Blog Assignment 3: Aggressive games make children throw controllers at each other? Nah, not really.

The debate I will be focusing on in my blog is the one about children’s behavior during video game play. A lot of the problems that people have with video games is that they, just like all forms of media, have a lot violence. People think that it is worse than the other forms though because unlike those ones, it is interactive. The reason why the interactivity is bad is because people think that by children indirectly carrying out acts of aggression. Thus, by carrying out these aggressive acts, they would learn to do it themselves. This would be vicarious learning, which is learning from seeing. Yet again though, people see violence in all forms of media, so they would also learn violence from those mediums. In essence, people are afraid that, while children play these games with violence, they’ll start getting violent while they are playing these games.

The Handbook of Computer Games looks at some research on how children act while they play computer games. The research they look at concludes, in essence, that, while kids play video games, they, rather than getting aggressive, they get more friendly and sociable. It basically says that there are no aggressive tendencies that come to kids while they are playing video games, they are just having a lot of fun. However, there are some limitations to this research. It does not look at the long term effects of playing video games on behavior of children while they play video games. It also only has them play video games for a short period of time, only six minutes. That is not nearly long enough to get into a game and really get good results. Also, they could not really control well for games that had no aggression because there are almost no games that do not have aggression in some form.

However, I still think that the research has a point in saying that kids are more having fun playing the games rather then getting more aggressive. Aggression, from what I have seen, happens more during game playing when frustration occurs. It does not come from seeing it in games. It is seen in many other places besides games, and could easily have been learned from those places. The research, though it was rather limited, did lend itself to somehow support what I understand about the process of playing video games in terms of aggressive behaviors. Overall, I would say that during the process of playing video games children do not become more aggressive.