Effects of Violence within Media

This is a very big topic that we discussed in the lecture today and it has been very controversial throughout the media from past to present. The session started with the display of some movieclips of violent acts found in many movies and video games. These sort of movies and video games are often considered as murder simulator but there are other controversial thoughts in the defence of these media products. Violent movies like Alien, Natural born killers and Men behind the sun, and violent video games like Mortal Kombat, God of war 3 and Fallout 3 are thought to be capable of inflicting the act of violence among the youngsters that watch these movies or play these games.

Mortal Kombat

Alien

Outrageous violent acts such as school shoot-outs are blamed enormously as an influence from games and cinema. One of these incidents was a high school shoot-out in America where the shooter admitted that he was obsessed the game called "Doom" (a first person shooter game with violent contents). Also "Wild Boys of London" is a very controversial publication that was considered to have caused a lot of fear on young men and corrupt their mind irreplaceably. So even in the old days of media, controversies about social violence emerged from these products.

However, many experts believe that the violence in the video games and movies are for entertainment purpose  only and they do not have direct and immediate effect on the viewers of players. Those who do commit violent crimes and blame it on films and games are just using it as excuse and they are likely to commit these crimes with or without these movies and games. Many experiments have also done to support this statement. For example, in certain Universities, students were given a game with violent contents to play and then the same game was let to be played by the students but this time they took out the violent contents and replaced them with non-violent content. The results came out as the excitement level in the students remained the same meaning that violence included in games do not influence one's desire for violence.

Violence and video games are also related in different manner in the field of modern technology. Video game consoles come with the gaming controllers which are designed to be small, easy to use and fit perfectly on average size of hands. This concept was taken and implemented in the modern military where the soldiers can use a controller similar to the video games controller to easily use the remote controlled weapons like guided missiles and RC car with explosives and spy camera attached to it.