Persuasive Essay about Violence in Video Games

Video gaming is approaching its fortieth birthday as we approach the year 2020. What started as a ball bouncing between two movable bricks has evolved into large open landscapes with endless possibilities. However, there is somewhat of a divide in the modern world between being for and against the implications of video games. While some people believe that video gaming causes spurts of violence in young children and hinders classroom development, others believe that daily gaming stimulates the mind and opens our deepest imaginative chambers of the mind allowing oneself to create, learn, and focus more than normally possible.

Before evaluating the actual chemical impact that gaming has on the brain, one must look at how gaming has influenced our society. Before today’s world of seemingly everybody having a gaming console in their homes, gaming was often done in arcades away from the household. The jump in gaming industry revenue can be seen in large from 1978 to 1981 where the numbers escalated from 1.8 billion to nearly 35 billion dollars today worldwide. Today the United States alone has a gaming market revenue estimate of around 36 billion dollars by itself. Globally in 2017, that number was estimated at over 137 billion dollars (Geofroy 2017 p.1). Furthermore, gaming has evolved to span countries and continents, allowing strangers to team up with and against each other in online settings. The ease of use, number of titles for all age groups, and relatively low pricing allow gaming to easily be one of the world’s most common pass-times and staple technology in over fifty-one percent of American households.

The hippocampus is the area of the brain required for healthy cognitive thought and action. A 2017 study at the University of Montreal found that subjecting several individuals between ages eighteen to thirty saw a noticeable change in the amount of grey matter found within the hippocampus of the human brain. However, the study itself wasn’t so simple. It was subdivided into two groups; spatial and episodic memory. Spatial memory users who used the hippocampus to navigate saw an increase in hippocampus grey matter while the opposite was true for the episodic, “autopilot” gamers. Overall, the study found that certain games can cause different outcomes within the brain. Person Shooters have worse effects on the brain's cognitive development than platformers do as far as memory function goes. However, many FPS titles involve more than primary firing movements and trigger pull. Nowadays map recognition is important, thus flexing the player’s memory muscles and taking many FPS titles out of the category of episodic brain usage that puts the gamer on autopilot. The study is relatively new and while there is a connection between low hippocampus grey matter and illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s, nothing is concrete (Geofreoy 2017 p.17). Many games flex different areas of the human brain while others merely set the brain to rest and let basic cognitive thought take hold.

Scientists have published their works in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience on further examinations of the human brain under the effects of video games. An author within the aforementioned review, Marc Palaus stated, “Games have sometimes been praised or demonized, often without real data backing up those claims. Moreover, gaming is a popular activity, so everyone seems to have strong opinions on the topic.” There is great truth behind Palaus’ words as one can see from many newsworthy events involving violent children playing M-rated titles or gaming and media distracting students in the classroom. Most of these events point the finger at violent gaming when the real culprit could be any number of other harmful events attached to a young person’s psyche. The studies within this scholarly review examined structural changes and brain functionality and behavior. The first part of the study debunks the idea that video gaming negatively affects attention, showing improvements in sustained and selective attention. Additionally, the brain requires less activation to stay on task. A study from Florida State University, another study published within Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, found that most “brain games” meant to enhance any number of your brain’s functionalities are usually fake and will not affect your day-to-day life. The study tested those playing and not playing brain-training games and found little difference between the two. The study also found that aerobic activity, not brain training, was the best way to enhance one’s brain function (Brown 2016 p.12). Moreover, it should be kept in mind that scientific studies on video game effects are in thei