Video games are amazing. There are tons of different kinds of games out there but violent games predominate. People love the violence; kids love the violence; and society looks on and worries about it. Are our violent video games as bad as they say? Let's take a look at that.
Welcome to the Les Perras extensive English listening podcast. Today you're listening to episode 305 which is about violent video games. At the end of the video there is a list of some of the main words that come up here so you can refer to them and extend your vocabulary through extensive English listening.
Many Kinds There are thousands and thousands of video games out there and if we try to put them into groups, it turns out there's a lot of different groups too. One quick Google search I thought did return 24 different kinds, kinds of video games. Some of them are action games, some of them are platformer games, some of them are role-playing, there are strategy games and puzzle games, there are survival games and more. One thing that I found common across a lot of these groups was the violence. There's not one group of violent video games. First person shooter games are violent. But then some of the role playing games are also violent. Some of the strategy games have violence in them and there's violence in the survival games too. Violence is key to hooking people into the games I think.
Popular Not all but many of the most popular games have a great deal of violence in them. These violent games sell thousands and thousands and millions and millions of copies. They seem to be popular among boys and young men. And people have started to wonder if this is good for society.
Track record I've gone and I've read a lot of the studies and seen lots of people giving their opinions about things. But the one thing that I keep coming back to is we have had violent video games with us now for 30 years or more. Has there been a huge increase in violence in society? And if there is, is that increase directly attributable to violent video games? I don't think that that is attributable to violent video games. In fact a lot of studies now say that violent crime amongst young men has actually been going down a little bit over the past 15 years. There are studies that can link the Violet video games to increase aggressive behaviour. I didn't read the details of those studies and so I have a question. The question is do aggressive people play video games more so it appears like the games cause aggression or do the games actually cause aggression in people who otherwise would not be aggressive? It's a good question to look into but somehow I feel aggressive people are drawn to violent video games. It reinforces their beliefs about the world.
Conclusion There has been no study that could directly link violent video games to any change in violence in society or individuals. I think that we can safely let people play their violent video games. I'm confident that everybody can keep the violence in their own fantasy worlds, in their own video worlds, without letting it bleed over into the real world so we're safe.
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