Benedict Carey is a reporter for the New York Times that prioritizes his publications solely around the conceptions of the brain and behavior. He has written articles that deviate from the central idea of behavior. In his composition “Shooting in the Dark,” Carey uses ethos to legitimize his analysis of the relationship between violent video games and violent behavior in young people by explaining that there are various ways to view the impact of the video games in research: this includes short and long term experiments or studies and correlational studies. These experimental techniques and forms of studies have revealed many things about how violent video games have impacted young people. Even though these games primarily do not seem to vividly present long-term conflicts, they still come across mostly as short-term issues. Carey validates his research by saying that popular and “Mature” rated games such as “Call of Duty,” “Killzone 3,” or “Battlefield 3” are the kinds of games that create and lead to displays of bad behavior. In a study led by Iowa State University psychologist Christopher Barlett, he had a group of 47 undergraduates play “Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance.” After a short time interval, their behaviors were examined to analyze how aggressive they might be towards other classmates in dishing out hot sauce to them, as these classmates do not like spicy food, meaning hot sauce. They ended up forcefully giving out a larger share of the sauce to their peers. There was also another group that played a nonviolent video game in this study and it acted submissive in comparison to the corresponding group. Also, Carey implies that it is more difficult to analyze the impacts of violent video games over long time spans because they have seemed to not correlate to violent crimes by young people. In reference to his notion on the issue, according to ProCon.org, a graph comparing violent crime offences to computer and video game sales reveals that crime rates have decreased over the span of 7 years (1996-2003) as video games continued to increase in sales. The true relationship between violent video games and its impact on the behavior of young people might never reach a fully supported conclusion, but it will remain evident that even a short amount of time causing only animated blood and cruelty in some game can very easily lead to violence in the real world.
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Parents and other family figures of power can be more pre-cautious and take more initiative when their children want to purchase a video game that is rated "Mature," or seemingly full of gore and violence. They can limit their time on video games as a whole, play the video game to understand what content they are exposing the children to, and even converse about the game(s) that they play to understand their perspective, meaning opinions and feelings. They must assert their authority in order to establish the idea that their kids cannot be negatively influenced by the content of violent video games.