' Little By Little, Violent Video Games Make Us More Aggressive?

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Video Games And Violence Video games have gotten a lot of negative attention in the media as a scapegoat for what is wrong with children. Are video games really as bad as they are made out to be? Alice Park, writer of “Little By Little, Violent Video Games Make Us More Aggressive” published on time.com, believes that video games are making people more aggressive. But within her article there are many flaws with her arguments; it makes a poor attempt to blame video games for events like the columbine shooting, racism, and hostile behavior. Park makes poor unsupported claims about the quantity and quality of games being played by children and the effects these games are having on them. The authors research is hard to follow at many points. …show more content…

Craig Anderson worked with kids third through eighth grade in singapore to study the effects of video games on children cognitive development(69), specifically focused on violence and hostility, without taking into account many of the other factors. Anderson and his team gave the students a questionnaire, that asks about their video game habits and measures their hostility and aggression, 3 times over the course of 2 years to measure the effects playing video games has on children. Part of the studies findings directly contradict the title of Park’s article showing that rather than video games making us more violent over time, the children including the ones playing more video games were less aggressive as they got older(Park,2014). Children naturally outgrow their tendencies to lash out and find better coping skills(43). In describing Anderson’s research Park uses the ambiguous phrase “long-term gamers” in a study involving only children in grades three through eight. It is hard to imagine that any of these kids could have been gaming long enough to be considered “long term gamers”. Perhaps while she may want the reader to think prolonged exposure to games will lead to violence, she actually means that kids that play for obsessive hours are more likely to have results on Andersons test to indicate that they may have more aggressive behavior. While Anderson’s research does hint that there is a possibility that games affect children negatively it is not concrete

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