provide the players the relative real feeling and experience of shooting and killing.

Although nowadays lots of executives and managers of video game companies strongly deny that violence video games have caused much more crime of shooting and killing in real life, just as what have been discussed in this week's lectures we have to admit there do exist a correlation between people’s behavior in real world and the violence in video games. However, we are unsure about how strong the correlations is and whether or not the influence that violence video games bring to the players are all negative. Anyway, I think in future the designers of violence video games should pay much attention of how to present the violence in video games to minimize the negative influence that will bring to the players.