For this week’s first impression post, I chose the prompt discussing whether or not video games lead to more violent children. Personally, I do not feel that they do.
For starters, the United States is known for having one of (if not the) largest amounts of gun violence in the world. But these violent video games are not just specific to the U.S. Most games are able to be purchased in many countries. So it doesn’t make sense that we would have more gun violence than these other countries if video games are to blame.
Secondly, I feel that violence is not always a learned thing, and that it is just a part of human nature. You will see little boys, who are way too young to be playing video games yet, playing with toy guns, pretending things are guns, or using imaginary guns with their hands when playing with their friends. They are too young to be influenced by society to have learned that these things are violent, but they still fake shoot each other when playing at the park or in the back yard. Going along with this, maybe toy companies who are creating toy guns for boys to play with should also be at blame for causing violence, but you never really hear about that because all of the criticism is usually on video game companies.
Lastly, I don’t believe that the blood and gore in video games causes mass shooters. I think it could be somewhat therapeutic for people. Teenagers especially are dealing with a lot of emotions and stress as they go through puberty and school and all of the things that come with growing up. Coming home from a stressful day at school and playing video games can be an outlet for built up anger and emotions for teens. If they spend hours shooting imaginary people, the anger is able to diminish, thus allowing them to release their aggression before releasing it in real life.
In conclusion, gun violence is growing in the United States, but I don’t think video games are the culprit, nor do I believe that banning violence in video games is going to solve anything. There is no direct evidence that video games create more violent people. Violence is everywhere, and it is impossible to avoid. So don’t take away something that kids enjoy.
Jenna'sPSY105blog 
In response to your post regarding video games leading to more violent children I agree! I liked your point about comparing other countries with having violent video games yet not having an increased amount of violence as well. If we were to measure the difference between America’s crime rate and Norways we would see higher rates in America not due to the larger access to video games but the access it has to weapons.
In addition with the second part, it is not just young boys enjoy playing with fake guns and video games, rather, I think boys and girls have been pretending to be “toy soldiers” or “army men” or “heroes” for a while and the increase of violence with video games and later on do not correlate.
Based off of your third point I can relate it back to class with having different traumas lead to the different classical conditioning: UCS, UCR, CS, and CR. We would see a pattern and causation as to why this person is being more violent based off of these psychological tools. Does the child have a trauma which is causing them to be more violent? Are video games the trauma? How has the child grown up and has the negative or positive punishment or retribution played into role to make this child more or less violent?
For your last point I would disagree as normally bottling the emotion of the said angry individual would cause more problems and talk therapy would be the best way. Based off of this last point one could argue that the confinement to video games could isolate a person more if they were struggling with anger rather than talking it through and or have them numb to death and violence causing them to act more violent. Although this is true, violence in video games and violence in media doesn’t impact whether or not someone becomes more violent rather if it physically, emotionally, or mentally happens to them in their environment causing the impact we learned from different classical conditioning.
Regardless of whether or not these psychological questions are true crime is decreasing. If this entire proposition was true, we would look at crime date and see the continuation of increased violence as the technology with video games continued but instead there has been a large decrease in violence in general in the past several years. Crime is decreasing so to even propose that video games cause more violence would be false as there has been a decrease in violence for several years with the addition and popularization of video games.
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