Videogames: Giving Life a 1UP. Bang! You start to fire another round of your gun into the next enemy that comes around the corner, then you realize, the whole enemy team is standing in front of you. You grab for another clip to reload and you realize you’re out of ammo clips. You take out your handy secondary gun and prepare for a fight. Of course you’re not actually fighting real enemies; you’re playing a videogame. There’s a huge hype surrounding the launch of every new gaming system that comes out such as Sony’s Playstation 3, Microsoft’s XBOX 360 or Nintendo’s Wii, to name the latest. They affect individuals anywhere from the age of 6 to 50, or even older, videogames have been a major concern in our society relating to issues such as addiction, depression and even aggression that’s linked to the types of games they play. “The average child ages 8 to 12 plays 13 hours of video games per week, while teens from age13 to 18 play 14 hours of video games per week (3).” Furthermore, some videogames being played on a daily basis like God of War III, Battlefield: Bad Company II , Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 & 3, and even Call of Duty: Black Ops II are played for their violence and personal interaction when fighting an opponent. ESRB (Entertainment Software Review Board) puts signs like "Real-life violence" and rating levels such as Mature for their “intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language” on their box covers, arcade fronts, and even the television commercials sponsoring the game itself to both warn parents about the games their kids are playing and to inform their players what is involved in the game.
In the modern popular game Left for Dead 2, the story mode is set in an aftermath of an “apocalyptic pandemic where there has been an outbreak of a rabies-like pathogen that causes infected humans to become zombies (4).” Your character can carry one main weapon, and either one or two pistols, or one of several melee weapons, such as frying pans or chainsaws. The four survivors have to fight their way through the hordes of infected, from “Savannah, Georgia to New Orleans, Louisianna (5).” In other games such as Postal 2, which has been banned from numerous places, like the United States and Australia, due to the graphic nature. The player takes on the roll of ‘The Postal Dude’ where the character can set people on fire with a variety of methods, from “gasoline and matches, to Molotov cocktails and napalm launchers and even throw cow heads that spread anthrax” to other characters in the game (6). You can even stun gun people until they cower on the ground and urinate on them selves. In spite of the violence, they are also the more popular games on the market. When video games first were released, they were addictive, however, there seems to be a strong link between the violent natures of games these days and the destructive tendencies in underage game players.
For example, on April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold launched an assault on Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, murdering 13 and wounding 23 before turning the guns on themselves. Both Harris and Klebold enjoyed playing the bloody, shoot-'em-up video game Doom, “a game licensed by the U.S. military to train soldiers to effectively kill (7).” Harris and Klebold had customized the game so that there were two shooters, each with extra weapons and unlimited ammo clips, and the opponents in the game could not fight back or save them selves. For a class project, Harris and Klebold made live videotape that was similar to their customized version of Doom, where they were dressed in trench coats, carried guns, and killed school athletes. They had acted out their videotaped performance in real life less than a year later, now known as the Columbine Shooting.
Every individual deals with aggression and even depression differently depending on how frustrated they are. However when acts are taken upon the frustration and
