I am so fucking tired of this bullshit. I love how the first paragraph ends with "...if you know of someone harmed as a result of violent entertainment, especially video games." and yet, any form of entertainment
but video games doesn't appear again anywhere on the page except in one bullet point.
Violent games are not meant to be played by children, and are marked as such by the people who make them. The problem isn't with the games themselves, necessarily, so much as it is with the way they are marketed. Unfortunately, it seems like most of the time it is the gamemakers who are being targeted and not the advertisers who are the ones who encourage kids beneath the age range suggested by the ESRB to find ways to buy violent games.
I love the studies that accompany this sort of thing. Do we really need a team of scientists to tell us that violence begets violence? Of course steady exposure to violence leads to desensitization. That should be common fucking sense. But just because video games are interactive doesn't mean that impressionable youngsters can't potentially be "taught how to kill" by movies, or TV shows, or books, or the internet, or any other sort of media. It's difficult to find formal education on the subject of killing people, so of course there are "copycat murders," or whatever. I seriously doubt that violent entertainment is nearly as responsible for directly causing violent behavior as some people seem to think. Certainly it is a contributor, but there has to be a certain mentality already present for someone to watch a man die at the hands of another man and say "Hey, that's pretty spiffy. Maybe I should get in on some of that." People who parade their causes around only show you the evidence relevant to their cause. I'd like to see what
other factors were present in these cases that contributed to the tragedy.
Having said all that, there is a responsibility on the part of the creators to treat their subject with the respect and gravity it requires. Sometimes I get the feeling that Hollywood tries too hard to glorify violence rather than presenting it in a more socially realistic sense. Then again, isn't it a point of entertainment to entertain? To make their production seem more interesting and "larger than life?" I can't deny that there's a problem with violence in the media, I just really don't trust politicians and activists to adequately deal with the situation. <p><div style="text-align:center">
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