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I don't think this is about video games, this is about giving your child proper education, teaching them about boundaries, knowing right from wrong, help them mature and learn other people have feelings just like they do.
I don't believe a perfectly normal kid who was brought up well and got good education and all the parental attention and guidance they needed would just murder someone because they saw it in a video game. Normal people know the difference between reality and games.

HOWEVER, I'd rather not get my own future children violent video games. I don't think it could be harmful, but murder is not a game and I dislike the idea of making it a game. It just doesn't feel right to me. I'd rather if they played other games that are more helpful to their mental development.

Meh.. I learned to play the gameboy at the age of five
I grew up around videogames, most of them violent. And yet I turned out to be a mostly nonviolent person. So, I don't think games can have too much of an effect on a child. But I do think, that if you give a five year old god of war to grow up with, they will become violent. But not murderous.

I think a lot of the stuff in Videogames has an underlying "justifier" of sorts, although it has been diminishing with time.

I mean games like CoD, Halo, they involve shooting yes, but look a little deeper, and it's somewhat more justifiable, shooting "bad guys", more specifically for the defense of one's home. Something that is easily seen as admirable.

Grand Theft Auto though... I'm not too sure about.


On the other hand, I think that Violent videogames also function as a deterrent on some level. I don't know anyone who plays GTA, CoD, Wolfenstein, etc. Then say "I wish this were real".
Games such as those certainly show the horrors of combat and the fact that the violence is incredibly toned-down in the games should be scary.

I just did a report on this for school. Here it is. All of this info was found in books and legitimate internet sources.



Imagine taking a shard of glass and plunging it into a man then watching him bleed and struggle only to die, this was common in a game titled Manhunt, despite the lack of evidence people blame games for violent crimes. These crimes are done so by someone who is unbalanced, no normal person would do things like this. Any child that is influenced into violence is often caused by the lack of parenting in their life.

Why do people blame games when it’s obvious there is no evidence? On April 16 of 2007 Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and injured many more before committing suicide. Many say played a shooting game, Counter Strike, while other sources say he was not a gamer, so why did they still blame the game? Society tends to shy away from people taking responsibility for their actions and seek easier things to blame. In the 1930s Jazz was blamed for youth disruption and it was Rock ‘N Roll and comic books in the 1950s. People who do not share the same attractions can’t comprehend that games like Counter Strike enforce communication and teamwork to achieve victory. Studies of video game related violence are not plausible, you can’t have someone act out crimes in a test lab, most studies only study aggression which in not the same as violence.

In a 2001 report by the Surgeon General, it was stated that the strongest factors of shootings at schools was not media exposure, but, “mental stability and the quality of home life”. Eric Harris and Dylon Klebold killed thirteen and injured 23 before turning the guns on themselves at Columbine High in 1999 and games were blamed, but the fact that they were social outcasts and were ridiculed regularly was ignored. Public panic over such events cause adults to be more hostile and suspicious toward already socially distraught youths and misdirects them from the actual causes. Everquest, a popular online PC game in 2001, was blamed for a man’s suicide, but it was also proven that he had poor self-image, was lonely, and depressed, all signs of a typical suicide. A study of 1254 students in 2007 showed the most popular game for males, and second for females, was Grand Theft Auto, a game involved in robbery, murder, and sex, and when asked why it was this game many replied that it helped relieve stress into a fictional world.

A 2005 study shows that 79% of parents agree that it is the parents’ responsibility to monitor what their kids are exposed to. The shooters of Columbine had built bombs in their garage for a long period of time and their parents never noticed. Killers are feared whether motivated by a game, book, or movie, it is how the person is taught to reflect on these that is to blame. Like comparing an apple with a hand grenade, studies usually test the influences of a violent shooter against a non-violent puzzle game; additionally the study is only fifteen to twenty minutes long. As Dr. Dmitri Williams of the University of Illinois said, “you can not study people for twenty minutes and know what’s going to happen to people in society ten years later”.

There has been no evidence of a link to violent criminal behavior and video games. Often enough it is lack of evidence that forces the blame. People look past the mental and social stability of the accused. How their influences are regulated can either raise a child to a healthy life or condemn them to a life of disappointment and the need to escape.