Video games are overwhelmingly popular nowadays and with every year this trend only rises. The first video games came out in early 1970s, and they were rather simple and mostly nonviolent, but it all has changed in the 1990s, when very brutal games have started appearing, such as Doom, Mortal Kombat, Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D, Postal and Grant theft Auto. All of those listed games relied practically completely on hurting, killing, mutilating other people or animals and stealing. According to Jędrzejko (2011), those games with violent acts are hugely popular with young people in school age and selling of them grows by about a dozen percent annually. It is often claimed that such games cause a significant amount of violence and behavior related problems among practically all younger age groups, but are there only bad effects of them, and if no, what are the positive ones? Are most of the aggression problems related to young people fault of video games? This essay is aimed to answer what are the real effects of violence in video games and what impact do they have on young people.
‘Kill him! Kill him!’, these words were shouted by a 7-year-old daughter when testing a new game ‘Pirates’ with her 10-year-old brother. “It’s a bit unnerving to hear your seven-year-old daughter shout those words” (Wolock, 2004). People are fascinated by violence. In the past it was common to attend public executions and nowadays it is normal to see violence in television and video games. It is fascinating that people like to see it, and yet they are scared that those bad things might happen to them in reality. According to Buchman and Funk (1996), 63% of boys and 59% of girls voted that their favorite video game contain violence and the most popular ones in eyes of young people are Grant Theft Auto (86%), Painkiller (53%) and Max Pain (37%) (all of those with high levels of violence). The accessibility of violent games is huge and age restrictions usually do not work as they were intended. Despite the fact that there are many different types of games in shops including strategy, sport, logic, races, simulations and economic, the majority of them are action and FPS (First Person Shooter), so it means that they are most often bought by customers. Playing video games is currently one of the most common forms of spending free time so it can have huge impact on the players, especially younger ones. According to Jędrzejko (2011, p.175), the world shown in games is much more brutal than in reality and the amount of violent situation that the player takes part in them is disproportionate to real dangers. The most common features in video games are killing as a form of entertainment no matter what is the target (it can be anything from a soldier, man and warrior to woman, police officer and animals), virtual character does not die for real, it can reappear with just one key on the keyboard, the game can be modified however we want, we do not feel the pain and smell of blood, all values and norms are relative and everything can be a weapon. This is all imaginary in a certain sense but the most important aspect is that players take part in all of this, and he or she is getting used to such behaviors, also often observed that players choose more violent ways of playing.
Watching programs that contain violence in television is also some sort of taking part in violent acts. The audience does not do it actively but the fact that they are watching, means they want to see it and usually find it interesting. Similar to games it is out choice what we play or watch and ‘just watching’ can encourage violence as well. The most common killing and harming means we see in these two forms of entertainment are guns of all sort (from pistols and revolvers to automatic weapons and grenade launchers), saws, construction equipment and machines, knife, torture tools, cars, planes, baseball bats, tools, dangerous animals, science fiction creatures and forms of torture of all sorts (hanging, crushing, drowning and similar) (Jędrzejko, 2011). The amount of these means is overwhelming and for most people seeing harm usually is not even disturbing. It can be easily observed that people in general got used to violence in television and video games. It is also important to pay attention on how characters in video games are presented. For male characters the most frequently observed behaviors are being powerful, aggressive and with hostile attitude, and for female characters wearing provocative dresses, having a curvaceous figure, being thin and sexualized. Also, content of game magazines shows that for males 82.6% are aggressive, 31.6% glamorize violence, 41.9% wear armor and 33.1% are sex role stereotypes. For female characters the behaviors are being sex role stereotype 62.6%, being aggressive 62.2%, being sexualized 59.9%. Many different characterizations also overlap, for female it was being sexualized, scantily clad and beauty pattern, as for male characters it was being aggressive and hyper masculine (Dill, 2007). It is important to notice that after seeing such behaviors and norms in games once it should not have big impact on players but if they look at it and take part in all of this many times it becomes some sort of a norm and they are getting used to it. It is no longer shocking or disturbing, it starts to be normal for them, and they might try to look for such behaviors and actions in real life. According to Fedorov (2005) research, almost all of the games accessible in computer rooms contain violence (82.75%). Those included scenes of killing (55,17%), fighting (39.08%), scenes of disasters (35.63%). It is astonishing that only 17.24% of games did not contain any form of violence and those mostly had a sport theme. It is important to note that it was not restricted or controlled by age of the players. This research shows that the most common users were children between 10 and 16 years old which means that they mostly were under the recommended age to play those games and in ages between 8 and 17 the numbers of favorite games that contained violence was much higher compared to number of favorite games that did not contain violence. Those research show that video games that contain violence and characters having negative behavior are much more interesting and popular among young people. It could also mean that it can only lead to negative behaviors but is it really the case?
There are many games on the market that are educational, help learn new languages, teach critical thinking, train imagination and make it easier to actively get involved in learning process. This means that they can also have positive impact in daily life of young people. Brosch (2006) says, there are 2 main theories about playing violent video games: catharsis and stimulation. The first one means that playing games that contain violent behaviors and situation can help the players get rid of negative emotions and the anger that they keep inside. Most of the games are single player, that means they play alone, only with computer and are not going to hurt any other people. In the end, it is much better to pour out emotions in this way than start a fight with someone or being impolite which can have huge consequences and, in some cases, may even lead to death. The second theory, stimulation, says that constant contact with negative and violent behaviors can lead to recreating them in real life and it often means hurting others or animals, as players see those situations in games it is becoming natural to them. According to Jędrzejko (2011) research, there is a clear correlation between pupils that play video games and represent negative behavior. Among students that play 6 or more hours a week 21-28% took part in a fight in last month, 31-43% were rudely talking to teachers, 59-67% were unkind to peers and 29-43% hit a person that is younger than them. In comparison to pupils that play from 0 to 5 hours a week only 5-10% took part in a fight, 6-16% were unkind to teachers, 11-32% were rude to peers and 6-27% hit a younger person. I clearly show that young people who play games more than the others much more frequently take part in acts of violence or behave in a bad way. It is also shown that in average there are about 100 acts of violence and physical attack in video games and in cases of experienced players the number of ‘kills’ can be about 500 or even higher. Different negative effects of players are poorer academic performance, they more often late for school or miss classes without justification, they are more often unprepared for classes, are impatient, they have less interpersonal contact with peers, they less often engage in extracurricular activities with other students (Wolock, 2004) (Jędrzejko, 2011). The amount of negative effects is astonishing and it seems to be a serious problem because of the impact on the young people. But there are also positive effects of playing those games, survey taken in 2002 for the Interactive Digital Software Association showed that 42% of families like video games and enjoy them as they encourage to play them together with friends or family, research conducted by Washington State Department of Health that contained 59 studies showed that brutal games do not lead to violence in real life (Wolock, 2004). Those research show that violent video games do not always have bad impact on the young people that actively play them. It can even mean that games are not bad overall and do not fully lead to violent and negative behaviors in real life but the people who play them are overall aggressive and unkind to others. It is also important to not forget about games that do not contain violence and can be really helpful in developing brain of young players.
In conclusion, it is not possible to clearly connect violent video games with negative and aggressive behaviors among young people. It is important to remember that every individual is different and reacts in another way when playing games that contain violence, some of them may feel encouraged to negative or even illegal things, for some of the players it can have neutral effects and for some of them it can be helpful to discharge from negative emotions. However, it is important to control if children are old enough to play certain games, because age restrictions are not without reason. Also, companies that produce such violent games should not be treated as the root of the problem, as they only produce that the market demand, and the players choose to play them. Friedrich Nietzsche words are perfect to summarize this topic, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you”. Young people need to be aware of their behavior and how they change when playing violent games, as in short term it probably will not have negative effects, but after more time if those violent behaviors will become normal for young people, they might start to imitate the characters from video games which obviously is not a good thing.