blame the game Essay

Submitted By jrbookworm
Words: 844
Pages: 4

Blame the Game

Nowadays, whenever a teenager or a group of youth commit a crime, many people point fingers at video games being the cause of violence in teenagers of today’s time. I disagree with this, as there are more pros than cons when it comes to teenagers playing video games. Video games are known to boost children’s social, health and learning skills as well as improve their creativity and imagination. Video games prepare people to make decisions faster, and this fact has been proven by a study that shows people who play video games make decisions 25% faster than people who don’t. Video games also increase hand-eye coordination as well as being able to focus on 6 things at once without confusing them. Gamers are also able to solve several problems in different situations. A bizarre but true fact about gamers is they have improved ability to drive in foggy weather over people who don’t play video games.

Video games aren’t all pros unfortunately, they have disadvantages as well. Violent video games cause aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, as well as increased heart and blood pressure. Some video games teach young children wrong values as well as having a negative effect in their health. I can personally relate to the aggressive thoughts fact regarding violent video games, as my younger brother is an avid gamer who spends a lot of his free time playing video games such as Call of Duty, Black Ops and NHL 14, just to name a few. He can be heard yelling in frustration from his room all the way down to our living room, and that is quite a distance in our home. He’s also broken a few controllers from rage quitting or in frustration by throwing it against the wall. This shows that even though video games may have a lot of benefits, they’re not perfect.

One thing I believe that could help stop the blame being shifted towards video games after every violent youth incident is to have stricter ratings for violent video games. I believe that by restricting access to violent video games for underage youth could help the problem since availability for these types of games would be reduced, and so would the number of underage teens playing violent games. More often than not, kids get their parents to purchase mature rated games, since you need to show ID in order to buy M-rated games. If parents started acting more responsible, and only buy the age appropriate games for their children, a lot of the anger and aggressiveness in teenagers would cease to exist. Games are rated for the appropriate ages for a reason, as some games might teach young children the wrong values, and give unrealistic expectations, whereas the appropriate ages would have learned good morals, and have the common sense to understand that video games do not reflect reality.

Many people argue that violent movies could have just as bad of an effect on youth as violent video games. This is true in some aspects as many actors or characters in these movies may be a hero in the eyes of the child. The stunts and actions in