How Do Video Games Make Kids More Violence

Video Games are Making Kids More Violent: With most of the video games being involved with shooting one another do we really want kids playing them? 21% of all games sold are first person shooters (Cowan). Most of which on top of shooting people have massive gore. A much larger percent that is sold include at least some type of violence in them. Video games are making kids more violent as it desensitizes them to violence and makes them more aggressive. The first ever violent video game dates all the way back to 1976. It was an arcade game called “Death Racer”. The objective of the game was to gain points by running over as many “gremlins” as possible in a certain amount of time (“A Timeline”). The game was later taken off the market because of public controversy. The first game to have lifelike realistic violence in it was Mortal

This game was released in 1993 and continued to stay in stores (“A Timeline”). Some of the more popular violent games today are “Call of Duty”, “Killzone”, and “Battlefield”. Most of these games can be played online with other gamers. The objective may be different in each game, but no matter what the objective is the participant almost always will have to kill someone to complete it. Violent video games are desensitizing kids to violence as it is just a normal thing to encounter on the games they are playing. There was a study at the U-M Institute for Social Research in which “the researchers outfitted participants with electrode caps to obtain EEG data, including the average amplitude of a particular type of brainwave, known as P300, which is believed to be an indicator of how people evaluate a stimulus, such as a photograph” (Swanbrow). The participants then looked at a neutral, violent, and negative but not violent picture. In conclusion, the researchers found that the participants that were involved in playing violent video games on daily basics