5. They Cause Deviant Behavior
Since the early 90s and the release of games such as
Doom,
Night Trap and
Mortal Kombat, video games have been accused of altering the minds of young people. The fear is that if a young child is perpetrating virtual acts of violence for a long enough time period, their thought processes will be warped and they will come to believe that such behavior is passable in the real world. 20 years later, the debate still rages on, with countless studies providing evidence that playing video games temporarily raises aggression, as if such a fact means anything other than exactly what it means. Every time a terrible public shooting happens, experts and media pundits try to pin the blame on video games. Moral crusaders such as the infamous Jack Thompson have gone to ridiculous lengths to censor and regulate the industry for fear that it is somehow corrupting our youth. What these folks fail to realize is that they are overreacting to a new form of entertainment in the same way their parents overreacted. Older generations fear the young ones, and this includes the fear that they are violent and amoral with no regard for the law. The fact is that young people are always going to be deviant on some level, as it is a normal phase of growing up. Any fear that games are making kids more deviant than usual are unfounded, as violent crime has
been going down for decades. There is literally no basis for this belief, yet it continues to be propagated. Video game players know better than anyone else how games affect them physically and mentally. We play them for entertainment; it is no more complicated than that. Does this mean that children of any age should play M rated games? Of course not, but such a decision lies with the parents. They are responsible for their children, not moral crusaders and psychological studies. While there is still much to learn about the effect video game play can have on the development of young minds, at the moment there is no evidence to treat such a statement seriously.