by Ryan Benkert
School shootings. Robberies. Murder. What do these things all have in common? They’re all crimes that at one point in time, have been blamed on violent video games. Whether playing violent video games actually caused these crimes to happen remains to be seen. However, video games with violent content do have an adverse effect on youth, especially those who are too young to be playing them. These adverse effects are a result of the easy access kids have to these games, the poor rating system used by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), those who rate the games, the interactive nature of video games, and the lack of awareness of the parents.
Before getting into the harmful effects of video games, what’s classified as a violent video game, and how they are rated must first be examined. According to the ESRB, “ESRB assigns age and content ratings for video games and mobile apps, enforces advertising and marketing guidelines for the video game industry, and helps companies implement responsible online and mobile privacy practices.” These age and content ratings for the games consist of these letters: EC for early childhood, E for Everyone, E10 for everyone 10 and up, T for Teen (13+), M for Mature (17+), and AO for adults only (18+). While video games with a rating of E10, and sometimes even E can contain violence, the violence contained in these games is minimal, while the violence in T and M rated games is either plentiful or graphic. Therefore, for the purpose of this essay, violent video games will be considered as games with a rating of T or M. Some examples of T and M rated games are the Uncharted game series (T), and the majority of the Call of Duty game series (M). AO games are not a real problem, as they’re hardly ever sold or marketed, with most mainstream retailers straight up refusing to sell a game that has such a rating. Some examples of stores that refuse to sell AO rated games are Target, Walmart, and Gamestop.
While the marketing and advertising rules for the video game industry is regulated very well, with certain games only being able to be marketed at certain times, the actual purchasing of the games aren’t so well regulated. While any store that sells video games are required to ask for an I.D. with the purchase of a game rated M or AO, the games may also be purchased with consent from a parent. This information is stated both on the Gamestop parents section, and on Target’s help section of their website. Technically kids aren’t allowed to buy games that are age restricted, they can still get their parents to buy them. According to a study done by pewinternet.org, which is the website for the Pew Research Center, a group think tank who conducts opinion polling, demographic research, and content analysis “More than half of parents of gamers (55%) report ‘always’ checking the rating before their children are allowed to play a video game, compared to 17% who say they ‘sometimes’ check, 8% who say they ‘rarely’ check, and 19% who say they ‘never’ check.” (Lenhart). This means that while over half of the parents polled are checking the ratings, there’s still a large amount that don’t, sometimes do, or rarely do.
This is a problem because it gives kids easy access to games they otherwise would not be able to play. If parents of a particularly young child aren’t checking the rating on the game their kid wants, they could end up buying them a video game that is not age appropriate for the child, which of course could still happen even if they do check the ratings.
Another problem with the rating system is that the reasons a game is rated the way it is isn’t always clear. A game may have a T rating, and all that will be expanded upon is that there’s “cartoon mischief”. What does that mean? For a lot of people, this is a meaningless rating, as it doesn’t actually expand upon what kind of stuff actually happens in the game. With M rated games, this is an even bigger problem. Let’s take a look at the most recent entry into the Call of Duty series, Call of Duty: WWII. According to ESRB, the game is rated M for Blood and Gore, Violence, and Strong Language. It doesn’t talk about how much of these things are featured in the game, with the only measurement for size being used for the strong language part of the rating. This is troubling because a parent looking to buy this game will only have vague knowledge of what actually contributed to the game earning itself an M rating.
While using unclear language in their rating system is a problem, the ESRB is even less clear in another area, and that’s the ratings for the online play in video games. According to the ESRB, all online interactions in games are not rated. If a game has low levels of violence and an online component, whatever happens onlineisn’t rated or classified. This means there’s no restrictions in what can be said during online play. So it follows, in almost any online gaming community there are players who are toxic in their actions and words. The most infamous game in the regard of toxic online communities is League of Legends. According to an article about League of Legends by Brendan Maher, a senior editor for Sciencemagazine, “Online players have a reputation for hostility. In a largely consequence-free environment inhabited mostly by anonymous and competitive young men, the antics can be downright nasty. Players harass one another for not performing well and can cheat, sabotage games and do any number of things to intentionally ruin the experience for others – a practice that gamers refer to as griefing.” (1). So not only are children who play violent video games with an online component being exposed to the violence of the game itself, they’re also encountering a poor environment online. In a study done by Dr. Shu-Ching Yang of the National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan, there is a direct association between being a victim of cyberbullying, anddoing cyberbullying yourself, as well as otheraggressive behavior. This means that kids who experience cyberbullying and harassment online are likely to cyberbully as well, thus continuing the cycle. In the study, Dr.Yang looked at a sample of online gamers and explored the relationships between their gender, preference of video games, hostility, aggressive behavior, experiences of cyberbullying, and victimization.
What negative things can happen when kids are exposed to these online groups? Well hearing negative words and feedback, especially racial slurs and the like can have a negative effect on children. They might hear these terms and think that it’s okay for them to say them too. For a lot of online games, interacting and speaking with other players is a huge part of the game; kids who play games online could be exposed to this type of language every time they play. Of course, some games have profanity filters, and even ban players who are too negative, but they don’t always prevent the negativity from getting through.
A solution to this problem is to do research into what the online community for the game is like before buying it for a kid. Looking up articles on websites dedicated to gaming, such as IGN, Polygon, or Gamespot, or looking up gameplay videos on Youtube are two ways that a parent can research what a game is like online.
Now that we’ve seen some of the flaws in the rating system, and how they enable kids to obtain violent video games rather easily, the reasons this is a problem for children can be examined. The first problem that arises from young kids playing violent video games is the interactivity of these games. During violent TV shows and movies, the audience is passive in the action, just watching. With video games, you take an active role in the situations happening in the game. In the article Computers in Human Behavior by Jih-Hsuan Lin from the department of Communications and Technology at National Chiao Tung University, “A random sample of 102 male college students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: video game playing, recorded game-play watching, or movie watching. The results indicated that video game players (mediated enactive experience) experienced greater increases in aggressive affect, aggressive cognition, and physiological arousal than participants who watched recorded game-play or comparable movie scenes (mediated observational experience.)” (1). What this study is showing, is that compared to movie watching, or just observing game-play, actually playing the violent video game increases aggression levels and awareness of aggression.
A different study done by Hanneke Polman, a faculty member in the department of Social Sciences at the University of Utrecht University, done in 2007, also looked at the effects of video games and interactivity on children. For this study, Polman took a group of 102 children from fifth and sixth grade classes, and randomly distributed them among three groups, that played three different types of games:active non-violent, active violent, and passive violent. The groups were also divided by gender. The levels of aggression from the members of each group were then measured after playing the games. In this study, Polman states that “Playing a violent video game caused boys to become more aggressive than merely watching the same video game. Active participation of actually playing the violent video game made boys behave more aggressively more often than passively watching violence, as is the case with television.” (262). So what this study says, is that not only are the aggression levels of the male children from this study increasing from playing violent video games, the aggression levels are increasing more than the group of kids from the study that were merely watching the violent video games. This shows that it’s not only the violent nature of the games that are making the kids more aggressive, but the interactive nature of them as well.
Besides just aggression, playing violent video games effects kids in other ways too. One of these ways is the effect on moral identity and moral disengagement. Moral identity is about the importance of moral ideas, traits, and actions to a person’s sense of identity; so basically how important morals are to oneself. Moral disengagement is the process of convincing oneself that ethical standards do not apply to you in a particular context. According to Distinguishing Imagination from Reality, by Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a Senior fellow in the department of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, “Children occasionally demonstrate imagination-reality confusions… These confusions could be taken to show that children have an immature reality-imagination distinction.” (75) This study shows that kids are still learning the differences between reality and imagination. This could contribute to the moral disengagement that can happen to kids when they play violent video games.
Teng Zhaojun, a professor of Psychology at Southwest University in Chongqing, did a study on 761 Chinese middle school students in 2016. In the study he found that “The correlation analysis revealed that violent video game exposure was positively related to moral disengagement, and negatively related to moral identity, and moral identity was negatively related to moral disengagement.” (1). This means that when playing video games, levels of moral disengagement in the children increased; they were more likely to believe that ethical standards did not apply to them. Also according to Zhaojun, the children with a higher sense of moral identity saw a drop in moral disengagement when they were exposed less to video games, and that children with a lower sense of moral identity saw no change when they saw less interaction with violent video games. So while children with a high sense of morals were positively affected by less exposure to video games, those children who valued morality less didn’t see any change. So it could be said that a positive way to affect kids who play video games is to expose them to less violent ones. This data actually makes a lot of sense, because when the player is playing a video game, the normal laws that govern our world don’t usually exist. Nothing you do in game has any real consequences, and if they do they’re shorterm, or ineffective.
Now that the effect of violent video games on kids, and the reasons they’re able to access these violent video games has been examined, possible solutions can be looked at to combat these negative effects.
The first thing that can be done is to further restrict the access that kids have to violent video games. As shown earlier, while there are measures currently in place to stop kids from getting ahold of violent video games, specifically M rated games, these methods are not always very effective, and there are no restrictions on kids getting violent games that have a T rating. One way to make it harder for kids to get these games is to make the language used on the game box more clear. Most of the time, the back of video game boxes are dedicated to in game screenshots, basic descriptions of the games story and mechanics, and a run down of the various awards the game has won. Instead of having all of that, which is all superfluous detail, why not include a more full description of why the game received the rating it did? It can include examples of the various violent actions or deplorable behavior the player will be engaging in. This would help the parents have a clearer idea of what exactly their child will be doing in the game, and perhaps give them second thoughts about buying the game for their kid.
In the same vein as this, another way to make it harder for kids to obtain violent video games is for parents to become more knowledgeable about the games in general. As stated in the research done by the Pew Research Center, 45% of parents either don’t check the game rating, sometimes check or rarely check it. That is literally the least amount of effort you can put into researching the game they’re about to buy for their kids. Other ways to gain more knowledge about the game is to visit the ESRB website, where they go into slightly more detail about the game. Another way, and probably the best, is Youtube. Youtube has thousands upon thousands of videos of people playing games. You’ll be able to see exactly what happens in the game, and the parent will be able to decide for themselves whether they think it’s a suitable game for their child. One way the ESRB could get parents to check the ratings of games more often would be to make the ratings on the box more obvious. With the rating on the front of the box, it’s relegated to a small, black and white box. One way to increase the visibility of the rating is to possibly make the rating on the front bigger, and more colorful. Having a color coating rating could work very well, with M rated games having the rating being red, T being yellow, E10 being blue, and E being green.
Perhaps the best approach to preventing kids from being affected by violent video games is to get games for them that are not only age appropriate, but can also even help children learn and grow. Some of the best games on the market are games that contain little to no violence, and are full of puzzles that not only are fun, but make the player think. More older games, like Minecraft, which focuses more on building and creativity than violence, are great alternatives to violent video games. Minecraft has even been used as a tool to teach children in classrooms. In an essay by Anton Petrov from the department of Curriculum at the University of Toronto, he discusses a study that was done to see the effects of using Minecraft as a teaching tool. In this essay he says that “findings suggest that Minecraft is mobilized as an excellent tool that decentralizes education,encourages students’ creativity, facilitates collaboration in class, allows for cross-classroom and cross-curricular teaching, addresses some of the needs of diverse students and students who have experienced prior school struggles and may even have potentially therapeutic values for students with learning disabilities.” (1). So not only is Minecraft a non-violent alternative to the violent video games that seem to dominate the market, it can also be used as a teaching tool in schools. As opposed to games like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed, Minecraft is a relaxing and charming tool for enhancing creativity in children.
While Minecraft is a great game that can keep kids entertained and away from violent video games, it’s definitely not the only alternative. Games made by Nintendo are almost all very friendly and easy to play for kids. Games like the New Super Mario: Odyssey, and the Sonic games are not only entertaining, but like Minecraft, focus on creativity and problem solving over violence. In both of these games, there are bosses and other creatures to fight, but the main draw is using creativity and ingenuity to get the characters out of whatever predicament they find themselves in. Another facet of these games is how skills learned in one level can be carried on and used again and again in other level. In each level, the character learns a new way to overcome the problems in the game, and each skill will be used again, and in tandem, with the other skills later. This is an excellent example of how skills learned in one area can be used in another, and it teaches kids this lesson too.
Besides puzzle based games out there, sports games can also be a great non-violent video game for kids. It can teach kids the value of teamwork and socialization, as most sports games require some kind of interaction with your teammates in order to do well. A popular sports game that is quite fun is Rocket League, which is a soccer game where the ball is huge and the players drive cars instead of controlling players. There’s no violence involved, and the problem about toxic online interaction discussed above is solved by having a system that filters out all profanity, and promotes good sportsmanship between teammates and opponents. The game also promotes creativity by letting the players customize their cars nearly however they want to. The NBA 2k series, a basketball game, is also a fun alternative, which lets the player take control of an NBA prospective player, and live the life of a rising star in a basketball franchise of their choice.
All in all, a poor and unclear rating system, toxic online communities, and violence increasing aggression and causing a moral disconnect are all problems that violent video games can cause for children. Fortunately for kids, there’s plenty that can be done to prevent these problems from affecting them. The ESRB can increase the restrictions that keep children from playing these games by adding clearer and more full language on the games they sell. Parents of kids who play video games can research using Youtube and other tools to learn more about games before they buy them. The biggest thing that can be done to prevent kids from being affected by these games is to look for non-violent games as alternatives to the violent games that are more popular. Minecraft, Mario, Sonic, and sports games can be great alternatives to violent games, because they not only have little to no violence featured in them, but they also promote teamwork and problem solving skills. Games like Minecraft, where creating and building content is a key component to it, can even be used to a small degree in our education system. To conclude, while there are many violent games on the market right now, thesegamesaren’t as terrible as they have sometimes been made out to be. There are some simple steps that can be taken to make sure kids aren’t affected by these problems. So the next time a kid asks for a video game for a holiday, or for a birthday, do research on what they’re asking for. If the game seems a little too violent for them, maybe look into an alternate, less violent game that they could enjoy instead.
Works Cited
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Gamestop, “Making the Right Choice Means Looking on the Box” gamestop.comGamestop, October 24, 2017. https://www.gamestop.com/stores/playground/parents.aspx
Lenhart, Amanda. “Part 1.4: Parents and Games” pewinternet.org, Pew Research Center, September 16, 2008. http://www.pewinternet.org/2008/09/16/part-1-4-parents-and-games/
Lin, Jih-Hsuan. “Do Video Games Exert Stronger Effects on Aggression than Film? The Role of Media Interactivity and Identification on the Association of Violent Content and Aggressive Outcomes” Computers in Human Behavior, January 16, 2013. Semanticscholar.org. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/201e/2cf69609c8d4e5b91e7b02aad432b248e…
Petrov, Anton. “Using Minecraft in Education:A Qualitative Study on Benefits and Challenges of Game Based Education.” University of Toronto, April 2014. http://zonaminecraft.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Petrov_Anton_20140…
Polman, Hanneke et. all. “Experimental Study on the Differential Effects of Playing Versus Watching Violent Video Games on Children’s Aggressive Behavior” Aggressive Behavior- Volume 34. December 27, 2008. Ebscohost.com http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=f09d2aea…
Target, “Video Game Ratings (ESRB)”, help.target.com, Target, 10/25/2017. http://help.target.com/help/subcategoryarticle?childcat=Video+game+rati…
Teng, Zhaojun. “Violent Video Game Exposure and Moral Disengagement in Early Adolescence: The Moderating Effect of Moral Identity” researchgate.netAugust, 2017. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319304929_Violent_video_game_e…
Weisber, Deena Skolnick. “Distinguishing Reality from Immagination”Our Uncorrect Proofs- FIRSTPROOFS, January 5, 2013. Sas.upenn.edu. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~deenas/papers/weisberg-oxfordhandbook-2013.p…
Yang, Shu-Ching. “Paths to Bullying in Online Gaming: The Effects of Gender, Preference for Playing Violent Video Games, Hostility, and Aggressive Behavior on Bullying.” Sage Pub,SAGE Publications, January 9, 2013. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2190/EC.47.3.a