Francisco Alderete

Videogames: the scapegoat for student behavior and performance

EMD 250 Afternoon Class (2:30)

NMSU
 Videogames, they are played the world around and in some cases, quite

intensively but do they cause more harm than what would appear to be the case. It would

appear that ever since videogames first came out in the seventies they have had their

detractors. First they made children go blind because they sat too close to the television

while playing. Then, they were causing Americas youth to become lazy and lose

coordination. Most recently and most importantly, videogames are now being accused of

an even greater crime. Nowadays, videogames are being accused of turning our children

away from being assets to society and into a nation of unknowledgeable, unmotivated,

violent and socially inept burdens on America. Some argue that games are a very large

factor in why students do not do their homework in school and receive bad grades. But,

do they really cause so much disaster in students? Are the videogames being turned into a

scapegoat or are they truly to blame for things such as school violence, bad grades and

social misfits who find it hard to interact with actual people in school.

One may wonder when the crusade against video game violence really gained

steam. This person may wonder what catalyzed this whole movement against video

games. Well, I believe that the answers to this can be found in articles written about the

Columbine shooting. On Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in an

unincorporated section of Littleton, Colorado located in Jefferson County, near Denver.

Two teenage students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, carried out a shooting rampage,

killing 12 students and a teacher, as well as wounding 24 others, before committing

suicide. It is considered to be the United States' deadliest school shooting, and its second

deadliest attack on a school, after the Bath School disaster.

 What does this have to do with video games? Well, both of the shooters were later

discovered to be avid players of the game Doom, a game where you the protagonist goes

around shooting Demons while in the first person perspective. Needless to say, the fact

that you shoot things in doom and that the pair of students shot a number of students in

the school, was not a correlation missed by investigators and certainly not a theory

untried by the media. Soon after, a bevy of different outspoken blowhards looking for

something to blame latched onto this explanation and accused video games of corrupting

their youth. Since then, many studies have been preformed in order to learn about the

correlation, if any, between students and video games.

“Video games have become one of the favorite activities of American children. A

growing body of research is linking violent video game play to aggressive cognitions,

attitudes, and behaviors.”(The Association for Professionals in Services for Adolescents,

2003). These are the first words written in an article I read that was published by TAPSA,

an organization vested in service to adolescents. Although I am certain that videogames

and the violent images desensitizes youth slightly, I doubt that Videogames and the

media create monstrously violent people. Yes that particular study showed that some of

the people who played those violent games had violent attitudes, but in a school one

realizes that violent people like violent things.

Notice the study said there was a correlation between aggressive attitudes, not

actions. Sure the person is going to feel aggressive playing the game, the person is

supposed to be drawn into the game world. He is supposed to feel as the character feels,

but the feeling passes once the console is shut off. Actual human aggression is actually

natural and not caused by games, take bullies for example. Bullies do not pick on you
because some game made it seem cool; they do not dip kids’ heads in toilets because their

favorite video game character does it. They instead behave in that way because there is

most likely something wrong with them. There have always been school bullies, and

there has always been school violence. Violence in schools has existed long before

violent video games and if they were somehow banned, it will exist long after. Games are

not the problem.

The other main problem that people attribute to video games is that they make

those who play it full of bad characteristics that create bad students who behave violently

and receive poor marks in school. This is not the case, according to Eugene Provenzo, of

Harvard University, “No correlation has been found, for instance, between the amount of

time spent playing games and negative personality measures. Nor does it appear that

involvement in video games relates to poor school performance, or to reduced

participation in active sports. Game playing seems to bring families together in common

activity more than any other form of recreation.” This notion is certainly supported by my

experiences. Some of the smartest kids at school loved video games and all of the athletes

had videogames at their get-togethers at my school.

In the end I believe that Videogames have virtually no effect on your attitudes and

behavior at school. I know that there is the occasional time where playing games does not

help certain situations, but in the case of violence, it does not take much to make a violent

person become violent. If we had no games said person would just find something else

which feeds his nature. In the case of students who prefer to play games rather than study,

if they had no access to games they would find something else to distract them, perhaps

twiddling their thumbs. Video games are certainly not to blame.

 Works Cited
Gentile, D. A., & Sesma, A. (2003). Developmental approaches to
understanding media effects on individuals. In D. A.
Gentile (Ed.), Media violence and children (pp. 19–37). Westport, CT:
Praeger.

Provenzo, Eugene F. (1991). Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo

Cambridge: Harvard University Press;