Essay

As the years past video games are starting to become a lot more violent, containing more graphics of violence nature. An example of this would be Call Of Duty MW2, due to the increase in violence moral panics have been increased towards the nature of violence in video games. The gaming industry has been on the increase for years now, this is for several reasons. One being video games is a way for the user to escape from everyday life. (Add in theory) Due to the increase of technology and the quality the games are produced in, the games are starting to become more and more violence. Some people even say it's like life like experience. To continue offering users these levels of realism during the games, they have to create games like Call Of Duty, which is a 1st person shooting game. So it makes the user feel like they're actually the person. Some would say the game is far to realistic. One of the main issues with this, is that because the game is too realistic people believe it may influence other users to carry out the actions done on the screen. There's been many cases of this in the past (Insert example). The reason why this is such a big issue, is simply because of the amount of games sold, it's been said that in 2010 approximately 63 million games were sold during that year, so that near enough works out as one game per UK resident. So overall millions of people could be effected by the violence. Even though there's no strong evidence against violence in video games, there has been many cases in the past in which people have performed an act of violence towards another person and referred it back to a video game. As the video industry is here to stay, the moral panics will be increasing year by year, but the question we have to asks ourselves, does violence in video games effect the way we act?

One major case that will be remembered for years, A famous outbreak in violence is Anders Behring Breivik, he’s a Norwegian man who went under trial for a terrorist attack, which lead to the death of 77 people. This took place on the 22nd July 2011. The man admitted to playing violent video games, such as Call of Duty to plan his killings. Predicatively the media completely overemphasized the impact violent video games had on the man’s behaviour, before his attack. They basically used it as a scapegoat for many other issues that lead to the heinous attack. One reason why video games are commonly related to violence is the age of them, and how recent the video games are. So the action during the games, and the way it affects the brain is completely new to professional scientists today. In this trial on April 19th Breivik claimed that games like Call Of duty: Modern Warfare is good if you want to simulate police response and escape strategy for training purposes.  He used video games for simulating killings, but he was mentally unstable before he played video games. They were never the cause of the murders themselves. But the Media went on the blame the games. I personally believe this is an unfair thing to do, the game may have created the situations in his mind, however this isn't the gaming industries fault. Most people are mentally stable to play the games, however Breivik wasn't mentally stable which caused him to do the actions he did. Normal gamer play games for escapism or for social reasons, they don't change as a person when the game is turned on and off simply because they're mentally stable to play the games, unlike Breivik.

However there has been several cases in the past when it's obvious that the games itself have caused a person to act the way they did, some extreme examples of online gaming addiction is, someone from Philadelphia called Tyrone Spell man  and age 27 was convicted of a third-degree murder because he killed his 17 month old daughter whilst he was raging over a broken Xbox. In February 2002, a Louisiana woman sued the company Nintendo because her son suffered many seizures and then went on to dying, simply because he played his Nintendo 64 for 8 hours a day, six days a week. But Nintendo refused to take responsibility for his death. Around the time of November 2010 in South Philadelphia, someone called Kendall Anderson, aged 16 killed his mother by hitting her violently 20 times simply because she took his PlayStation away from him. So from these examples, you can tell that online gaming addiction can get extreme, even that extreme it involves death.  This is why online gaming addiction is a serious issue in the modern day world, it completely takes over some people’s minds without them even realising.

A famous theory which links in to my case study is the Culmination/cultivation theory, This theory is all about the media having effects on the audience, for example gaming causing people to turn violent. This theory asks if years and years of watching a female in soaps being mistreated, would we be more accepted to it happening in real life? However this theory is yet to have any concrete proof, that the media texts can change ones behaviours. Advertiser may use this to attract their target audience to buy their products, a lot of money is being spent these days to try and prove this cultivation theory. This theory can be split into two parts, firstly the media exposing violence towards children, causing them to be more tolerant towards them. The second part being the media causing them mentally to be violent towards others and this would be seemed as normal considering it goes unpunished in media text. W.Belson conducted research with males between the age of 12 to 17, to see how violent they are. He discovered that “Children who tend to watch violent TV programs do become more violent themselves to some extent, largely because violence comes to be seen as a legitimate problem solving device for them.” A lot of the time surveys show that violent people enjoy violent programmes. So how does this relate to my case studies? Firstly there’s been many cases of violent out streaks from gaming, a famous example of this happen on the 11th February 2009 a multi-million dollar lawsuit was filed in Alabama against the game makers, people claimed that the months of playing the game led a teenager to go on a rampage, killing three men two of which were police officers. Grand Theft Auto is a game which allows you to decapitate police officers, kill them with a sniper, a chainsaw, and even set them on fire. And now the game is at the centre of a civil lawsuit involving the murders of the three men, the murders happened in a small town of Fayette, Ala. The boy who committed the crime was only 18 years old. He was known as Devin Moore, he had played the game for days on end for months.  It all happened when they found Moore trying to steal a car, Moore had no criminal history. He was taken down to the police station, and he suddenly snapped, completely unexpected. According to the statement which Moore wrote himself, he lunged at the officer Arnold Strickland, grabbing his 40- calibre glock automatic and shot Strickland twice, once in the head once in the body. Another officer heard the shots, came running to meet Moore in the hallway, he then fired three shots at the officer, again one in the head. He then kept walking down the hallway towards the door of the emergency dispatcher, there he turned and fired five shots in to the third person. Again another one in the head, along the way he grabbed a set of car keys, and went to the parking lot and jumped into a police car and took off. It was all under a minute, and all three people were dead. The game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye, in the police station. The menu offered him a split second decision, to kill the officers, shoot them in the end and then flee in a police car. Just as the game trained him to do so. Everyone who was involved in the scene remember these famous words said by Moore, ‘Life is like a video game. Everybody’s got to die some time’.