Question

Main topic - violence in video games, needs to have three main ideas and thesis statement

Answer 1

Video gaming (playing video games) has become a popular activity for people of all ages. Many children and adolescents spend large amounts of time playing them. Video gaming is a multibillion-dollar industry

Answer 2

Contrary to popular *assumption*, games are merely life simulators, and so, exactly like books (at least the ones that mentally take you to a place, and make you feel like you're there), damage can only come from bad subject matter, not the fact that "it is a game".

But now, it's the shooting/killing games that everyone wonders about the most, and they're a very mixed bag... Some of them are up the neck in reckless cultural filth (like Grand Theft Auto), for no reason other than the makers trying hard to be cool/careless/"shocking-but-not-caring-a... (exactly, exactly like so many extreme bands), whereas others are more like situation simulators (like Deus Ex or Half-Life), or even "gun sports" (like Unreal Tournament), and have killing in them that mentally doesn't feel any different than knocking down plastic dummies (or making a tackle in a sport, for the over-enthusiastic).

...it's just unfortunate that there's so much "muck" (society trash) mixed into many of them, which *could* have been spotless, especially since the muck doesn't even do a THING for them (except add discomfort. Same with movies; many writers/directors think anything at all that elicits reaction from the audience is good - like an accomplishment of some kind - and so they do some of the dumbest things that ruin the movie, because they think that all reaction is good (you'll see this mindset especially running rampant in amateur and high-school films). The makers of the best games should re-release clean (and bug-fixed), versions of them, or better yet, remake them into something inspiring/meaningful, as fuel for a society revolution (and technology too)... Some games, just right off the bat, that could be remade into something amazingly useful to the world are: Deus Ex (the first one), Thief (with fan-made missions), Oddworld (the first two), Half-Life (any), and Zelda (first two 3D ones). Realistically, ANY game could be remade into something incredibly good like this, even if loaded with extreme gun violence... (which Thief/Zelda/Oddworld prove is not necessarily needed for success. Thief in particular is a perfect example of how just slowly walking around with almost your bare hands can be even a LOT more interesting than the most overblown, expensively made hollywood-style shooter... and most of its goodness came from "fan missions" that regular old people made on their computers. It's all just "time-filler" entertainment, but a glimpse of what's to come, when people finally start realizing what power and meaning they can put into things like this...))

One day, you'll be able to use "video games" to do things like visit digital places on the computer, or meet with family/friends in digital form... even do stuff like digitally attend simulated conventions and technology/industry shows, or build your own 3D places, and visit ones others have built. You would walk around in each place as if you were there, like in First-person games, where you see through the eyes of the character you control... (First-person games often *feel* like the real thing, too... less in faster shooting games, but more in slower "immersion" games. Thief, for example, is so immersive, you feel like you're really doing things inside the game world (many players have dreams that they are in the game), and so when you come across horror elements, it's almost psychologically traumatizing (and causes fear of the dark, at any age)).


So, to recap and highlight a few points:

1 - To gamers, killing someone in a non-deliberately-excessive-brutality video game feels about 100x less like death than watching someone slowly die in a movie... (it's even less than seeing a warehouse full of those 80's action movie ninjas lowering down from ropes on the ceiling, and getting mowed down by a machinegun). The feeling/impulse of killing in most games is more like that of knocking down a plastic dummy... And gamers even love exaggerated blood/gore blasting out of enemies (as long as it looks fake, and is not done in the "gross" context) because it *feels* like merely throwing paint-filled water balloons at things (it's fun/harmless to see them splat). Now, to a completely new gamer, killing will feel *mildly* harsh for about a day (maybe two, depending on background), until the imagination gets over the "I fear that this is somehow a harsh action" impulse.
(see top link)

2 - And then there are the "deliberate-excessive-brutality" and "hurting people is fun" video games, where instead of fighting with some clean sense of purpose and accomplishment (Half-Life, Crysis, Halo, etc), or even just playing a digital sport with your friends online (Battlefield 2, Unreal Tournament, etc), they make it so that elements of heartless, low-life-style Buttism are what's supposed to be FUN about it... And so these games (like Grand Theft Auto, by far above all) take every society-trash element they can think of (and ones that you