There is a silly belief of thinking that playing video games makes you an aggressive person and so far to reality, we’ve always heard, al least one time, people arguing that videogames create violent persons. But, what is all this misinformation about? Back to 2011, a sixteen years old boy named José Rabadán killed his mother, father and his little sister with a katana, this news was so viral and it was called “The katana killer”
The media took an advantage of this crime to say that the murder was made under the influence of videogames based on the fact that José Rabadán had the same haircut as “Squall” who is a famous character from the videogame series “Final Fantasy” also he had in his room some figures and posters from the game.
Knowing the beginning of this popular belief we came back to our question: Do video games lead to violence?
There are three factor we have to analyze:
- Gamer age
- Type of games.
- Game hours
Gamer age: This is the most important, obviously an eight years old kid, whose personality is still growing, is susceptible to adopt behaviors and languages from video games. However, a twenty years old person, whose personality is formed, will not have any issue while playing.
Type of games: It is fundamental for us to analyze there are a lot of games, warlike games, that don’t promote an aggressive behavior but neither a positive one, war games, vandalism, zombies, etc.
Game hours: We will use the time expending playing as a pattern to decide if people are obsessing playing or if is just for fun.
Do videogames make people violent?
In my opinion, I’d say yes and no. Explaining myself better, a person who has a developed personality will not become an aggressive person for playing a violent game. However, kids, whose personality are susceptible to changes, could associate in a positive way the behavior and actions by watching those videogames, modifying their world perspective and thinking that all the things their watch though the screen are “normal”, that’s why they would become aggressive.
As a method of entertainment, videogames do not cause a behavior or personality change. However, when they become a vice, our actions will be affected on subtle things like, we probably will not want to go out our home, take us away from people, but this is another topic my friends… Depending on the assessment of this post I’ll do a 2nd part with my analysis of behavior changes caused by video games.
¡Thanks for reading!
Post in Spanish