Homework: Group discussion about the gaming critical investigations

How do video games such as 'Call of Duty' and 'Grand Theft Auto' push the boundaries of on-screen violence and what is the impact of this on audiences?


As a teenager and gamer I found this question easy to answer as I have my own experience along side research however I did have to take into consideration that my own experience is not the same as everyone else.

As a group we agreed that games as a whole have become more violent and are trying to be as realistic as possible, games now have a larger variety of weapons and props as well as ways to kill a character which results in more blood and gore and of course more violence. Some games have gone to the extend of allowing players to even shoot body parts such as arms or legs off a character, this is possibly due to audiences becoming desensitised and wanting more and more violence and the gaming companies have to fulfil their customer needs otherwise they wouldn't be earning any sales revenue so they push the gaming experience as far as possible in hopes that it wouldn't offend people but will entertain and satisfy their needs for violence in games.

One thing I told the group about with Kiran Rai was the Bobo doll experiment. Which is mainly a psychology theory but is used in media every now and then, it was an experiment conducted around twenty years ago in which children were shown a woman attacking a clown doll named "Bobo", the children were then taken into a room in which a variety of girls and boys toys were at, including the Bobo doll, and when the children saw the doll they decided to copy exactly how the woman attacked the doll, but the longer the children were inside the room with the toys including the doll, the more they developed new ways to attack the doll. Males would use toy guns to attack the doll while females went off to play with cooking toys and then later returned to strangle the doll and hit him also with other toys.

Another impact we stated was that audiences becoming desensitised and therefore want more blood and violence, in other words, we are becoming more violent as a society because once we've seen the most gruesome violence we expect to see something better next time otherwise we'll be bored and dissatisfied as an audience. We also as a group thought that violence and crime rates may increase due to violent video games, as stated in the critical investigation, we as a society glorify violence and therefore are becoming more violent due to that. We also spoke about the hypodermic needle and how that might be affecting audiences, the media is feeding violence and they are taking it in, linking to this is the gorilla test, which is a test where a gorilla walks through a video of people passing a basketball around and he walk past unknown to the audience. It is therefore possible that gaming companies are feeding audiences much more dangerous information and the audience is taking it in subconsciously.