The Truth Behind Video Game Violence

Many people play video games to relax, relieve stress and anger. However many games contain fictional violence that is being projected through the mind of the person who is playing the game that might impact their daily life routine.

"The psychological group reports that more than 90% of children in the United States play video games. Among kids between the ages of 12 and 17, the number rises to 97%. More important, 85% or more of video games on the market contain some form of violence. The titles seem to say it all: "Manhunt," "Thrill Kill," "Gears of War" and "Mortal Kombat." However, even the seemingly benign "Pokemon Go" requires players to go to battle.”

Constant exposure of violent video games, the gamer will start to experience more violence tendencies as he is more exposed to fictional violence. Research show that the accumulation of risk factors lead to aggressive or violent behaviour. However video games “are one such risk factors”.

Therefore video games can be a bad example to kids and so parents started to worry what their child is actually playing and what does it include. The stress of violence video games had a great effect that parents started to protest on the streets and on social media.

As a reaction to those protests from the childrens parents, a rating board was formed. This dates back when Mortal Kombat was released on the Super Nintendo and Genesis. What happened is that the game ended up being censored on Super Nintendo because it was alarming that the “kid friendly” console system included violence and blood. On the other hand the Sega Genesis included all the realistic blood and the ability to use violent “fatality” moves to defeat opponents.

Today this rating board is known as the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) where it helps the consumer or parent to make an informed purchase when they buy a video game. This is done by a rating system that rates games based on their content included in the six categories.

Some companies like Rockstar even profited from the controversial news about violence in video games. This is because they used “bad press” to market their games. Sometimes they even paid to have “bad press” on themselves because they found out that the press had marketed their game for them.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas can be taken as an example, where a left out explicit piece of code was discovered known as the “Hot Coffee Mod” that was implemented into the game by a 'modder'. What happened is that Rockstar ended up selling more copies when the news had spread around the globe and thus proved to be an efficient way of marketing

Parents being parents they might exaggerate a bit especially when for our behaviour and future. That’s because from my personal experience my friends and I used to play a lot of violent video games and we never turned out to be a cold hearted killers. It is also argued that playing video games will reduce your violence because you "express it" in the game. This can be a benefit to society because it will reduce the child's motive towards aggression.