Videogames affect people

With February being National Heart Month and Valentine's Day, I thought this would be a great time to show what the gaming world has to offer.

One of my favorite games, Kingdom Hearts, shows the messages of Valentine's Day throughout the storyline. Kingdom Hearts is an action based role playing game that tells about Sora, a teenager destined to fight an epic battle against the darkness. As Sora moves through the game's storyline he searches for his friend Kairi, for whom he has romantic feelings.

As he gets closer to finding her, many challenges and mysteries arise. Sora teams up with Donald and Goofy in order to help him defeat the darkness. When all of them finally are able to save Kairi she tells Sora about her romantic feelings for him. As the game finishes both are finally reunited and set off for a new adventure with all of the friends Sora, Donald, and Goofy encountered.

Videogames unfortunately are not all hearts and flowers. In fact many of the top rated games currently selling in the U.S. market are violent games that glorify killing.

Call of Duty is a popular war game that is based on the events surrounding World War II.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that games are more than entertainment. The military has long utilized war gaming as a means of training for real world events. Technology is making for more realistic simulations.

As new technology emerges the games become more sophisticated and more impactful. As new technology is merged into simulations game developers are finding it necessary to turn to sociologists and psychiatrists for direction in gauging possible reactions to graphic events depicted in the games.

One study said, "78 percent of all violent interactions in the first ten minutes of game play featured lethal violence" (Smith, 2003). These are the facts that many military personnel are faced with in this modern age.

Social scientists suggest that violent videogames can have substantial psychological effects on people. Those who play violent video games at a young age seem to have a propensity toward violence or are obsessed with the idea of killing at a young age.

Because gaming is so popular for fun and work you can find various games in arcades, homes, backpacks and even in military and business training labs.

There is a bad trend that seems to lean toward violence in gaming.

This trend of violent videogames began back in the 1980's. During the 1990's violent videogames were viewed as an escape from reality without any consequence. With some high profile cases where young people have committed acts of violence that mirror violent videogame scenarios, a wakeup call has sounded.

Today experts are coming together to acknowledge that violent videogames affect people from different age groups. Presently this trend toward more games with greater amounts of violence seems unchecked and the growing acting out of violence will continue to deteriorate unless something is done.

The way that society is able to fix this problem is by implementing stricter rules for obtaining games that are of a violent nature. A good measure is to check for an identification card that verifies the customer's age. Stores should use the Entertainment Software Rating Board's rating system in the United States in order to determine whether the customer is old enough to purchase the game that the person has selected.

The most important factor for me and I think an important part of the fix for violent games is to have adult supervision to keep violent games out of the hands of young users.

I am working on a school project that will continue studying gamers and some of the impacts from playing games. Some of the current generation of gamers are now in the military and I believe that exposure to video games has been very beneficial to being able to quickly begin and successfully use some of the high-tech training simulators that the military is employing.

(Smith, Stacy L. (2003). Violence in Video Games: A Few Facts to Consider. Retrieved February 9, 2009, from The Lion and the Lamb project Web site: http:// www.lionlamb.org/ violence_vid_games_facts.htm)