As the video game industry releases games with higher resolution, more realism, and a higher amount of violence, blood and gore, a debate has raged on for many years. Do these violent games have a link to violent crimes such as murder, rape, or even assault? Perhaps, this link is just a scapegoat used to veer away from the more serious attributions to the violent crime. This link has been studied since the 1980s by social scientists(Carey 1). There could be reasons as to why this debate has lasted so long, whether it is bias or unknown variables that are not thoroughly investigated. When an extremely violent crime occurs such as a school shooting, the media seems to blow it out of proportion, and will focus on one thing about that shooter, video games and do their best to iterate that the suspect became that way because of the games. If this is true, then perhaps a fallacy is also true in which a person who plays a flight simulator is a pilot, or even a person who plays a professional sports game is a professional athlete.
When it comes to the effects that violent video games have on the players, people usually respond along the lines by saying that they have played for years and can perfectly distinguish fantasy from reality. Perhaps that is so, but not everyone is able to distinguish fantasy from reality, and studies indicate that it is the unstable who are most likely to be affected negatively. Tragically, this might have been the case with mass murderer Elliot Roger(Brown 1). A fair portion of players have the maturity to see the satire or humor that is within this particular media with a certain detachment to the game. "But whether the game's teenage target market is so readily capable of making such distinctions, I'm not nearly so sure.(Brown 1)" An example of this would be a statement that safety expert Sedgrid Lewis wrote last November, stating that, "The knockout game aka The One Hitter Quitter is the deadly game that African American teenagers are playing across the nation It is the true life version of the popular video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA).