The existential use of violent video games over time may cause adolescents to become violent. Gender may also play a role in associated behavior. A video game is an interactive game played using a specialized electronic gaming device (a controller) or a computer or mobile device and a television or other display screen. A violent video game often uses guns or many other weapons to kill people or animals, and destroy objects in order to complete the missions and win the game. Video games are active, meaning that your are actively involved in traveling, shooting, and completing missions. Whereas watching television or movies is passive, as you are basically just sitting there paying attention and not actively doing anything.
Many researchers believe that playing video games-even violent ones could possibly have some beneficial effects. One of these effects being an increase in visuospatial cognition (Furguson, Abstract). Visuospatial cognition enables us to perceive and interact with our visual world. It includes everyday skills such as the ability to reach for and grasp our knife and fork and to recognize the food on the plate; the visual search skills required to locate our favorite cereal on a supermarket shelf or our coat on a coat rack; the processes that enable us to individuate objects in order to count them, to draw pictures, to write and recognize words, and to complete puzzles; and even the ability to know which bus stop to get off at when traveling (Farran and Formby). Playing video games, including violent shooter games, may boost children’s learning, health and social skills. “While one widely held view maintains playing video games is intellectually lazy, such play actually may strengthen a range of cognitive skills such as spatial navigation, reasoning, memory and perception, according to several studies reviewed in the article. This is particularly true for shooter video games that are often violent, the authors said. A 2013 meta-analysis found that playing shooter video games improved a player’s capacity to think about objects in three dimensions just as well as academic courses to enhance these same skills. This enhanced thinking was not found with playing other types of video games, such as puzzles or role-playing games. Playing video games may also help children develop problem-solving skills. The more adolescents reported playing strategic video games, such as role-playing games, the more they improved in problem solving and school grades the following year, according to a long-term study published in 2013” (A New Study).
Educational video games be excellent teaching tools for motivational and learning process reasons. But, it also may make violent video games even more hazardous than violent television or cinema. Recent video games reward players for killing innocent bystanders, police, and prostitutes (such as in Grand Theft Auto). By using a wide range of weapons including guns, knives, flame throwers, swords, baseball bats, chainsaws, grenades, cars, hands, and even feet. Some include cut scenes (i.e., brief movie clips designed to move the story forward) of strippers (Anderson, Craig A). Over time, everyone is consuming increasing amounts of media per year, due to the broadening availability and convenience. But in just the past few decades, media use has increased dramatically. “A recent United States poll showed that, on average, children aged 8–12 years were exposed to almost six hours per day of recreational media. According to Rideout, 2015, teens aged 13–18 years were exposed to an astonishing amount more: almost nine hours of recreational media and more than six and a half hours of screen time” (qtd. in Coyne and Warburton) Recently, the potential effects of media on users have been investigated in many forms, and they have found that the extensive exposure to different media content has been linked with multiple ranges of positive and negative outcomes. According to a Children Now (2001) “As much as 89% of video games have some form of violence, with almost half including potentially lethal violence against other characters. Many studies have investigated the effects of violent video games on several different outcomes. A majority of studies that were conducted over the course of multiple years with multiple adolescents has suggested that the playing of violent video games is actually associated with aggression” (qtd. in Coyne and Warburton). More directly relevant to video games, this report noted that the high-risk student spends inordinate amounts of time playing video games with violent themes, and seems more interested in the violent images than in the game itself. Very little research has investigated the potential relationships between violent video games and associated aggressive behavior. According to Maughan, Christiansen, Jen- son, Olympia, & Clark, 2005, There are a large variety of behaviors and activities including hyperactivity, social deviance, disruptiveness un-manageability, disruptiveness, anti-social behaviors, and delinquency (qtd. in Coyne and Warburton) “Given the scope of externalizing behaviors and the developmental issues related to externalizing behaviors (e.g., Campbell, Shaw, & Gilliom, 2000), it is important to understand contributing social factors, including violent video game play. While some research combines aggression and externalizing behaviors as indicators of problem behavior, there is evidence to suggest that these are two distinctive constructs that are differentially associated with outcomes” (qtd. in Coyne and Warburton). A current study uses the general aggression model (GAM; Anderson & Bushman, 2002) to explain associations between viewing media, externalizing, and prosocial behaviors. GAM is used as a model to explain the underlying psychological processes during an instance of prosocial behavior and aggression. An outside environmental trigger interacts with the characteristics (biological and personal) within a person that make them more or less prepared to or behave pro-socially. Physiological arousal could result in the start of relevant cognitions and emotions. Although these cognitions and emotions, in turn, may push the person toward aggressive behavior and could also cause them to lash out. This action becomes more likely if the person is very agitated or doesn’t do things like thinking through the consequences of their actions and alternate responses that they could have. Given the similarities and overlap between aggression and the various antisocial behaviors conceptualized as “externalizing,” GAM seems to be similarly applicable to externalizing behaviors (Coyne and Warburton).
Gender also may play an important role in aggression linked to playing violent video games. Adolescent teen boys have been shown repeatedly to have higher rates of violent and aggressive behavior starting in early childhood and continuing into adulthood. Adolescent females have more protective abilities and take less risks than adolescent boys. Adolescent females have also been reported for less serious delinquency than adolescent males, which in turn makes males more prone to mistakes and injury. According to Greenberg, Sherry, Lachlan, Lucas, & Holmstrom, adolescent males spend approximately twice as much time playing video games as adolescent females, and this extreme amount of time spent playing video games carries on into early adulthood (qtd. in Coyne and Warburton). Adolescent boys are typically much more likely to play physically- oriented (aka, violent) video games than adolescent girls. Although adolescent boys may play violent video games more often than adolescent girls, and generally take more risks throughout their day-to-day life, there is no significant evidence that largely states that adolescent boys become more aggressive or violent while playing and after they’ve finished playing.
Known associations with violent crimes do not constitute strong scientific evidence that exposure to violent video games is a factor in associated violent behavior. There is no strong hard evidence that playing violent video games over an extended period of time. It may be a small contribution to temporary aggression after playing a game or losing one, but there have been no scientific links between violent video games and a violent action after.