The fingers should be pointed at the person responsible for the violent act, not an inanimate object that is only used to entertain. Christopher Ferguson is an assistant professor in the department of behavioral, applied sciences, and criminal justice at Texas A&M University International. In his article, Ferguson discusses the link between violent video games and violent behaviors. Ferguson states “it seems to me that increasingly, as a culture, we have shied away from holding people responsible for their behaviors, and instead prefer to seek out easy or even abstract entities to blame” (2007 p.
B20).
People, like scientists and politicians, state that they have the answers to our problems. The fallout from this is that it leads to a witch hunt or a moral panic. Ferguson is aware that while his own research on the topic will not be well received by some in his field, he does speak from “familiarity with the research and the literature” (2007, B20).
He believes that social scientists made up their minds that violent video games caused aggression before there was significant data to support the theory.
Consequently, violent video games have become a “scapegoat” to explain away bad choices that people make. Christopher Ferguson states in his article that he has conducted his own research on violent video games and has published several articles on this research. He believes that Americans do not want to bear the weight of blame for their own actions, nor are they quick to place blame on another person’s shoulders. Rather, they find an object to become the focus of their finger pointing.
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So ethically it is easier for people to believe others can be influenced by and therefore place blame upon a “thing”, rather than to accept responsibility for their own actions. Ferguson believes humans to be influenced by weak results from studies that have proven to have low thresholds for evidence. Sometimes we forget that scientists are mere humans, and that the process of science, as a human enterprise, may always have difficulty rising above a collective and dogmatic pat on the back rather than a meaningful search for the truth (Ferguson, 2007 p.
B20).
To support his findings he revisits a very familiar scene for most Americans, the Virginia Tech rampage. Not long after that occurred many “pundits” began the finger pointing at a game that was played by the shooter, Counter-Strike. It was believed, by some, that the video game was responsible for the idea behind the shooting at the school. Since most young people today play some sort of violent video game, it’s not hard to link violent actions with those violent video games, if you so desire.
Ferguson states that “using video game playing habits to predict school shootings is about as useful as noting that most or all school shooters were in the habit of wearing sneakers and concluding that sneakers must be responsible for such violence” (Ferguson, 2007 p. B20).
Yet most Americans do just that, try to find the link between video game play and aggressive behaviors in youth. Discussing school shootings for parents is very emotional. They often play the “what if” game with their own children, putting them in the place of the victims.
Opponents of violent video games like to use scenarios like this as the driving force behind their attacks on the video game industry. The statistics are surprising for those that think there is in fact a link between video game violence and violent tendencies in youth. On the FBI’s website, in an article Crime in the United States, 2008, it is noted that juvenile murders fell 71. 9% and juvenile crimes fell by 49. 3% between 1995 and 2008. So logically you should be able to conclude that either less people are getting arrested because criminals are outsmarting the police or videogames are not responsible for violent crimes.
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While that seems like a simple solution, Ferguson states that it is far from it. “Some media researchers attempt to defuse this argument by suggesting that “other factors” are at play, but no theory should be allowed to survive such a retreat to an unfalsifiable position – that it never need actually fit with real-world data (Ferguson, 2007 p. B20).
Ferguson tries to appeal to his readers’ sense of logic by trying to pin the argument against violent video games on social scientists.
He says they want to make people think the human race is more like mindless robots who are programed to believe something, rather than being actively involved in their own behaviors. Politicians often like to use “media violence” to enact popular, though unconstitutional, legislation censoring or limiting access to violent media out of “concern for children”. This thought begs the question, are parents and opponents of violent video games allowing politicians to decide what is best for their children? It seems Ferguson was ultimately driving at this goal in his article.
Parents and the public in general need to be careful how much control they give to politicians. While it might seem like a good idea to have laws concerning who can and can’t play video games, we are at the same time limiting our First Amendment rights. What most parents don’t realize is they actually have no legal rights to make decisions for their children. By allowing politicians to have control over issues like video games, one could argue that this could be just the first stepping stone to a larger issue altogether.
With all the talk of whether violent video games are good or bad there is one issue that is overlooked in the debate which Ferguson brings to light. “There have been several publications suggesting that violent games may be related to increased performance in some areas of cognition, particularly visuospatial cognition” (2007, p. B20).
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Video Game Pop Culture Misunderstanding Our society isn't safe for our children anymore because of drugs and alcohol abuse, sex, violence, war, playing video games... Playing video games? This is the last straw; some video games are made the focus of controversy when much better things can be argued over. Well, don't get me wrong, some of these games show horrific acts of and much less to our ...
There is a video game that was played by cancer patients called Re-Mission. Researchers studied young adults going through cancer treatment who played a first person shooter game.
They discovered that the youth who played this game did better with their cancer treatment and had an improved quality of life than those who were in the control group who did not play the game. This is a new area of research however, and the lasting effects of this game have yet to be shown. To some this would seem like encouraging news and a definite boost for violent video games. It also makes you wonder though, if in the end, the games are just simply a form of entertainment and nothing more. When did our society come to a point where we have stopped holding people responsible for their actions and blamed inanimate objects instead?
When a person chooses to pick up a gun with the intent to do harm to another human being, it’s not because they witnessed it in a video game, it’s because they made the conscious choice to do so. Ferguson believes this and has proved it through his research. The evil that lurks in this world doesn’t come from a book or movie or video game. It comes from inside people who choose to let it dwell there. References Ferguson, C. (2007, July 22).
Video Games: the Latest Scapegoat for Violence. The Chronical Review, Vol. 53(42),Page B20.
