The Effects of Violent Video Games in Present Days

Nowadays, the impact of mass media on our daily life is beyond any doubt. Thousands of researches and experimental studies on the effects of media and mass media communication have been published over the last few decades. Among other cognitive, emotional and behavioral impacts, several studies focused on the effects of exposure to media violence on aggressive behavior. Violence in media includes the violent scenes on television, video games, music, and movies. Violence in video games has come under extreme examination lately. Even though there are studies that avoid the fact that there is no experimental evidence of the relationship between violence in video games and aggressive behavior, several researches have concluded the direct relationship between the two such as mentally and physically.

Cognition is defined as “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and senses.” This includes psychological abilities and methods linked to knowledge, attention, memory, evaluation, problem solving and decision making. Also, violent video games stress children out which causes them to be more aggressive. There is no doubt that the use of video games develops the gamer cognitive skills, as he/she uses existing knowledge to make decisions, and to generate new ideas. The question remains on the development of these cognitive skills towards aggression. Based on a general analysis, “Andersen et al” concluded that the violent video game is “positively associated with aggressive behavior, cognition, and affect, as well as negatively associated with empathy for victims of violence and with social behavior.” Researchers have also observed these behaviors across cultures, genders, and types of games.

According to the same study, researchers concluded that the impact of the video games may be stored in short memory, also, repetitive exposure of violent scenes will create a habit to these scenes and lead to reduced empathy and sensitivity to violence. The more gamers see violent acts, the more their memory gets used it, to a point where they would not have a “negative” type of reaction to these scenes in real life.

Video games, whether violent or not, it also promotes a certain behavior. Children who are exposed to repetitive violent scenes in video games may indirectly understand that aggression can be the solution to several life problems. For example, they may unconsciously use aggressive behavior to solve any problem they face, by recalling “acquired behavior” from short- or long-term memories. In fact, children may have wrong interpretation about the world and will think that it is a hostile world and that aggression is a natural behavior to the hostile environment.

Despite the fact that several other researches came to the conclusion that violent video games and aggression are directly connected, these studies did not reduce the doubt among some other minor researcher that deny the direct correlation between violent video games and aggression, claiming that the direct relationships, is either significantly exaggerated or completely invalid. Recently there was a study showing a team of German researchers led by “Simone Kühn” studied the long-term impact of video games on aggression. They came to the conclusion that violent video games do not increase aggression or decrease pro-social behaviors. Results showed that while violent video games may have some short-term impact on behaviors, the same is not evident on a long-term base.

In conclusion, if there are concerns on the general well-being of our society, then it is needed to target younger generation with exposure to a fewer hostile scenes and environment, one would argue that the benefits on development of cognitive behavior can be derived from video games that do not need to be violent. The negative impact of violent video games on aggression, even if it is only on the short-term, can be avoided.