Reality Bites: Violence caused by society, not games

If you have watched Japanese anime television series Gokusen, then you would have known the difference between the terms 'violence' and 'fight'. No doubt, violence translates as maltreating the force/power against rights or laws whereas a fight is when there's a need to save someone, a need for force to get something in order. However, the violence when related to videogames, it seems sarcastic and the questions start tickling our mind as to what is the need to relate violence in schools, on the streets or elsewhere with videogames.

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Surely, no one can forget the dreadful shootout that took place at secondary school in Germany killing 32 innocent students and there is no way one can sum up the grief, fear and rage of all associated with that senseless cruelty, but moral campaigners/critics once again created a great deal out of the incident by making the videogames a scapegoat.

The criticism over the heightened level of interaction that comes from playing a title on the console or PCs is just another case of moral campaigners who stand on their heads buried in the sand making things groundlessly worse. The violent motions that translate into fittingly-gruesome 'on-screen' representations, now tainted to the notion of 'murder simulator' is perhaps far from the mark.

Before anyone can think of blaming the so-called 'violent videogames' for the 'real life violence', the under mentioned quotes are more than enough to bring some of those hard-core strikers around.

After heavy scrutiny, some New York City officials have vaingloriously stated that there isn't any significant correlation between gamers and their probability of getting indulged in vicious acts.

David Walsh, a child psychologist, says,

several factors may impact a young person's developing cognitive processes but not affect a fully developed adult.

Also for those who believe that, videogame addiction is really a mental disorder, we would like to grab their attention to what the psychiatrists have to say about, what they call a psychological disorder.

Dr. Louis Kraus

It's not necessarily a cause-and-effect type issue. There may be certain kids who have a compulsive component to what they are doing. They can make up academic deficits, but they can't make up the social ones.

Dr. Michael Brody (TV and media committee head, AACAP)

You could make lots of behavioral things into addictions. Why stop at videogaming?' Why not Blackberries, cell phones, or other irritating habits.

Dr. Stuart Gitlow (ASAM & Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, New York)

There is nothing here to suggest that this is a complex physiological disease state akin to alcoholism or other substance abuse disorders, and it doesn't get to have the word addiction attached to it.

Addiction experts

Excessive use of video and online games; a problem that affects about 10% of players, could be considered a mental illness.

However, to make the game-critics fall in a line in few hundred words is difficult, but still we are sticking to our guns. If you read what the researchers have found, none of them believes games can turn a normal kid into an antisocial menace, someone who can be involved in a school shooting. A lot of time and effort has been put on that old 'monkey see, monkey do' hypothesis, but appear to be a big fiasco. In our opinion, mental illness, domestic violence, broken families, poverty, etc. are some major contributing factors that provoke a kid to execute German Secondary school or for that matter Virginia Tech like massacre.

So, next time if a kid slays his opponent's neck with a chef's knife in a 'cooking competition', please don't say that cooking-competitions are violent.