Are we obsessed with violent video games?

Video games have been followed by criticism wherever they go. They have featured sexism, racism, depictions of criminal behavior, blood, gore, partial nudity, and even murder. Many experts believe that playing video games makes kids aggressive, and some even blame video games for shootings, including the recent Colorado massacre. What is our fascination with violence, and is there a history of it in video games?

In 1971, according to the book Mass Communication Theory, before video games were anywhere near the popularity they have today, an American scientist named Seymour Feshbach began studying if consumption of violent media would lead to further aggression in real life. In his experiment, he used a group of adolescent boys. Half of the boys were restricted to watching television shows that did not feature any violence of any kind. The other half were allowed to watch violent television shows. Feshbach studied the boys for a six week period. After the experiment was over Feshbach used a number of behavioral tests and discovered that the boys who watched the violent shows were much less aggressive than the boys who were restricted to watching less violent shows. Feshbach called this his “Catharsis Theory.”

Catharsis Theory states that by viewing violent media or acting out violence in video games, you in effect purge your mind of these thoughts, and no longer feel the need to recreate them in real life.

However, in 1992, a new video game emerged that put the limits of Catharsis Theory to the test. This video game was Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat has the reputation of being one of the most violent video games of all-time. Characters in this game go head to head in a “side-scrolling” fighting style, and players push combinations of buttons to garner different fighting moves, most of which are extremely violent. When a player’s opponent gets down to low health, a loud voice yells “FINISH HIM!” This is when the player performs a “finishing move” and kills their opponent in a very gruesome way; one very famous way being ripping out the other character’s spine.

Then, a few years after the release of Mortal Kombat, an incident occurred that forever tarnished the reputation of video games. This incident was the Columbine High School Massacre. On Tuesday, April 20^th 1999, two high school students at Columbine High School went to their school with various automatic weapons, shooting and killing 12 students and a teacher. They then turned the guns on themselves. During the investigation, police found that the two shooters loved to play violent video games like Mortal Kombat and Doom. This was inevitably linked to the reason the massacre occurred, and many violent video games began to be censored and banned all around the country, as well as other shootings being blamed on video games.

Since then, games like Call of Duty, Halo, and Gears of War have emerged depicting war and violence with unimaginable realty. But are we obsessed with these games? Are teens the only ones being influenced by them? Check out this infographic and decide for yourself.