In this piece of work I will investigate computer games and their impact on young children and

adults. I will give a critical analysis of 3 articles I have found on the internet and compare them to
one another. There is a lot of controversy in this topic as a small percentage of killings have been
blamed on the violent computer games.
In the first article written by Victoria Woollaston for the daily mail , its states that gory games make
players Less aggressive , and that due to research the drop in violence among teenagers is linked to
an increase in playing games such as GTA. To come to this conclusion, researchers studied the
history of violent films between 1920 and 2005 , they then compared this to murder rates of the
same time period. After that they looked at the number of teenagers playing popular 18 rated
games between 1996 and 2001. Overall, violence and homicide rates were not correlated. It has
been stated that playing gory games like GTA can actually turn people of violence. HOWEVER , at the
end of this article it concluded that the corolation is most likely due to chance and does not indicate
video games caused the decline in youth. In my opinion, everyone is very unsure about this
statement and no one wants to finalise at as there are some flaws. Supposedly, teenagers who play
violent games are more likely to drink, smoke and have unprotected sex psychologists recently
found. Games that glorify illegal behaviour can encourage adolescents and could make people
become more rebellious. This quote was in daily mail, it gives a very stereotypical image about the
people who play videogames. In most these games there are moral choices which the player must
choose, and the players decision can decide the outcome of this situation, whether its violent or
passive.

Lets look at another article written By Sean Coughlan who is a BBC News education correspondent.
This article is completely opposite to the first article and says that videogames can leave teens
morally immature upon reading this article I have found that the title is very misleading. Upon
research it says Many teenagers could play these games without any evidence of a change in
attitude, and non-violent games seemed to have no adverse effects on "moral reasoning", regardless
of time spent. However under this paragraph it says that the problems only started to occur in
children who played more than 3 hours a day without any real life interactions. However this was
only a small %. Further on in the investigation it was shown that children who are playing these
videogames and still developing and understanding whats right and wrong , and being put into
certain scenarios in games can alter their perception and give them a wrong understanding on what
to do if that were to happen in real life.

In this last article it states that a recent study reviles that violent games make children violent and
can influence them to be bad and get up to illegal stuff. A psychologist researcher called Dr Mario
vance who is a psychologist researcher at the rapture institute for headline inspred science
conducted a survey witch has taken over 7 years. He researched the anger levels from 1500+ people
from different gaming communitys. he just recently concluded his results stating that there was a
statistically significant increase in overall aggression and violent tendencies that occurd very soon
after tenuous mainstream media storys calming that the games they have played have caused
violence. This however causes some controversy, as I will now explain in my analysis.

To sum up an Annalise all of these articles I have read, there is something going terribly wrong.
Scientists are saying one thing, and other scientists and psychologists are saying another. They both
have evidence that backs up there theory, but one of them is wrong. In my opinion , the media
doesnt like video games because it is now beating the film and tv industry by far , instead when a
violent killing materialises and the killer plays games they just assume that the video game has made
this person gone mad to give games bad publicity , and they like to use scare mongering techniques.
I have found from the uses and gratifications theory that players like to play games for escapism and
get lost in a make shift world to be and do what they want. However, in some games you can choose
whether to be violent or peaceful and the overall outcome of the game depends on how the player
interacts with his surroundings.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2821680/Gory-games-make-players-aggressiveDrop-violence-teenagers-linked-increase-gaming.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-26049333
http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/sep/20/video-games-cause-violenceclaims-cause-violence