What effect violent video games may have on children is important for us as a society to determine simply because children (along with adults, who are, after all, supposed to serve as role models for children) spend so many hours playing them. The electronic-games industry posted sales of $5.5 billion in the U.S. in 1998, and was the second-most popular form of home entertainment after television. According to one survey, nine out of ten U.S. households with children have rented or owned a video or computer game. And a lot of what children are playing when they turn to video games is pretty gory. Nearly a third of the Top 100 video-console games for the first quarter of 1999 had at least some sort of violent content. And among video and computer games, bloody titles like Quake and GoldenEye 007 rank consistently among the most popular (Wallis).
Opinion over how much this matters is rather sharply divided, and this paper looks at the possible effects of violent video games on children under the age of 18.
People who either minimize or dismiss the bad effects of violent video games tend also to emphasize the good that such games can do, suggesting that playing video and computer games can make children smarter because a lot of the games are as complex as they are treacherous. They require players to learn how to solve problems fast, test hypotheses and decode puzzles. Such a defense of video games often goes something like this:
Patricia Greenfield, a psychology professor at UCLA, has studied the relationship between video games and intelligence and finds a positive correlation. Her research attributes an increase in worldwide "nonverbal IQ" (spatial skills, the use of icons for problem solving and the ability to understand things from multiple viewpoints) to the spread of video games (Wallis).
Criticisms of the games tend to note that while they may indeed raise IQ, they do so at a cost not incurred by other activities that...