Blaming the dark side of gaming

[WillowIX]

Games promote violence, no doubt about it! If it's fun to shoot somebody in the head in a game that it DOES promote violence. However, if one is affected by it is an entirely different question. If one can't play a game without getting affected one shouldn't play it.

[Nerull]

I've been playing violent video games for a good part of my life, watching horror movies for even longer, etc. I've never hacked anyone up. Sure I've gotten angry at people and yelled at them before (nothing like getting cut off by someone on a wet road and almost ending up in oncoming traffic...), but I've never even though of truly getting violent with them. I will agree that exposure to violence causes a higher tolerance to violence. However, the reason I've never had a problem is because my mother would monitor what I was watching and would take the time to explain things to me (and stop me from watching stuff that was "out of my league" at the time). I've seen all too many parents that use the TV as their babysitter, throwing their children in front of it and taking off to do their own thing. I've also been browsing in software stores, and seen parents buy their younger children Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. In the vast majority of the cases where violence has happened with children (i.e. school shootings, etc.), you can see where there was the exposure to violence, but also both some sort of emotional trauma (problems at home, bullying at school, etc.) and problems with the parenting. Thus, I've always felt is has less to do with the exposure to violence in media as much as the environment the person is in when the exposure happens.

Oh, and another thing, the pervasiveness of violence in U.S. culture and media does not happen in a vacuum. If there was no demand for violence, then there would be no violence out there. Remember, the people putting out this stuff are out to make money, and if they could not make money putting violent material out, then they would put something else out. Stop looking at the suppliers as the big bad guy (what I like to call the "War on Drugs" mentality of going after the supplier as the bad guy), and instead focus on the things in the culture itself that creates that demand. Of course, if it was that easy, then it would have been done long ago...