Video games have become one of the most common forms of entertainment that people enjoy. It is easy to sit down, start up your platform of choice, and lose yourself in a game and forget about the worries of the world for a few hours. However, when they were first introduced to the public, people had major concerns about the media medium, more specifically, violent shooters such as “Call of Duty” or “Grand Theft Auto”.
In the early days of video games, they were the subject of much debate regarding their effects on the youth. Many claimed that games depicting violence, such as games belonging to the 1st-person shooter genre, would encourage impressionable youth to become more violent. Groups were formed to protest video games and to get violent games taken off the market. Over time, these arguments and sentiments gradually died out, only to return with a vengeance when young adults would commit violent acts, most prevalently seen when a school shooting occurred.
These sentiments seem to change when studies were conducted and found that there was no link between the popularity of violent games and the rise of violence among the youth. Anyone who has played video games frequently growing up, such as myself, can tell you that there was no link between violent games and wanting to inflict harm on others.
Often, video games are a common way to relieve stress for people, to lose yourself in another world, to take out your frustrations through a digital medium, or to find joy in accomplishing something difficult without penalties for failure. The reasons behind playing a video game are similar to watching a movie or TV show, and the results are comparable. If you have watched war documentaries and John Wick movies, are you more likely to go out and shoot someone? The answer is most likely no.
Video games are just another form of entertainment and do not encourage violence any more than movies that have violence in them. It is encouraging to see that more people have come to accept the entertainment medium, and sentiments against it have declined.
