Korby Fenske
Reporter
Around 67% of Americans play video games. Do video games cause violence? This is the question that people have been asking for the past few years. Are video games the cause of mass shootings?
“Video games do not cause real world violence,” said Nathan Gandy a psychology professor at Crowder. “Video games are starting to become learning tools for people of all ages. They are making you choose moral dilemmas such as saving one person to another. Yes, they make people angry but who doesn’t get angry when they lose something. Video games make you feel a range of emotions, including happiness and sadness.”
Video games stimulate the brain where you have to think about the choices a player makes. They also help with your hand eye coordination as a study from a few years back learned. Games help children below the age of three get interaction, learning and feedback so it helps them just as much as everyone else. “More aggressive people tend to play more aggressive games, but that doesn’t mean that they want to shoot up a mall.” Gandy stated. “That’s like saying that people that play sports games can go join a professional sports team.”
“There could be too much of everything” Mr. Gandy on if he thinks there is a such thing as too much screen time, “If you eat too much food, if you drink too much water, if you exercise too much, those are all things that can put your body into a bad shape. I think that if you do play three to four hours a day I think that you should also do other things like hanging out with friends, watch movies, homework, drive around, and other things because if you only do one thing it could be harmful in the long run. Diversify your experiences to make them positive.”
Gandy told me that there was a study done on a 12-year-old boy who played a shooting game and people took him out to a firing range to shoot the gun that he plays with in the game and the first time that he shot it he put it down and started to cry because it was nothing that he has ever experienced before. “Video games put a blanket over how things are in real life, people who play shooter games sometimes will never shoot a gun in their life.”
“There has never been a true-life reason that video games cause violence,” says Crowder student Anthony Maddox, “people will be violent no matter what”.
Video games are a source of entertainment for a lot of people and is sometimes a get away from the harsh world we live in. While sometimes people get agitated or mad when playing games, not everyone wants to shoot up a school or a mall.
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