What effect do video games have on their audiences?

• short attention span
• YouTube is highly stimulating
• if you play too many video games, your actions become violent
• there are many stereotypes
• widely held belief the media affects us in a specific way

The effects model has been disproved by Stuart Hall and his Reception Theory

Bobo Doll Experiment - Bandura (1961)

• assumes audiences don't know what is going on
• experimented on children
• looks like a bouncy punching bag
  

• violence in video games is normalised
• assassinate and kill are often above the head of the person who the character in the video needs to kill
• normalised
• desensitised - video games make killing seem normal

Cultivation theory - George Gerbner

• genres do not make us violent but they cultivate violent ideologies

• The debate is far more complex than "if you play a violent video game you become a violent person"
• The actual relationship between video games and violence is extremely complex

Harmful scenes in gameplay footage

• violence
• hitting and killing people
• imitable behaviour
• jumping off a building into a haystack

Doom (1993)

• the game is not gory or violent
• it was for the time - caused controversy
• the extent of the violence had not been seen before
• this was played from a POV shot
• also called first person shooter games

Columbine shooting (1999)

• the media blamed video games