The Appeal of Small-Screen Violence
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Given the nature of children and given the nature of adults, we can imagine - although we have no direct evidence for it - that parents worried over the effect of such violent tales as the Iliad and the Odyssey on their children. While a great deal has changed in the millennia that has passed since Homer composed those timeless tales, one thing that has not changed is that parents still worry about the effects of being exposed to violence (either real or fictitious) on their children. Those concerns have been made even sharper today by the fact that the violence that children are exposed to is far more realistic than anything one might glean from listening to even the bloodiest parts of an ancient saga. Moreover, with each new generation of computer games, the ability of video players - including children - to put themselves in the position of those who commit violent acts has become ever greater. This paper examines some of the issues that arise over the increasing popularity (and increasing bloodthirstiness) of video games.Given the real bloodshed that is occurring in the world right now, it might seem to be an intellectual waste of time to focus on what goes on on the small video screens that so many teenagers and children (as well as adults) spend so many hours glued to. But at least some researchers believe that many of today's real-world problems arise from the psychological license granted to people by the games that they play. A
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of the content of what they are watching but also because by spending so much time glued to their computers and PlayStation2's, they sacrifice time that could be spent interacting with real people and acquiring the kinds of social skills that are needed to reduce interpersonal conflict and avoid violence. And there is also real concern among critics of violent video games that the games are psychologically addicting:
Participating in the action of a game--pushing buttons to score, shoot, bomb, fight or fly--entails neuromuscular coordination. "So the brain not only is seeing the images and getting stimulated, but it's also practicing a response," says Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist at UCLA. "When the person is exposed to these violent media stimuli and it excites the psychoneurological receptors, it causes the person to feel this excitement, to feel a kind of high--and then to become addicted to whatever was giving him the high." (Wallis, 1995).
Methodology
To measure the effect of violent video games, the following experiment was designed. Fifteen boys aged 10 to 14 and fifteen girls aged 10 to 14 (all of whom played video games between two and 10 hours a week, making them moderate video-game players). Five girls and five
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Approximate Word count = 2153
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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