With video games becoming more and more violent over the years, controversy has also increased as to whether or not they cause children to become more violent, however this claim has yet to be proven. Many people believe that the depiction of violence in video games and other mainstream media is driving children to become violent and commit crimes. Several groups have publicly campaigned against violent video games; groups like Parents Against Violence, Parents Against Media Violence, and One Million Moms all oppose violent video games. However, most studies suggest that video games are not directly, if at all, responsible for the way violent video games affect children. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayIt is an inconvenient truth that when something goes wrong or something bad happens, people immediately look for someone or something to blame, no matter whether it is a legitimate cause of the problem or not. People generally tend to "jump on the bandwagon" and blame something for what everyone else is blaming at the time, even if they have no idea what their fault is. One of these popular bandwagons have become video games, especially violent ones. Violent video games are becoming the scapegoat for youth violence today, shootings like Columbine, Virginia Tech and even Sandy Hook have had many media sources questioning whether the shooter was playing video games and whether they were the cause of their violence. While video games may be a factor in some of these cases, many times in debates over violent video games the perpetrator's mental health or personal life outside of or before video games are completely ignored. Society continually tends to find these scapegoats to escape the fact that some people cannot be changed, people want only one reason to blame for the evil in the world. People also want to find something to blame immediately without having to search for it, people plug in everything that is widely discussed in the media and expect it to be seen as fact. But people need to learn to actually do their own research on a topic before accepting it as fact; “The research is inconsistent and therefore psychiatrists may want to be more careful in their public statements linking violent digital games to harm. In fact, there is a lack of scientific data on the relationship between violent video games and this interaction between the individual's mental state and the aggressive outcome. More research is needed before we can fully understand the influence of violent video games on real life” (Fournis, 2014). The reason this scapegoating has become so popular is thanks to a research paper conducted by Craig Anderson of Iowa State University and Karen Dill of Lenoir-Rhyne College in North Carolina. The students said they have new evidence showing that violent video games cause violence and are more harmful than other forms of violent media. Their main reasons were that video games are interactive and engaging and players tend to identify with the attacker. the research consisted of two studies, both involving undergraduate students at the University of Missouri at Columbia. In the first, 78 male and 149 female students were asked what their five favorite video games were, how violent they considered them to be and how much time they spent playing them. Additionally, the students had to fill out questionnaires about their aggressive and delinquent behavior. ANDThey were also asked how much time they spent playing video games when they were younger” (Cumberbatch 2000). Researchers say they found that students who played more violent video games in middle and high school engaged in more violent behavior. However their research fails to ask whether the games they had played in previous years were violent or not and cannot be based on any findings in their paper. As Guy Cumberbatch says in his article Only a Game? “What the data [show] is a reasonably strong association between playing violent video games and concomitant aggressive and delinquent behavior. This may be worrying, but it tells us nothing about causal relationships: are video games the root of the problem or its fruit? In other words, discovering that people who consume violent media can also be aggressive is equivalent to observing that people who play football also enjoy watching it on television." The second study, to which the researchers attach greater importance, involved 106 male and 104 female students. a laboratory experiment. They were each asked to play the violent video game Wolfenstein 3D or the nonviolent game Myst and were then rated for violence. First, the students played for 15 minutes and then took tests to measure how quickly they could repeat violent words displayed on a computer. The authors state that this is a measure of violent thinking and the potential for violence. Students who played the violent video game showed faster response times to violent words. However, we cannot know whether the violent game accelerated the times or whether the non-violent game slowed them down, since the research does not say, effectively making the authors' conclusion that the effect is due to the violent game an act of faith. A week later, the students returned to the lab to spend more time playing. They then had to play a game of reflexes to respond as quickly as possible by clicking a mouse button when a beep was made against a computer they thought was a human. If they failed, they received a Noise Blast from their opponent, but if they won, they gave their opponent a Noise Blast. Students were asked to set the decibel level of the noise blast their opponent would receive if they won. They could change this level and the duration of the explosion by holding down a control bar. The research reported that students who played Wolfenstein played longer than Myst players, which they said proved that people who played violent video games were more aggressive. However, they failed to address the fact that the sounds were about 2% longer, which when averaged across all students comes out to just over half a second. The research also doesn't mention the volume at which students played the audio. It's not that violence is a new thing in society, it's not even new in entertainment, as best written in the Nature magazine article "A calm view of video violence". are good reasons to be troubled by the violence that pervades the media. Movies, television, and video games are full of shootings and bloodshed, and one might reasonably wonder what is wrong with a society that presents videos of domestic violence as entertainment. Of course, one might have raised the same questions while watching Macbeth or Punch and Judy. Let's face it, people have always enjoyed watching other people's chaos” (2003). Violence is, and always has been, a fundamental part of our nature, it is almost impossible.