Video Game Violence


    One reason that many adults believe that teens are more violent than in the past is that they are seeing scary news reports that show teen violence in them. Since many teens are playing violent video games which didn't exist in the past, some adults have connected video games to incidents of teen violence.

    In one study, out of 210 people that played either a violent or non violent game, the ones that played the violent game punished an opponent (with a blast of noise) louder and longer than the ones that played the non-violent game.

     Another study was reported in November of 2006, in which scientists used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine to look at teenager's brains while playing video games to see whether their brains functioned differently with a violent game or a non violent game. They did find differences in the emotion and inhibition areas of the brain

    One of the ways that many people think that teens are being affected by the games is that some teens try to copy the people in the games because they think they are cool, which may lead to them being violent. The teenagers believe that the people are cool because the in-game people act like they are so cool.

    One of the incidents that upset people about the violence of video games was the Columbine attack. Two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were the two people who carried out the attack at Columbine. Columbine was a school near Denver, Colorado. The two teens attacked other students in their school. They were addicted on playing the games Duke Nukem and Doom and some people feel they had trouble telling the difference between reality and fantasy. Relatives of the victims filed a lawsuit against the makers of video games. The lawsuit was dropped because there was no real evidence.

    Some examples of violent games are Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Mortal Combat, Grand Theft Auto, Duke Nukem, and Mafia. Certain games encourage people to kill more by praising them by saying, "good shot" and "excellent". Critics say that in games that you carjack, you may carjack in real life.
In some games you get money for stealing and killing cops.

    Many parents are worried about their children playing these games when they are not being supervised.To help parents decide which games to buy, the U.S.A. uses the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) rating system. The ratings are the following: