Violent Video Games And Children Do Not Go Well Together

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Violent Video Games and Children Do Not Go Well Together Video Games contain age-suggested ratings for a reason. It makes sense for MLB The Show to be an everyone (E) rated game, because what content in the sport of baseball would be unacceptable for anyone to see? It also makes sense that Call of Duty is a mature (M) rated game because it contains inappropriate content not everyone is meant to see, especially children. No wonder game retailers are requiring people under seventeen years old to be accompanied by an adult or legal guardian to purchase M-rated games. Though many video games are completely appropriate for all ages and even offer some educational value, some should never be played by kids because they contain content that no child …show more content…

In fact, many video games offer an education component. Describing Madden NFL, Sarah Glazer puts it as, “Yet the knowledge built into “Madden,” for example, employs a playbook the size of an encyclopedia. To win, players must have a sophisticated understanding of strategy and make split-second decisions about which play to choose.” With this being said, does it not make sense that a child will better understand the ways to kill someone by playing violent games? Why are parents giving their children the ability to learn about violence when they could be playing video games about sports? Children are not done growing mentally, so by starting them on these violent video games while they are young, who knows what could happen in the future. According to John Walker, Dr. Yang Wang carried out fMRIs [Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans] on people who played violent video games, and “The results of this demonstrated that those who were playing the violent videogames showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe for the emotional task, and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex for the counting task, than those who had been weaving daisies into their hair for a week”. This data further concluded, “These are regions of the brain associated with aggression and violence, and the results appear to show that violent videogames are affecting those regions” (Walker). If this can affect adults, why let children, the future of our world be negatively impacted by