Media Impact

On this blogger projest, we had resheach a topic and how it had an impact on the media. I decided to do video games. Even though I have no interest in video games, my boyfriend is a huge gamer so i had alot of matieral to work with,.

In society today, there are very mixed feeling about video games and using violence in video games to help sells. I took a specific look at Grand Theif Auto #4. My boyfriend, Samaad, owns this game and plays it frequently. He beleives it has some impact but does not pay attention to how it effects him. The media uses violence to add an element of entertainment in video games. Some say this can cause desensitization to violence in everyday life and even cause modeling of the pretent violence to real violence. School bombing and murders are used as examples of this kind of modeling.
But is it the games fault for this insanity? That is the main opposing arguement. Many of the persons that cause these horrible acts had already been diagnosed with mental disorders and should have been monitered more carefully before these crimes were committed.
It is very hard to do reseach on how this effects it's user because the user are mostly younger and do not participate in the laboratory experiments or even survey methods. So one does not see the effects untill something bad happens and there are always excuses for that.
So for this, I took a personal look at Samaad's habbits while he plays these types of games. He is not diagnosed with any mental disorders and does not have a history of violence, that i know of... I noticed when he plays these games, he generally gets excited when he kills and often laughs at the death scenes. Further studying, the game often rewards killing with advancement of the next level and show comic elments in the death scences by elaberate showings of gore. So is it really his fault he reacts this way? I also noticed when he is in a bad mood, he will want to play these games to get his mind off his environment and also to release his anger. This van be taken as productive or really scary.
So I started to aply these habbits to his everyday life. When he got angry, he did not seal a car or run anybody over, so the modeling element was not there (thank god). But we did run over a raccoon (on accident), and his first reaction was to laugh as mine was to cover my eyes. This disterbed me a little. He also said once, "Wouldn't it be cool to actually live in a world where you could just respone. I wonder what the world would be if that were possible?"
When I started this writing, I beleived it to be over-reacting mothers. But in concluesion, I believe that media does in fac have some impact on society. It may not cause modeling for the everyday gamer, but could easily cause this for someone with a loose grasp on humanity and normal ways of thinking. I also saw very clear ways in which the everyday gamers' mind set had changed. But as it is the right to be american, you have the right to choose to play it or not. So it all boils down to whether or not you decide to play.