Weekly news:what is the link between video games and aggression?

What is the link between violent video games and aggression?

Content: The story is about the studies/research that have been carried out by many psychiatrists about the effects that video games can have upon children/teenagers and how they behave in society and what factors contribute to them behaving aggressively in society after playing video games.

In 2013, a study that was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, shows that there was a link between playing violent video games and the side effects of playing video games when playing a competitive game.

However, it also depends on the context in which these sort of games are played. In a study made by Seth Gitter and his colleagues published in Aggressive Behaviour (2013), it showed that if the participants were to play a violent video game with a positive goal in mind e.g. protecting a friend in a zombie video game, they showed reduced levels of aggressive behaviour as compared to those who were asked to kill as many zombies as possible.

According to a 2012 longitudinal study looking at the behavioural development of 165 teenagers over the course of 3 years found that when pre-existing emotional, family and social problems were accounted for any aggression, increasing effects of playing violent video games disappeared. However that same year, Teena Willoughby and colleagues at Brock University in Canada looked at 1,492 children from the ages of 8/9 to 17/18, and found that those who played violent video games over a long period of time also showed increased development of aggressive behaviours.

Context: Over the years since the invention of technology, there has been rise in how advanced technology has become, for example, before social media was invented and placed on portable devices such as smartphones, there were only two forms of technical communication which were sending messages and calling people. Now we can even communicate with other video game players via multi-player video games. We are living in a society where there is more scientific research being carried out on people’s behaviour which is now answering questions relating to the side effects of playing video games and allowing those who have been affected to be diagnosed and cured or find ways to help them adjust back to the way they were before being affected.

Comparison: Some users of video games claim that they can control the amount of time they spend playing video games and experience no effects from the video game. This may be because of the laws that there are in society which restrict or stop people from carrying out any violence is include in the game in society.

Opinion: Overall, I would say that the aims of the games set by the producers are the cause of young people developing aggressive behaviours.e.g. if a violent video game is requiring you to kill the enemies in the game, your mind would immediately be set with that mind frame and if a violent video games asks you to protect a friend or save someone, it will tell you that you should kill the enemies along the way in order to save or protect those people, rather than the individual playing the game choosing to become aggressive and carry out acts of violence in society.e.g. School shootings. However, if those people have been playing that particular game for a long time, they would have instilled the aim of the game in their mind and every time they are playing that game they would know what to do.

Source: The story is taken from the newspaper, The Guardian.