Cultural Lag Essay

If video games did not exist what would society blame for peoples violent outbursts, or acts of aggression? The truth is video games have been around since 1958. In the 58 years after its creation, the video game continues to maintain its bearing even when its continually bombarded with false accusations of being the reason people in the gaming community act out with violence and aggression. True, there are those select few individuals that did something so shortsighted that they ended up on the news. That is still not enough to reason to solely blame video games. Many people believe that the game PONG, created by Nolan Bushwell in was the first video game ever made. That, which is sad to say, is wrong. The first computer game was created by a man named Willy Higginbotham, in 1958 (Lecky-Thompson 2). In 1961, Steve Russell made a game by the name of Spacewar. Each game was given to

Essentially it means that society is hesitant to embrace new things like technology, trends, things of that nature. For example, before video games, people blamed rock music for violence amongst the people of society (Bezio 1). Before that, people blamed television for violence. We as people are horrible at coming up with answers when a problem we can not comprehend immediately emerges. This is why we have cultural lag, we would rather point the finger, rather then find the solution. Hundreds of studies have been made on trying to find the connection between violence and video games. All of the tests have had the same result, no concrete proof that video games make people violent (Bezio 2). Why do we keep doing tests? It is because scholars and politicians continue to point fingers, telling us that video games are the reason people in the gaming community act out with violence. When they themselves probably have little to no experience playing video games. Even if you were to remove video games out of the equation, we would still have