Trigger Happy

In ‘Trigger Happy’, Steven Poole discusses the moral concern over videogames and childhood violence. I agree with him that you cant blame games directly because, as he says, the point of playing games is not to kill as there isn’t actually anything to kill and also because as no one actually dies, there aren’t any moral consequences. It’s just entertainment. In looking at teenagers involved in high school shootings you couldn’t say that playing violent games would cause them to shoot their classmates, that if they hadn’t played them they wouldn’t have done it. Clearly these kids had psychological problems. Perhaps they got ideas about how to go about it from games like Doom, but as Poole notes, influence the violence in video games has on kids would be in combination with other media such as movies.
I do however agree with the moral concern of children being exposed to videogames and movies etc with themes of violence, sex, drugs and alcohol as this would be doing more harm than good.