Violent Video Games and Children In today's society, there is a great controversy concerning children playing violent video games. Some authority figures believe that it is negatively effecting the children who play these games (Park). Others believe that they boost a child's learning and social skills (Ferguson). Studies show that adolescent exposure to violent video games positively correlated with aggression (Park). Children who are exposed to violent video games for extended periods of time begin to show increased signs of aggression. Research shows that these children react with more hostility and use much more verbal aggression than children who spend less time playing violent video games (Nowak). The sign of aggression that is most noticeable in a player is a raised voice. The children who play these games also become more argumentative when they …show more content…
The Director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University, Craig Anderson, conducted one of the most known experiments on 3,034 children in grades third through eighth who owned a violent video game in Singapore. Over a two year period, Anderson and co-workers asked the children about their video gaming habits three different times. They also distributed questionnaires to the children to grade their attitudes and violent behavior after playing the violent games for a long time. They found that as the children matured that their hostile attitudes and violent tendencies declined. However, the children who played for the most hours in a week showed much more aggression than children that played for the least amount of time in a week. The research group also came to the conclusion that the children who averaged the most time exposed to these games in a week felt that it was acceptable to strike a peer who said a negative comment about them