Video Games and Their Affects

Essay by matrixhunterHigh School, 12th gradeA-, May 2005

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Video games have now been around for more than thirty years and have steadily improved in quality and availability, by technological advances. During the last several decades, electronic interactive games have become the most popular forms of entertainment, mainly among children and adolescents. With the introduction of the first widely available video game console in the 1980's "Nintendo", the gaming industry was taken by storm by the popularity and wide spread use of the "Nintendo" console in only a few years. The never generation of interactive games have changed radically in their sophistication, graphics, realism, interactivity and level of violence with amplification of gore and mutilation of the human anatomy, allowing players to participate in violent action without any physical consequences. Growing concern among parents has sparked many studies in the psychological and physiological effects of video games on children and adolescents. It is believed by many researchers that playing video games can create effects ranging from triggering epileptic seizures to causing heart rate and blood pressure changes.

Recent studies have also shown that video games especially first-person shooters (FPS) are causing desensitization to violence, and hostility, but there is one major drawback. Studies so far have been fairly inconclusive, because there are just too many factors involved to provide a solid answer anytime soon. Yet in the United States over 90% of households with children have rented or owned a video or computer game.2 Video games have now become the second most popular form of entertainment after television, and in 2001 revenues totaled $6.3 billion in the United States alone.1 Children spend a great deal of time with violent video games at exactly the ages that they should be learning healthy ways to relate to other people and to resolve conflicts peacefully. When a vice president of...