Do Video Games Cause Violent Behavior In Teens?

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In Call of Duty Black Ops during the mission “Payback,” a teen will find themselves in a Vietnamese torture-interrogation scenario where they are forced to play Russian Roulette until they give up information. The objective is to break out of the interrogation room and get revenge on their captors. They do so by blowing up, shooting, and stabbing every enemy soldier they come in contact with. This mission is similar to many other missions in popular violent video games. The majority of the time, the player of this game will turn off their Xbox or PlayStation and either go to sleep or go out to the living room and has an in-depth conversation with their family about the days’ events. They will go about their day and continue to live their life …show more content…
The American Academy of Pediatrics states that real life violence can be traced back to exposure to violent video games. This, of course, can be easily falsified due to the increasing number of teens that have been exposed to violent video games without committing any violent offenses. Since video games are interactive and may even encourage role-playing, they may cause teens to lose sight of reality. The guidelines of how children usually learn include adopting behaviors after seeing and mimicking them. However, these findings are inconclusive because not all teens learn the same way. Therefore, playing a video game may have a different effect on one teenager than …show more content…
One possibility of how parents can manage their child’s video game entertainment would be to give them a set amount of hours per week that they can be on their video games. Another suggestion parents can follow is simply to stay informed and know what the different ratings mean for video games (Anderson). Some media industries try to confuse parents in an effort to get them to buy a game for their child whether they can handle it or not. One thing that would help parents is if researchers could figure out how people with different demographics and mental states would react to the same violent video games (Caspari). This would allow parents and teens to get a better understanding of how a certain type of video game can impact someone from their walk of

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