Poll: Do Video Games cause violent behavior?

[brunothepig]

Yeah, considering this is a video game forum you are only gonna get one side of the argument. Kinda the most worthless place possible to ask such a question.

Possibly one of the most easiest debates to find countless unbiased studies on and yet you turn to a gaming forum?

Guys. This is an English project. They don't want facts. No, seriously. I've been told this by my teacher. It's more about how you write and analyse that they're interested in. Though apparently mentioning Michael Moore documentaries is a sure fire way to make English markers pay attention. A lot of them like him it seems.

OT: Indirectly, certainly. In no way are they the direct cause, but you'll never see a case of one thing being the cause of a major problem like mental illness or whatever.
If a child, or adult, is sufficiently unbalanced already, violent media, be they video games, movies even books, may exacerbate the situation. It's likely, however, that games were a small influence, just the thing that tipped an already very disturbed person over the edge.

 

[Lord_Kristof]

Violent video games do not cause people to be violent any more than movies like Saw or Friday 13th cause people to murder other people. If a guy has issues, nobody really knows what will set him off - it may be a video game, a movie, or a crappy song in the radio, or a tv commercial which is particularly stupid.

I, for one thing, have found that violence in video games helps me unwind. Especially when I was younger, playing Mortal Kombat or Doom was a way to imagine that I'm kicking the crap out of somebody who screwed with me the same day, or made me angry. So venting anger in a non-violent way (mashing buttons is not violence).

Plus, I still feel my stomach turn when I see a dead animal on the road, and I still can't watch bloody horror movies. So there you go, no help from Mortal Kombat and all those FPS games in this regard.

 

[Squeaky]

http://www.news4jax.com/news/22304695/detail.html

Ask this woman.

0.o yikes

Yeah but I'd really have to say no, violent video games calm me, great to just break things, restart and break em again.

My sentament exatly il break shit in a game, rather than get done for vandalism or murder.

thank god for video games or i dont know were id be

 

[Lord Kloo]

Let us look at some of the people who commit violent acts:
Kids who want to look hard
Kids who are extremely stupid and haven't heard of negotiations
Kids who think punching a bully will get them to stop

It is extremely likely that the majority of these kids will be male (as its natural instinct to beat up other males).. And what do the vast majority of male kids play.. video games.. and what's the most common type of video game.. the violent kind..

So we've established a pattern that because 99% of male kids play violent (semi-violent) games therefore the violence they do is a consequence of playing video games.. I don't think so..

Did Hitler play any violent video games? No he didn't. Stalin, Crusaders, Romans? No, no, no

It just so happens that violence is man's natural answer to everything, or was in ye-olde natural instinctive times..

Most of the time, its being bullied, self-contained maniac or just misunderstood that leads to violent acts..

Note: I play minecraft yet commonly want to beat the s*** into some people, but I have a thing called SELF CONTROL....

THE END

 

[RIOgreatescapist]

THIS HAS ALREADY BEEN DONE WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT ILL STALK YOU TO YOUR HOME KILL YOU THEN DRINK YOUR MF BLOOD I HATE YOU SO MUCH IM FOAMING OUTTA MY MOUTH GODDDDD.
hey videogames do what?

 

[Jezzy54]

Where's the "Hell No" option?

 

[Offworlder_v1legacy]

I'll use an example I used when I answered on a thread like this one:

Killing hundreds of people in COD does not want to make me go out and knife people.

 

[EeveeElectro]

...You're asking a gaming forum. That's like going on the Twilight forum and asking, 'Is Twilight awesome?'
I think a video game can trigger violence, but it depends entirely on the person at hand. If the person does have some kind of problem, then it could have been anything that triggered it; a game, a book, a movie, a comic.

 

[nuba km]

I wouldn't say any more then TV of movies

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

I am, simply put, fucking sick of this argument. Videogames may cause violent behavior if the person playing them is a massively antisocial jerk who hasn't seen sunlight in a year and doesn't have a job, doesn't study or is completely without any time constraints in some other way.

For once I'd like to see a study about, say if hockey fans are more violent than other people. When you start to think about what the sport is like, it seems almost obvious.

 

[justnotcricket]

Well, games have never prompted me to go out on some sort of killing spree, but I'd be lying if I didn't confess that I've yelled at the screen/tossed a controller away in disgust a few times. Not many, but some games are just really frustrating... =P

 

[EvilMaggot]

i would have been a seriel murder by now but i aint, when i was 9 years old i played "Soldirer of Fortune" you can shoot off limbs and pretty much do massive carnage i saw braveheart when i was 8 years old (still an awesome movie <3) and by now all the most violent games ive played through the years, so when ppl come and say gaming makes you violent is totally bs...

 

[MasterV]

Domestic and environmental (as in the people around you) reasons are more likely to cause violent behaviour than videogames. People should try to become better parents than trying to demonize everything.

 

[Emilin_Rose]

Actual statistics show that people who play video games, and in particular, are actually LESS prone to violence than people who don't, because they have an outlet for their agression.

Most violent crimes commited because of or inspired by video games are committed by people who shouldn't have been playing them, such as 15 and 16 year olds playing M rated games, or people with mental illness already backing them that is not being treated.

Incidentally, violence from video games has also been decreasing, until 2004, where it jumped a tiny bit. There were no significant events in video gaming that year, but it WAS the year with Idiot du Jourge W Bush was re-elected.

From this we can conclude that it isn't video games that cause violence and suicide, it's republicans who think Paris Hilton deserves a 35k purse more than people like, say, my mother, need surgery to save their lives.

I play video games, did it make me violent and hateful? No. Is watching my mother slowly die in front of me when she isn't even 50, I'm only 20, and my little brother only 14, and somehow despite all the sacrifices she's made for us, she still deserves to not only die, but die slowly and painfully.

That is what causes violence my friend. Saying "I wish you mom had insurance and could get her surgeries and medicine and stuff" does nothing. You want to know why I hate america? because in britain, or canada, or any CIVILIZED country not run by RETARDED APES WITH COMPUTERIZED EMOTION SIMULATORS THAT RUN ON MONEY, my mom would get help.

Republicans cause violence. Maybe not all of them, but most of them.

And before anyone says "If you worked harder blahblahblah", we have been working. Mom lost her job, because the new manager didn't like her. She has spent every day, same as me, either looking for work, or cleaning houses for my aunts in exchange for a bit of money to survive, and her unemployment runs out soon, so we'll be even worse off.

 

[Eisenfaust]

in general no, but there will no doubt be outliers who are, just like there will be those for whom the moon causes violence... at which point the video games are more likely just to be a catalyst and less likely to be the root cause

as a side note, a poll on a website is hardly going to be accepted as statistical data on any level... would be better if you searched google for an academic journal with an article that supports your thesis, however vaguely, and just reference that... "studies have shown..." works wonders

 

[daedalus720]

Violent people are drawn to violence. That is the only reason they play the game. We do not require such filth creating stereotypes for us to the unwashed, uneducated media. That being said, I've shot millions of U.S. Army soldiers escaping from Black Mesa Research Facility, I've roamed deserts with a pistol raiding bandits and merchants alike in Fallout, and I've been hired for shady oddjobs involving assassinating seemingly random people for money and pleasure in Hitman. I do no such things in my life. So no, America's young and impressionable people aren't being corrupted by video games.

 

[Lucane]

The majority will be uneffecticed by those types od games as far as showing acts of aggression simply by playing violent content while a a certain percent of peoiple are influental to Agressive/violent media who'll wish to re-enact or do similar deeds.

I think other froms of violent tendencies are just from more violent mindset.

 

[bluemistake2]

Very much so Dead Rising made me want to kill loads of zombies in the most comical way possible

 

[Blaiz]

I would say yes but not to a full extent...
As a gamer for over 90% of my life I find that sometimes gaming ideas pop into my head during real world events.
They are as harmless as thinking about what it would be like if physics worked like Tetris blocks, or as dangerous as considering different subtle ways of murdering someone quickly and quietly.
I fortunatly have enough sense not to listen to the dark ones but there are people out there who wont distinguish and will move to the path of killing someone and stealing their wallet just because thats what you do in Saints Row 2.

In conclusion, I would say that it is mainly the people, but video games plants the creative seeds and sometimes just puts the blunt ideas into the heads.

 

[captainwolfos]

I said maybe, as biased as I am toward video game violence.

While there have been several (incredibly biased) accounts of people going crazy, and of course they play video games so that HAS to be a main factor for their craziness, there are games out there which are not violent, or are violent and are useful for blowing off steam. Not crazy.

Games are a form of escapism - the imagination allows us to kill people/things in our minds and on our screens so that we don't have to go and grab a knife and kill a random bystander.

If anything, with someone playing video games, the other half or other family members are more likely to get violent from lack of attention.

Me, I love my video games bloody and full of squishy meatbags. My sister, on the other hand WILL get violent if she plays something like GTA. It has been proven. So therefore she has been banned from playing it. Problem solved.