This House believes that violence in video games directly leads to real-world violence

New research suggests that hours of exposure to violent media like video games can make kids react in more hostile ways compared to ones who don't spend lots of time controller-in-hand, reigniting the debate about children and gaming. [1] In theory, when someone becomes excessively submerged in some sort of activity, either mental or physical, they begin having a sequence of recurring flashbacks and lapses that can cause them to assimilate what they have seen and experienced in the particular activity. This is not only true in theory, but it has also been set in motion in practice. It has been scientifically accepted that overindulgence in any activity, whether it is binge-drinking or playing gold, can have a directly detrimental effect on your life in ways that are unexpected and haphazard. A definitive example of this is the Columbine shooting, in which two kids embarked on a deadly rampage at their high school. These two kids were, and I do not intend for this to be taken lightly, 'hard-core gamers' who have been enraptured in the M-rated game Call of Duty since they were small children. After playing the game for almost a decade, these children were subconsciously inclined to emulate the synthetic role of the players into reality. The Columbine shooting is not a single manifestation of the effects of extended artificial violence. There exist many statistics that show a direct correlation between gory violence in video games and real-world violence. I'd like to project one very objective trend: The amount of mass-shootings and indiscriminate killings has expanded to a large degree ever since the gaming industry has expanded to homes across the globe, and has become mainstream in much of the developed countries in America. The kids who were implicated into the Columbine shootings were not just involved with an aggressive gaming addiction but instead, the gaming addiction had bled into other negative interests such as metal music and gothic subculture. Recently, legislators have made a seminal move in taxing violent video games and decreeing a proposition for enforcing age-restrictions towards who can buy them. The uprise of the gaming industry has even prompted President Obama to address the concern by making this statement to an interviewer: '...violent video games set kids up to react in more hostile and violent ways.' I'd like to summarize with a quote from an article published by the Times Magazine. "Working with 3,034 boys and girls in the third, fourth, seventh, and eighth grades in Singapore, Anderson and his colleagues asked the children three times over a period of two years detailed questions about their video game habits. They were also given standardized questionnaires designed to measure their aggressive behavior and attitudes toward violence. Overall, the students" scores on aggressive behavior, as well hostile attitudes and fantasies about violence against others, declined slightly throughout the study. That"s because children tend to act less aggressively as they get older, and learn more mature ways of dealing with conflicts than lashing out. But a closer look at kids who played more hours of violent video games per week revealed increases in aggressive behavior and violent tendencies, compared to those who played fewer hours a week. When asked if it was okay for a boy to strike a peer if that peer said something negative about him, for example, these kids were more likely to say yes. They also scored higher on measures of hostility, answering that they would to respond with aggressive action when provoked, even accidentally. The more long-term gamers were also more likely to fantasize about hitting someone they didn"t like." [1] http://time.com...