I am a Gamer? Reader? Audience? or a Killer?
Playing video games have become prevalent. I think many teenagers would like to play games that have high-quality graphics and meaningful storylines.
Unfortunately, it is common for many parents to think that violent video games have caused teenagers to behave more aggressively and violently. Sometimes, you might even wonder how does the link between violent video games and aggressive behaviours work? In fact, there are a few cases which have being reported by the media about the relationship between murders and violent video games.
For example, the murder case of Devin Moore is one of the cases that was linked with the violent video games. The Attorney Jack Thompson has mentioned that the aggressive behaviour of Moore was trained with violent video games. So, he had become a killer. Similar, the sheriff’s department indicated that an 8-year-old boy killed his grandmother after he played violent video games. Not only these two incidents in which have declared the link between violent video games and violent behaviour, but also including the incidents of Jared Lee Loughner, Elliot Rodger, and other killing incidents.
Besides media reports, there are also several research papers that have investigated the link between violent video games and violent behaviours. These researches were conducted based on the influence of media effect. For those readers who may not know what ‘media effect’ is, the following is an explanation of media effect video.
As the explanation of it, you may briefly understand what media effect means. This theory claims that the mindsets of people are framed and cultivated by the agenda setting of the media which is controlled by mass media holders. However, all of these research have been rejected by U.S. Supreme Court to prove that violent video games will affect children to commit aggressive behaviours.
If you have read David Gauntlett’s article, ‘Ten Things Wrong with the Media Effects Model’, you will comprehend why it does not make sense to prove the link between violent video games and violent behaviours.
Here are the 5 out of 10 common reasons from Gauntlett’s article explaining why using ‘Media Effects Model’ to link the violent video games and violent behaviours does not make sense.
- People blame the influence of violent video games for them to commit violent behaviours, rather than looking at social factors. They ignore the problem of poverty, unemployment, debt payments, the culture of family and other social factors.
- The logic of ‘Media Effect Model’ has underestimated the intelligence of the children to differentiate what is right and wrong.
- The research of ‘effect model’ is based on artificial studies, but not sociological studies. Since artificial studies have expected to set up an experiment or investigated activity to prove the link between violent video games and violent behaviours, the result of the research will not come out as an unbiased conclusion.
- People condemn violent content from the video games but not other media production; they have included news, bible, history books, Sherlock Holmes stories, superhero movies, and other media production may have violent content which have no complaint from the public.
- The logic of ‘Media Effect Model’ has ignored the intention and meaning behind the media content. It means that this logic has proved the link between violent video games and violent behaviours as the violent scenes and actions in the game, rather than understand the whole meaning of the game.
Besides the rational arguments by Gauntlett, I would like to present three brutal killing incidents in Taiwan to think why these killers want to murder people.
Recently, a murder case in Taiwan has been stunned most of the people who are living there. A four-year-old girl has murdered by a man with cutting off her head. This incident happened in Taipei.
From the news, it did not state the reason he did it. It only stated that it was the third random killing of children in Taiwan. Since he made no reason why he did that to the girl, the police and the reporter have revealed his previous personal negative records. He was unemployed; he had had mental health issues and committed drug-related crimes. In this incident, the police and journalists did not check his room to find out whether he has played violent video games or consumed other violent media production or not. They try to see his individual problems rather than blaming the effect of media content. From here we can see the difference in the investigations between this incident and those killing incidents which have related with violent video games. This investigation of the three-year-old girl killing case sounds more rational and reasonable, compared to with those ‘media effect killing incidents’.
Besides this incident, the other two random killing incidents in Taiwan have astonished political leaders, government, and the public as well. On May 30th, 2015, a 29-year-old man entered the elementary school without authorization. He followed an 8-year-old student randomly and slashed her throat twice with a knife. Through the explanation of why he wanted to kill her, the reason was because the meals in prison were better than his daily meals. So he wanted to kill someone and get himself into the jail.
The third random killing of children incident which also happened in Taiwan occurred In December 2012, another 29-year-old man slashed a 10-year-old boy’s throat in Tainan. The reason of this murderer was because he wanted to get free meals in the prison as he was unemployed. Also, the murderer believed that he would not be sentenced to death by the law of the government. Upon psychiatric analysis, he was found to have abnormal thinking and generalised anxiety disorder caused by his isolated lifestyle caused.
As the investigations of these three random killing of children incidents, political leaders and lawmakers have been discussing on how to improve the law system in Taiwan. Instead of blaming violent media content, they were more rational to think of ways to fix the problems of the social factors. They were looking at the point of social factors and the education system that may cause people to commit murders, rather than simply declaring the negative effect of violent video games.
Those murders lacked of the opportunity to approach people in their life; they cannot find any job and feel stressed with financial insecurities, so they relied on drugs to relieve their pressures caused mainly by the society. For me, I would like to encourage the government to look at the main reason of the social issue and solve them, rather than wasting so much time and effort listening to ‘media effect’ researchers to prove the link between violent media content and violent behaviours.
These are the points of Gauntlett who has mentioned above. The government and political leaders have to take responsibility to fix the problems, rather than letting media content be the ‘scapegoat’.
If people learn violent behaviour from violent media content, how do the people learn violent behaviours in the past when media content was as established?
To me, violent video games are just an entertainment tools for the people. For most of the people in the world who have accepted legal and proper school education, they should know that murder is not a right thing to commit.
From these three Taiwan random killing incidents, locals were angered and forced the government to legitimise a death sentence to those random killers. It is true that these incidents cause rage in the society, but I believe that every people has the right to live, no matter the mistakes. The death of these criminals would not bring the murdered to life.
Instead of blaming those killers who had already committed violent behaviours, I think we should consider educating these people to know that murder is a brutal behaviour, and how this violent behaviour creates the sadness and hatred of others. Don’t they deserve to get an opportunity to redeem themselves?
Children were dead because of the root of the trouble from social factors, not only murderers’ behaviours. The government has to think of ways to avoid their citizens to commit murders and help them to face the enormous pressures in their life anymore.
If the government believes that this kind of incident will never happen again after they improve the law system.
I am not a prophet, so I cannot guarantee that, but I am sure that if the government does not try to fix the social problems, I think we may see this kind of murder incidents on the news headline again.
What do you think?
Originally published at The Isthmus.
