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Students respond to violence in video games
a violent scene from Grand Theft Auto By Reo Nakai
Beating up strangers, killing cops, stealing random cars etc… . Everything is possible in the game called “Grand Theft Auto” even if it’s illegal in a real world. It personally felt great to do crazy things we cannot do in a real life when I played this game for the first time. On the other hand, some people are very concerned that Grand Theft Auto provokes actual violence cases. On this blog, I am going to examine if there is a correlation between Grand Theft Auto and violence based on academical researches and our own surveys. For those, who do not know about the game, “Grand Theft Auto” is an action-adventure video games series published by Rockstar Games. It features very violent actions like killing people, stealing and destroying. Millions of copies has been sold all over the world. First of all, violent juvenile crime in the U.S. has been statistically going down since 1993 according to U.S. Department of Justice. On the other hand, the sales of violent games are going up. In this series, the sales of “Grand Theft Auto” released in 1997 were 3 million. In 2013, "Grand Theft Auto Ⅴ” has sold 70 million units. From these evidences, we can safely conclude that video game popularity and real-world juvenile violence are moving in opposite directions. However, some studies that indicate a correlation between violent games like Grand Theft Auto and aggression were reported. For instance, a study by EYEKA Singapore, they did an experiment with the use of Grand Theft Auto. In their experiment, participants were assigned either to the group where they played Grand Theft Auto Ⅳ over a period of 3 week or the one where they did not play a game. Although the finding from this experiment do not support the idea that playing a violent game increases aggression or reduce empathy, researchers suggest a small increase in pro-violence attitudes. Therefore, violent games like Grand Theft Auto could potentially lead to violence in a real life. In addition, more people believe that there is a correlation between violent video games and violence in a real life based on our survey. Especially, a majority of respondents rated Grand Theft Auto as 4 or 5, which means more than fairly violent, to the question of rating a degree of some violent games to. Consequently, a majority feels that violent games are related to violence in some extent, and Grand Theft Auto could be one of the most influential games in violence. Since this topic still has been debated and no clear consensus has made so far, I would not conclude here on this blog if Grand Theft Auto is linked to real-world violence or not. But at least, it is obvious that we cannot just ignore violent games like Grand Theft Auto when thinking about violence.
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