When it
comes to videogames, people and governments tend to say that they are a
vivid source of violence, and games are blamed for shootings and killings that
sometimes shake their countries. Moreover, the media and many research studies
have eagerly shown how violent videogames are and how they are responsible of
such accidents. Would you dare to contradict them?
Well, I
would. The problem with the media and the governments in general is that they seem
to need an entity on which they can blame for any negative event that produces
fear. Noticeably, in developed countries, shootings happen every now and then,
and since the media and the government do not know why those events happen,
they blame videogames because of trivial details like “investigations on the
killers showed that they played games on a daily basis.” But, does that mean
that videogames are the reason why these murderers commit their crimes?
To support
such statements, researches on videogames and violence are commonly carried out
to verify the connection. However, the results are somewhat shaky because they
do not show the link between playing videogames and those terrible outcomes. Moreover,
several other elements are not taken into account such as family violence and
mental illnesses.
All in all,
the non-existent connection between videogames and violence is commonly used by
the media and the governments to overlook the real problem behind the mortal incidents,
which may refer to a society that every day becomes more and more dehumanizing; and researchers are not responsible either, for they are not
consistent with their results.
