Video Game Violence

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate May 2001

download word file, 5 pages 3.0

Politics: current us problem-video games and violence 2000-07-10 In recent years, video games have been a popular icon of youth culture. However,as games have become popular, so has the amount of violence contained in them. Because of the immense popularity of video games with children, violence within them should be handled more properly. First of all, let's take a look at some background information to get a few ideas of who plays the games frequently and what amount of video games contain violence. A lot of people tend to think that the majority of video game users are children, but a congressional testimony by Interactive Digital Software Association denies this, and points out that 77 percent of the most frequent consumers are "adults"�. (57 percent""over18, 20 percent""over 36). (Douglas n.p) And yet, even though those "adults"�account for most of the users, the remaining 23 percent of the consumers are still under 18, and shouldn't be overlooked, especially when researches have found that many games contain at least some form of violence.

One research has sampled 33 popular Nintendo and Sega games, and came to the conclusion that close to 80 percent of them have at least some aggression or violence. (Dietz 425) Another research shows that 85 percent of the games that are inspected embrace a lot of acts involving killings. (The Journal of Psychology) One example of a destructive game that I have seen is Mortal Kombat IV. It's a fighting game between two characters in which one of them literally destroys the other by pulling off the arms or pulling off the head to make them explode, and so on. The commentator just laughs about it very loudly or says "Excellent!"� to praise you every time you kill the other character. Its graphics are full of...