Video Games and the Violence Behind It.

Blog 7

Are people becoming more violent due to video games? Video games are becoming more prevalent in households. About 90% of households have video games and an average of an hour worth kids are playing video games everyday (Hutemann). Consumers of video games invest their emotions and the main characters become more real, because the consumers believe they are the ones actually doing it. The more real the video game looks the more real it is going to become for the players. Even the Marines use the video game Doom to desensitize themselves for actual combat war. Killing and seeing a lot of blood and gory, for the Marines, in the video game Doom provides training and conditioning for the Marines.

Doom

Since the Marines use the video game Doom as conditioning, training, and desensitizing along side with trainers telling them what is right and wrong, what about the rest of the population who play the video game for fun and no one telling them what is right or wrong? Is the rest of the population assumed to not become desensitized and supposed to know automatically what is right or wrong? I do not think so; otherwise, the Marines would not need supervision while playing the video game. If this video game and other video games help desensitize their consumers to killing and seeing gore then this may help with the rising numbers in violence. In video games, people are not shown about remorse for killing or hurting someone/thing, but, instead, are given point for the most people someone kills. Killing now becomes a rewarding mechanism to consumers. Just one of my blogs below, Tough Guys, men act out how they believe is considered macho and masculine. Hurting or killing someone is a way to show respect. Could this notion also been drawn out from video games and not just movies, television, and advertisements? Although there is no factual truth about video games making people more violent, there might be an underline of desensitization of the violence that occurs if someone routinely plays Doom, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and so many more games.

References

Huntemann, Nina (Producer). (2007). Game over: Gender, race, and violence in video games.

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