Essay on Effects of Violent Video Games

Words: 1417
Pages: 6

Rhetorical Analysis Essay According to the article “Shooting in the Dark” author, Benedict Carey, states that studies today on violent video games show no concrete evidence on actually long term negative effects on gamers. Mr. Carey is not a researcher or scientist but is a veteran writer of neuroscience, neurology, and psychology. Throughout this article he gives factual evidence and quotes from scholarly sources such as doctors and researchers in the fields of behavior and psychology. The author gives ample explanation on evidence used from his sources to give the optimal understanding to the reader of the results and/or findings given by the sources. The article connects to the modern age of gamers with examples from big name video …show more content…
The author uses evidence from his sources throughout the article to connect logic thinking to his claim which goes along with the rhetorical appeal of logos. Mr. Carey uses real life situations to appeal to the reader’s logic so his claim makes more logically sense and can be backed easier. The author says “Many psychologists argue that violent video games “socialize” children over time, prompting them to imitate the behavior of the game’s characters, the cartoonish machismo, the hair-trigger rage, the dismissive brutality. Children also imitate flesh and blood people in their lives, of course — parents, friends, teachers, siblings — and one question that researchers have not yet answered is when, exactly, a habit is so consuming that its influence trumps the socializing effects of other major figures in a child’s life,” this statement from Mr. Carey used to bring all real life situations such as socializing, cartoon and video games characters, parents, etc. all together and uses that to how is claim is the logic choice when evaluating all these things in your life. The author then goes on to state, “Yet it is not at all clear whether, over longer periods, such a habit increases the likelihood that a person will commit a violent crime, like murder, rape, or assault, much less a Newtown-like massacre. (Such calculated rampages are too rare to study in any rigorous way, researchers agree.)” which makes the