Essay on simulation violence

How violent simulations and violent
Video games affect the real world.

Zachary Whaley

General psychology PSY1012
Spring, 2013

How violent simulations and violent Video game effect the real world.

Introduction Being a video game player myself when seeing on the news video games being suggested as the cause of violence in the real world has sounded ridiculous and silly to me. These kind of suggestions have been going on for decades but escalated after the columbine school shootings in1999. After the terrible event almost every school shooting was at least briefly associated with violent video games (Anderson, 2004). Obviously, given that 45.7 million households include at least one video game console, most children don’t go on to act in violent or murderous ways. In fact even though most kids that commit these shootings are video game players most have maladaptive personality traits.

Most of these children involved in these shootings were considered angry, mean, depressed, psychotic, unruly, and aggressive before the shootings. Although care should be taken when considering these anecdotal observations (Ferguson, 2007) these descriptions suggest that certain types of individuals may be more adversely affected by video games than other individuals. Thus the media directly blaming video games for the violence in shootings they are obscuring an important part personality traits.
Research
Over a decade of research and correlation suggest that violent video games are linked to various negative behaviors and cognitions, such as aggressiveness, hostility, and aggressive thoughts (Anderson, 2004, bushman & Anderson 2002). Although much of previous research has found a link between aggressiveness and violent video games, a considerable number of experiments and research have failed to find a compelling link between aggressiveness and violent video games (Ferguson 2008, Williams & Skoric, 2008). Fergusons research was that of looking at meta-analysis and correlations in which he determined that violent video games may cause more aggressive thoughts but not that of actual aggressiveness. He says that video games does not affect literacy in any ways and that the hypothesis that video games may reduce aggression should be further examined. Anderson on the other hand has other thoughts and believes that exposure to video games even those that aren’t violent can cause aggression through high levels of frustration. He says that violent video games are the only ones though that prime aggressiveness and cause long-term conditions. He observed these behaviors through correlations and moderators here is an example chart.

Table 1. Average correlations, 95% confidence intervals, and homogeneity tests for five dependent measures
Dependent measure k N r_ 95% C.I. Homogeneity test Estimate of random-effects variance (95% C.I.)
Aggressive behavior 33 3,033 .19 (.15, .22) _2(32) _ 23.25, p .05 0.042 (0.029, 0.068)
Prosocial behavior 8 676 _.16 (_.22, _.09) _2(7) _ 1.30, p .05 0.013 (0.006, 0.048)
Aggressive cognition 20 1,495 .27 (.22, .31) _2(19) _ 29.15, p .05 0.087 (0.054, 0.164)
Aggressive affect 17 1,151 .18 (.12, .24) _2(16) _ 15.11, p .05 0.070 (0.039, 0.161)
Physiological arousal 7 395 .22 (.12, .32) _2(6) _ 2.32, p .05 0.028 (0.012, 0.115)
Note. k _ number of independent correlations; N _ number of participants; r_ _ pooled correlation coefficient; C.I. _ confidence interval. The variance in each random-effects model was estimated using the residual (restricted) maximum likelihood method (see Wang & Bushman, 1999).

Video games and kids
Research has shown that about 90% of children have owned or rented a game system. Research also shows that kids would almost give up anything to keep their game consoles in a survey out of everything that they could take 49%

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