Just about everyone has heard a story about some kid acting out and doing something crazy. Well, do you think the kid would do that just because he saw something like it on one of the video games he has played? That’s what most of our media wants us to believe. Rob LeFabvre talks about today’s culture with his “Violence in Videogames” post on Gamesareevil.com. He went over how although today’s games have a lot of violence, it’s not exactly a new trend. As Rob had put it, “from board games to schoolyard games to video games, I’m also struck by how much they simulate violence.” Video games are not the cause of all violence; violence is a part of human nature.

Violence is not new yet many people think that it can be completely controlled. In the past, violence is what protected you and your community. People used to fight each other for food, territory, and other resources. Thousands upon thousands of years of violence in our history reveal that it is part of our nature. Rob wrote “We crave peace while preparing for war.” This is very true for our society today; you can just look back to the past couple of years to see the evidence. Today, violence is tolerated, and in some cases, encouraged in far more places than video games.

Video games are not played solely for the violence that they depict; they are played for a myriad of other reasons. People like video games because the games are exciting. They use violence as a way to help excite the audience. Take sports for example. Do you think people watch them solely to see people bash into each other? Most people don’t, the violence is just a part of the sport. Rob pointed out the already obvious in his editorial: “Violence [in sports] is explicit or implicit, direct or indirect, but it’s there and it’s real.” Video games do much the same, but instead they tell stories that players can interact with. Games are just another form of entertainment with the same amount of violence, but unlike sports, it is fantasy and not reality.

Many people cling to the idea that video games cause people to lose reason and act out. That is not true. Those people do not even consider what other problems those troubled minds had to deal with at the time. Opponents of video games try to find a way to blame virtual violence for an individual’s abhorrent actions. People tend to think this because of incidents like school shootings. When these happen, the lapse in thought in the shooter is usually blamed on video games. The problem with that logic is that nearly 75 percent of kids play games these days, but juvenile crime has been declining for the past 15 years (according to the FBI’s online database, www.fbi.gov). It seems as though people just want to use video games as a scapegoat to hang many of society’s problems on.

Violence is as much a part of our nature as wanting to find happiness; neither is going to disappear anytime soon. Would you try to blame Frogger for someone running through traffic? Just because video games have become a target for the media, does not mean that they are actually the cause of violence among the players. Maybe the media is criticizing violent video games to deflect attention from their own obsession with violent programs to attract viewers.