As video games have become more and more violent over the years, controversy over whether or not they make children more violent has also increased, but this claim has not yet been proven. Many people believe that the depiction of violence in video games and other mainstream media causes children to become violent and commit crimes. Several groups have publicly campaigned against violent video games; groups like Parents Against Violence, Parents Against Media Violence, and One Million Moms all oppose violent video games. However, most studies suggest that video games are not directly, if at all, responsible for how violent video games affect children. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get an Original EssayIt is an inconvenient truth that when something goes wrong or something bad happens, people immediately look for someone or something to blame, regardless of whether it's a legitimate cause of the problem or not. People generally tend to "jump on the bandwagon" and blame something on what everyone else is blaming at the time, even if they have no idea what they are blaming. One of these popular movements has become video games, especially violent games. Violent video games have now become the scapegoat for violence among young people. Shootings like Columbine, Virginia Tech, and even Sandy Hook have led many media sources to question whether the shooter was playing video games and instigating his violence. While video games may be a factor in some of these cases, the culprit's mental health or personal life outside/before video games is often completely ignored in discussions of violent video games. Society continually tends to find these scapegoats in order to escape the fact that some people cannot be changed, people want a single reason to blame the evil in the world. People also want to immediately find something to blame without having to do research, they will find anything that is heavily discussed in the media and expect it to be taken as fact. But people need to learn to do their own research on a topic before accepting it as fact: "The research is inconsistent, and psychiatrists may wish to be more careful in their public statements linking violent digital games to dangers." There is indeed a lack of scientific data addressing the relationship between violent video games and this interaction between the mental state of the individual and the aggressive outcome. Further research is needed before we can fully understand the influence of violent video games on real life” (Fournis, 2014). The reason this scapegoating has become so popular is due to a research paper done by Craig Anderson of Iowa State University and Karen Dill of Lenoir-Rhyne College in North Carolina. The students said they have new evidence showing that violent video games cause violence and are more harmful than other forms of violent media. Their main reasons were that video games are interactive and engaging and players tend to identify with the perpetrator. The research included two studies, both involving undergraduate students at the University of Missouri at Columbia. In the first, 78 male and 149 female students were asked about their five favorite video games, how violent they considered them to be and how longthey played there. Additionally, students were asked to complete questionnaires about their aggressive behavior and delinquency. They were also asked how much time they spent playing video games when they were younger” (Cumberbatch 2000). Researchers say they found that students who played more violent video games in middle and high school engaged in more violent behavior. However, their research cannot determine whether the games they had played in previous years were violent or not and cannot rely on any of the results in their paper. In the role of Guy Cumberbatch” said in his article Only a Game? “What the data shows is a reasonably strong association between playing violent video games and co-occurring aggressive behavior and delinquency. This may be troubling, but it doesn't tell us anything about causal relationships: are video games the root of the problem or the fruit of it? In other words, finding that people who like violent media can also be aggressive is like observing that people who play soccer also like to watch it on television. The second study, to which the researchers attach more importance, involved 106 male and 104 female students. a laboratory experiment. Each was asked to play either the violent video game Wolfenstein 3D or the nonviolent game Myst, and then was rated for violence. First, the students played for 15 minutes and then took tests to measure the speed at which they could repeat violent words flashed on a computer. The authors claim that it is a measure of violent thinking and potential for violence. Students who played the violent video game showed faster response times to violent words. However, we cannot know whether violent gaming sped up times or non-violent gaming slowed them down, as the research does not say, making the authors' conclusion that the effect is due to gaming violate an act of faith. A week later, the students returned to the lab to spend more time on their game. They then had to play a reflex game to react as quickly as possible by clicking a mouse button when a tone was emitted against a computer they thought was a human. If they failed, they received a noise blast from their opponent, but if they won, they gave their opponent a noise blast. Students had to define the decibel level of the sonic blast their opponent would receive if they won. They could change this level and the duration of the explosion by holding down a control bar. The research found that students who played Wolfenstein played longer than Myst players, which they said showed that people who played violent video games were more aggressive. However, they did not refer to the fact that the sounds were about 2% longer, which on average across all students was just over half a second. The study also doesn't mention the volume at which the students played the sound. It's not like violence is a new thing in society, it's not even new in entertainment, according to the Nature magazine article "A Calm View of Video Violence." are good reasons to be concerned about the violence that pervades the media. Movies, television, and video games are full of gunfire and bloodshed, and one might reasonably wonder what's wrong with a society that presents videos of domestic violence as entertainment. Of course, the same questions could have been raised about watching.