Violence

Hello,

The ideas of violence in videogames interested me this week. Reading Jeffery Goldsetin's article, one idea of his really captured my attention. This was the idea of the third person effect. I had never come accross this term and hadn't really thought about it before, but when I read about it, it made perfect sense. The idea that another person will be affected by a computer game, but you won't seems ridiculous. Surely if a game affects one person, it will have the same affect on everybody.

I agreed with most of what Jeffery Goldstein had to say, but ther was one idea that I feel that Jeffery Goldstein did leave out of his article. Although I agree entirely that videogames are unlikely to affect people's behaviour, and that people can think for themselves in terms of distinguishing the difference between real violence and the violence that they see in the game, the one thing that I did think that he left out of the article, in my opinion, was that a game could have the ability to exaggerate emotions that already exist within a person. Although the game is not likely to cause a person to go on a rampage, the game may serve as a means of teaching people about how to go on a rampage. What I mean by this is that a game may act as an educator about violent acts. Put simply, a game may have the ability to teach it's audience about violent acts, and possibly teach the player how to perform a violent act or an act of aggression that they may not previously have thought to do had they not been shown it in the game. Of course this is applicable to any form of media. An example may be a person who had concidered hurtinga man in the neck in the past, but didn't until a game taught them how. Therefore, it is not the videogame promoting violence, or causing violence, it is merely a game teaching a consumer about violence and showing them how to enact violence. This is only really an issue if the person playing the game already has violent tendencies and it could have been anything that triggered an act of violence, be it the game or anything. Obviously this is not a large issue, and it is only an issue with the very small percentage of game players who are likely to be violent reguardless of whether they had played the game or not.

As a side note, this week I also learned to not leave posting on the blog util the last minute, because if your computer breaks, it is likely to not be fixed by midnight...