The effect violent video games have on American culture has always been a very contested and sometimes uncomfortable topic, due to the sheer amount of people who play them regularly. While I am in fact one of those people who can and has played these games for hours on end, I would argue anything with such a huge sphere of influence–especially influence on youth–should be thoughtfully examined. That is what I aim to do for you this week.
At the moment, video games are making more money than all other forms of media combined. This includes console games, games for PC, and games for your phone. And each year the video game companies’ goal is to make even more money. Like any good business, one of the things they’re wont to do is repeat themselves when they come across a successful product, as this is much less risky than trying something new. One of the things these corporations have found over the past fifteen years is that graphic violence, especially first-person-shooter violence, make a lot of cash. The first breakthrough example of this was a little game called Call of Duty. Heard of it? It sold more copies the week of its release than any other video game ever. It’s 2010 sequel, Black Ops, still holds records for the massive chunk of change it raked in. Naturally, game companies all over the place began to copy its style, producing more and more “realistic” military-style first-person-shooter games.
The general widespread theory you often hear is that video games are responsible for the rise in violence in American youth. The NRA has even pointed the finger at video game corporations for causing the uptick in mass shootings–highly ironic, considering how gun companies profit immensely from the free advertising they receive in games like Call of Duty (Hallman).
Unfortunately for the NRA, video games do not cause violence. If anything, they are one small contributor in a laundry list of circumstances that might push someone to commit a violent crime (Jhally). What more and more research is showing instead, is that violent video games desensitize players to violence, and in this fashion degrade the empathy of their participants (Ivory, Kalyanaraman).
Think about it. In all these violent games, in order to be able to play for hours at a time, you ultimately have to stop being disgusted or horrified by the grotesque acts your avatars are committing. When the main task of the game is to commit violence, you don’t think twice about the effect that violence might have on real people, and players commit a number of horrendous acts they would never dream of committing in real life. But in order to do this, they essentially have to “switch off” their empathy for others, and view the (increasingly realistic) humans humans they need to kill as objects, rather than people. Additionally, when you play these games where violence–not negotiation or strategy–is so often the very first solution to any problem, and rewards the players by advancing them in the game and earning them points, it forwards the message that violence is an appropriate means of handling these sorts of challenges (Jhally). While this may not actually cause a player to then go out and commit violent acts, it has been shown to desensitize them to violence–and not just in video games. After playing violent video games, participants across the board were less likely to become anxious when faced with images of violence in real life, and less likely to intervene when violence was being committed in front of them (Nauert).
Another thing American video games have been known to do is glamorize the our military. Even though the vast majority of citizens who play video games will never join the military themselves, they still are able to make a pseudo connection with it through highly militarized games like Call of Duty, America’s Army, and Battlefield. The things is, these games are hardly anything at all like actual war. According to actual soldiers, they take a small snippet of time–one where lots of danger and action is going on–and reproduce it for hours and hours (Jhally). Video games also do not take into the account the effect war actually has on communities. Americans are very detached to militarized combat in this sense–we haven’t had any sort of attack on the homefront this century aside from Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (if you want to call the latter an act of war). We simply can’t imagine the sheer horror of violence committed against our own people, so we often don’t think as hard about inflicting it on others. The fact that video games continue to instill pride in American players while they vanquish “the enemy” for hours on end through their gaming console, isn’t helping things (Jhally).
In conclusion, I’d like to put forth the proposition that everyone take another look at the messages violent video games are sending, and ultimately search for ways to get the truth out. We might not be able to stop a multi-billion dollar industry from making its products, but we should at least try to find ways to counteract the negative effects. This could be through education, or any other number of means. But we need to address the issue somehow; otherwise, Americans are just going to keep becoming less empathetic and more desensitized towards violence.
Hallman, Rick. “NRA Blames ‘Corrupt’ Video Game Industry for Gun Violence.” The Huffington Post, 21 Dec., 2012. Web. 9 Nov., 2015.
Ivory, J.D. and Kalyanaraman S. “The Effects of Technological Advancement and Violent Content in Video Games on Players’ Feelings of Presence, Involvement, Physiological Arousal, and Aggression.” Journal of Communication, 2008. no. 57, (532-555).
Jhally, Sut. “Joystick Warriors.” MEF, 2013. Film. Nauert, Rick. “Video Games Desensitize to Real Violence.” Psych Central, 28 July, 2006. Web. 9 Nov., 2015.
Robinson, T. Callister, M., Clark, B., Phillips, J. “Violence sexuality and Gender Stereotyping: A content analysis of official video game websites.” Web Journal of Mass Communication Research, 2009. no. 13.
Tags: desensitization, empathy, video games, violence