Refutation essay on ESRB should be more restriction on rating video game

Essay by alan_charuk4756College, UndergraduateB, July 2007

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According to Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., a professor of education at the University of Miami and the author of Children and Hyperreality, the danger of violent images in video games is thatÃÂÃÂFirst-person shooter games such as Doom and Quake allow players to simulate the act of shooting people. The more people you can kill in these games, the better your score. These games effectively act as teaching machines that desensitize players to violence and make them better at killing. As computers become more sophisticated, the realism of these virtual-reality murder simulators will only increaseÃÂÃÂ (qtd. in Torr 44).

Video games have been a part of American culture since the late 1970ÃÂs and first emerged as a controversial social problem in late 1994 and have continued being controversial until the present. Violence in video games is one important issue that most countries are facing right now. The number of children exposed to violent video games is increasing dramatically and often results in violent situations such as fighting at school.

Even though this is not a new concern in the United States, it is still a controversial social problem for the government, parents, educators, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), and games producers. An example of the controversy is that some people claim that children are progressively becoming more aggressive because of video or computer games. Other people claim that the ESRB should reform the rating system for video or computer games. Also, people claim that video games should be censored. According to Anderson and Dill, children who play violent video games are progressively becoming more aggressive and the violence in video games has a direct correlation to more prominent violence among adults. So parents, educators, and the government are concerned about how much damage the violence in video games inflicts...