Do video games make people more violent?
There’s been a lot of research on whether playing violent video games effects the behaviour of adolescents playing them. Lots of physcologists and other people have written many papers on the positive and negative behaviours of the games.
I’ve chosen to review “Effects of Video Games on Aggressive Thoughts and Behaviours during Development” by Thomas A. Kooijmans from Rochester Institute of Technology.
This article concentrates on everything from the history of violence in video games, the general aggression model to considerations for future research. It also has excessive arguments for games that are clearly not violent, for example in his paper Kooijmans states that games like pacman and Super Mario brothers are violent. This is then contested by Joel D Collinsons commentary entitled “Are We talking about the same violence?”. There are many other comments about Kooijmans paper made by his peers. A couple of the other comments are entitled “Video Game Violence and the Emerging Psychopath”, “Getting to the Next Level” and “Positive Effects of Video Games on Development”.
In Kooijmans conclusion he talks about how the advancement of the video game research in the past decade has greatly helped their understanding of its effects on development but there is much more research still needed. It also states how the video game industry has grown to such proportions its now competing with the movie industry in its realism and graphics. “As we reach this understanding hopefully developers can create games which will help our youth, expand their minds, and shy away from the current trend of violence in video games.”
Reference:
http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/kooijmans.html
