Violent Video games

Video games have become one the biggest sources of amusement for people of all ages. With the rise of Gaming comes the concerns about how this new media is effecting our culture. Violence in video games has a especially become a big deal in recent research studies. For In new media and especially video games, violence and graphic scenes have become a regular part of the gamming experience. In this article I intend to look into what kind of relationship there is between violent video games and aggression in people.
A study done by Michael Slater, Randall Swaim and, Lori Anderson is particularly concerned with adolescents and the relationship between Video games and Violence. The Negative feedback loop model seeks to show that violent media like video games reinforces aggressive tendencies that already exist in People. At the same time they argue that Violent video games can also predict violence in others They argue that we need to study people having already measured their aggressive tendency levels. In order to test this theory the experimenters took sixth and seventh graders from three different regions and from six different middle schools. The children were then exposed to violent media such as video games or TV. The results of this test backed showed that Video game encourage violence in adolescents.
The second theory put forward by Cicchirillo & Chory, States that there is a direct connection between aggressiveness and violent video games. They came up with this theory using the Aggression model, which proposes that aggression is caused by repeating violent acts over and over again, thereby making a pathway in the brain that will make it more easy to be violent in the future. This study took 157 undergraduates and exposed them to various level of gaming. The result showed that the was positive correlation between the amount of violent games played and aggressiveness by the students.
It seems clear from these two studies that there is some sort of connection between Aggressive tendencies and violent video games. The question then to be answered is what kind of relationship exists between violent video games and aggression. The second research article seems to me to have some significant problems with it. It portrays the amount of video games as responsible for the heightened aggression. I would argue that the amount of time spent gaming is not really the issue to be studied. But, rather I like the first study which depends more on the people themselves and their natural predisposition towards violence in the first place, for then we can make some actual changes in our practice. Instead of focusing on what the game does to us we can look at what we do with the game. It is then more likely and possible to have a well formed view of the effect violent video games have on us.