Are Video Games Dangerous For Humanity? 

Brendan Keogh says “Video games are art. Anyone who says otherwise either doesn’t know what video games are, or they don’t know what art is. Videogames are creative works produced by creative people trying to express something. It’s that simple.” (Keogh B., 2013). Video games feed into modern culture just as much as they reflect it because its creators should have the same creative freedoms as other art creators.  

Like any artistic method, video games have the capacity to engage us with the concerns of marginalized and persecuted people in the world; therefore, we may say it creates empathy in us (Riley B., 2013). We can indeed say that literature, visual art, film, and theatre have been doing this empathy feeling for a long time. For instance, while Orwell was writing about the dangers of totalitarianism in the book 1984, Brecht was dealing with Nazism in Mother Courage, and Picasso was painting Guernica about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War; all of these masterpieces were making us feel the messages. Particularly, even film, with its relatively short history, had an established tradition as a stage to explore the complexity of modern human rights issues and make us feel relevant experiences. Video games haven’t been around all that long; however, their impact has recently been around worldwide.

Some studies believe that video games are both art and a tool for creating human rights advocacy. For instance, Benjamin Riley discovers the matchless capacity for video games to actively be attached to the audience in storytelling (Riley B., 2013). According to human rights activists, video games are an opportunity not only to deliver a message but also to allow or let gamers create their own meaning. In other words, vıdeo games can create awareness of human rights issues (Tater R., 2021). This allows us to see how developers approach the problems or, better to say, situations in terms of human rights. 

It was a significant step to put rating (e.g., R16+, R18+) on video games because it protects younger people, especially people who are under the age of 18, from unsuitable content, and moreover, it addresses more on reachable players (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2013). The danger of video games needs to have more scrutiny to deeply understand if it is the only way to teach violence because it might be ridiculous to think only video games are teaching violence while films are teaching how to use a gun. All media requires an active engagement from the audience; therefore, we may say that not only video games make people commit a crime. The way video games normalize violence should be counted as problematic and should have been prevented. Other art content, like films or books, should be done so because normalizing a crime can create serious problems or directly reflect real life. Here, video games should not be the scapegoat while other art forms are teaching violent acts.

With modern technology, video games have become a diverse and rich art form capable of showing countless new expressions that have never been achieved in previous art forms. However, we may need to say that they are all capable of propagating the same problems. Exclusively, we need to talk about violence in video games the way we talk about violence in all art forms at the end of the day. 

Virtual experiences in video games enable the game to be adopted more efficiently, which in turn shapes human behavior positively and negatively. A player’s behavior depends from person to person because some studies have shown that video games (their content) can influence users in various ways impacting different aspects of daily life such as our consumption, communities, and identity formation and cause mainly social, psychological, and cultural. Video games should be in accordance with ethical boundaries of human rights provisions. There should be the right balance between the development of modern art forms and human rights protection. As it is tried to clarify in the overall picture, video games are suitable for interaction. 

References

Keogh, B. (2013), “The Art of Video Game Violence”.  Right Now. https://rightnow.org.au/opinion-3/right-now-specials-1-video-games-and-human-rights/#The%20Art%20of%20Video%20Game%20Violence (Accessed on 26/12/2021).

Riley, B. (2013). “Not Just a Lecture: How Gamers Create Their Own Human Rights Meaning”.  Right Now. https://rightnow.org.au/opinion-3/right-now-specials-1-video-games-and-human-rights/#The%20Art%20of%20Video%20Game%20Violence (Accessed on 26/12/2021).

Tater, R. (2021). “The pathology of video games from a human rights perspective”.  The University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, School of Law. https://blog.ipleaders.in/pathology-video-games-human-rights-perspective/ (Accessed on 26/12/2021).

The Sydney Morning Herald, (2013). “R18+ video games rating comes into effect”. https://www.smh.com.au/technology/r18-video-games-rating-comes-into-effect-20130101-2c4ls.html (Accessed on 26/12/2021).