Literature Review

Literature Review

Gee (2003) states “When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy” but not the type of literacy that involves reading and writing, Gee (2003) describes that it’s also about the ‘Visual Literacy’ which involves how people ‘read’ images, symbols, graphs and diagrams. When it comes to violent video games where the images are that of killing and stealing cars, young people to teenagers playing the game could be in a way ‘brainwashed’ into thinking that you can do this in real life and get away with it. This can be backed up from Layton’s (2008) article where she talks about an event where two students opened fire in their High School in 1999 shooting at 20 people and killing 13. A teacher’s wife filed a lawsuit and found out that the students played a lot of violent video games from ‘Doom’ to ‘Wolfenstein 3D’ and also watched ‘The Basketball Diaries’ where a character uses a shotgun to kill students at his high school. With the violent images coming from the games and the film to influence the student’s doings, it seems that the brain was stimulated to do this violent event. Anderson and Dill (2000) conducted a study using different methods to find out about aggression and violent video games, in one of their studies which involved the participants to play ‘Wolfenstein 3D’ for 15 minutes, they said ‘players of violent computer games exhibit more violent behaviour in the real world’, this could be one of the many reasons why the events happened from Layton’s (2008) article.

References


Gee, P. 2003 "What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy" Palgrave Macmillan

Layton, J. 2008 "Do violent video games lead to real violence?" [Internet] http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/video-game-violence.htm

Nielsen, S. 2003 "Playing With Fire - How do computer games affect the player?" [Internet] http://resources.eun.org/insafe/datorspel_Playing_with.pdf