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David Vizcaino
Charmaine Boswell
PHIL-111

The negative impact of video games on peoples social development

In the last few decades the world has experienced a significant amount of notorious
changes regarding to technology. It can be said that this changes have introduced us into a whole
new stage in which versatility and self-empowering are the path to follow in order to experience
new ways for happiness. One of this paths is entertainment, and particularly in this case: videogames. Constantly promoted by the peoples need for expressing their art and capacity of being
able to image an entire new world, along with a huge market ready to be addressed, video-games
are here to stay. Not just young gamers, but a whole generation has taken part in this virtualreality community. They are changing the way people relate with one another and a reduced
ability to relate on the real world is becoming more and more obvious. Since the huge variety of
videogames on the market and their different impacts on people, this paper will discuss the
effects of violent and non-violent videogames on teenagers and adults.
The first video-game category to be discussed is life simulation. How many people would
like to create and rule the perfect life they have always want? Well, that is not always the case,
but the game called The Sims allows you to do it in all types of ways. This game makes you
able to create a whole new reality, and more than that: choosing and guiding this virtual people to
their own virtual accomplishment. Letting you to play god and have the chance to spend so many
hours per week in something that will remind as a bunch of data on your computer and lots of
money in video-game Companys wallet. Although, some people that have always had some

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difficulty relating to people, can find this proposal as a convenient approach to overcome their
fears and face real life with more confidence or experience. An informal article called The
Sims Changed My Life!, in which Catherine Rubino explains how deeply this game can
abstract people from their reality, can be used to analyze more deeply this dependence. After she
explains how much screwed the life of a game character is, they can always begin from zero.
Although she got dependent on the game, she realizes how unreal her experience was being. In
fact she writes: The most important thing to remember is it's just a game. This gives us an
important point: no matter how good a video-game can make you feel, it abstracts you from
reality and at the end of the day you have to live your life. No one will fix you for you.
The second example will be about another type of video-games. People who like
challenges, will be found to like the most difficult video-games. In the virtual world this need
can be satisfied in hundreds of ways, but one of them has gained more attention that the others.
The violent video-games. Even inside this category the gamer has so much choices and
preferences vary from one to another likes. In order to discuss the most relevant impacts, we will
focus on the game Call of Duty from Activision. In this game you have one character who gains
experience by killing another characters in the game. The more and most efficient ways you kill,
the more experience you get. The game offers several gamemodes. Multiplier, in which you
challenge another players by yourself or as a team. Career mode, in which you accomplish
missions to get rewarded with bonuses and experience. And finally but not lastly, Zombies. In
this gamemode you can kill and endless number of death beings that increase their damage and
speed as you eliminate more and more. One thing is to be distinguished among this gamemodes:
the continuous rewarding the gamer receives. The success of a videogame relies on how happy
and diverted the gamer is. This strategy of constantly rewarding the gamer causes an almost

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instantaneous dependence on the game. If we analyze how deeply a person can be influenced
after spending lots of hours repeating the same process, which is killing a fictitious character, we
can assure that the game affects the gamer psyche. Various people can argue that this is not
always the case, that people with a well sustained personality will not be affected by this proaddiction process. But this is not the case with all the people that play this type of games.
Particularly teenagers and children. In the last few years several shootings have been reported on
several regions of USA. A survey made back in 1987 by Chambers and Ascione showed that
100% of the elementary and junior high students they had played a video game at least once.
Provenzo (1991) studied the most popular video games and noted that 40 out of 47 were violent
in nature. Even if this citations seem to be old, they have been selected intentionally to show how
deeply this society has being involved into a violent-media culture since so many years ago.
After making this point it can be argued that violent videogames affect young and old gamers,
each on their own level of dependence and capability.
The third approach to be used regards to how this self-induced dependence between
gamer and videogame Companies, affects the society. It is a matter of fact that videogames
market is a very profitable one, but how is this actually making people accomplish real
satisfaction with their lives? We live in a society of consumerism, the more you spend money to
get what big enterprises tells you get and social traits demands you to have, the happier you will
be. This has to be a matter of consent in the sense that people have to realize how important real
life is and spend more time with the special ones that everybody has. If we as a society keep
spending money in things that only gives us short-term happiness and kills our planet, our
extinction will be sooner than what we want it to be. People have to have a serious concern about
this and dedicate time to what real life really is, and that is spending time in trying to help the

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people that really needs help, and spending time with people we do really care. Not talking with
a computer or TV or fictitious characters.
To conclude with it can be argued that video games are great ways to develop some skills
which are valid in that virtual life, but affect peoples social interactivity in real world. People
has to have a well sustained personality in order to do not let themselves fall into a dependence
on virtual realities and have to keep children away from violent videogames. Otherwise
videogames will affect their life and social skills will decrease.

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Works Cited

Rubino, Catherine. The Sims Changed My Life!. June 2003, The Snooze. Internet web
page.
Chambers, J. H., & Ascione, F. R. (1987). The effects of prosocial and aggressive
videogames on childrens donating and helping. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 148, 499505.
Provenzo, E. F. (1991). Video kids: Making sense of Nintendo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.