By Joseph Edward Lester Posted June 3, 2009
As long as I can remember my friends and I have been striving to find ways to entertain ourselves. Much like many other children of the “Y” generation, my entourage and I at one point or another took refuge in video games. From the time I was in kindergarten reaching almost into my first year into high school, I can’t remember one sleepover or Saturday morning that went by without my turning on my gaming console and becoming immersed in a virtual world for hours at a time.
However, my views have drastically changed; I now view video games as one of the most vile things on this planet. It seems that now, every time I hear one of my peers talking about mindlessly devoting his or her life to a video game I am revolted. I’m not saying my time was never spent on video games, but there are children today that are playing so many video games it’s becoming unhealthy, to the point where some gamers’ sense of reality can become completely skewed. A gamer’s whole life centers around video games and he becomes an absolute video game addict.
I have seen cases of gamer addiction in my friend’s houses and even in my own. Most of the cases I have seen weren’t my friends but their younger siblings; even my younger brother has fallen into the trend. Many children throw fits because of these video games; some even see the violence in a game and, if asked by their parents to turn the game off, will react in a violent way.
The tantrums of these children are a very small part of the effects video games have on people. But just turn on the news and you’ll see younger people are becoming increasingly violent. Violence in young people, especially those who play video games, is a frightening trend. One of the more extreme examples of gamer violence happened in October of 2007 when a 16-year-old shot both of his parents after they had taken away a video game he had purchased against their will. After he had shot them he fled the house, taking nothing but his game with him. This young boy stole his parents’ weapon and killed his family to keep playing his game.
With acts of violence occurring more and more often with links to video games, it shows that this plague of video games is corrupting the world’s youth with violence and desensitization, and that can mean only one thing: video games are going to be the downfall of our younger generations.
