kids and videogames


 


 

Rough Draft

On cartoons

 

The phrase yellow journalism means reporting that is lurid, sensationalistic, distorted, often false and designed solely to attract a mass audience. The term originated in the fierce newspaper rivalries of the late 19th century, when William Randolph Hearst’s New

York Journal was engaged in a circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. One of the star features of the world was “the yellow kid”, a regular cartoon that appeared in the World’s Sunday colour supplement. In 1896 William Randolph Hearst hired outcault, and his cartoon the yellow, moved to the New York Journal.

At the same time, a favourite issue for Hearst was the immigration of foreigners, especially Asian people, into the United States. This yellow peril in Hearst’s mind, threatened Native American values and culture.

The colour yellow became to be associated with inexpensive newspapers, and the loose standards applied by both Hearst and Pultizer to the reporting in their newspapers came to be generally typically known as yellow journalism. In yellow journalism, news media served as the mouth pieces for political organizations, for the personal prejudices of their owners, or as profit centers attempting to win the greatest possible audience with sensationalistic stories.

 

Video games and children

 

There are always two sides to every argument, in anything that we do. Video games, as some have made commentary on, are to be believed by some to teach children how to kill. Violent video games are instructional simulations that show young players how to kill efficiently and without feeling. By treating the animated victims as feeders for the player’s killing spree, children become desensitized to the act of murder and its consequences. Players of violent video games are learning the uncaring and dehumanizing attitudes displayed by some of society’s most grisly serial killers. To counter act the potential dangers of video violence, parents need to oversee the types of games their children play. Some may argue how to alert parents to the dangers hiding in their children’s video games without sounding like just another voice on another broken record. Three pointers are suggested to some degree:

• If parents wanted their children to develop attitudes like Gary Ridgeway (He was convicted of being the green river killer, killing at least 48 women) then these games could provide a good training ground.

• Video games are not spectator activities, like going to see a violent movie; they use simulation techniques that are used to teach people to fly a plane, drive a car or fight wars.

• Parents should not trust their neighbourhood stores to not sell hyper violent video games to young children.

Violent video games make victims into something much less than human. The victim’s heads are cut off and blood spurts from their necks. The dead bodies are then kicked and urinated on. The killer laughs at them and makes crude sexual comments. Sex and violence weave into deadly behaviours, over and over. The video games use techniques known to be effective in teaching young people to drive cars or go to war. Simulation is designed to hone the trainee’s instincts, to help them build habits that they can carry out quickly, and without second thoughts. Video games laced with human atrocities help young, impressionable people practice killing without any care. The youngsters who hold the joysticks and sit at the keyboards hold the guns and axes. Young players practice cutting heads off of people. They rehearse shooting police officers and urinating on them.

Interesting facts about video games

• Expected to reach $20 billion in sales this coming year.

• Every year, enough video games are sold to put two of them in every American household.

• More than nine of every 10 American children play some sort of video game

• Research shows that playing violent video games increases children’s violent thoughts and aggressive behaviours.

 

Now for the better, other sides’ point of view

 

Violent video games, of which we are comparing, apples to apples, are exemplary teachers of cognitive skills and learning principles. Typically, such games modify game play to suit the skill of the player, allowing the player to challenge themselves with varying degrees of difficulty. Mastering the requirements of each skill level encourages players by building self esteem through a sense of accomplishment and competence. Additionally, through the repetition needed to master a specific level of game play, players reinforce cognitive and learning skills inclusive of memory and problem solving that eventually ensure success. Such skills are not limited to game play and can be transferred to other areas of learning, benefiting young people in academic development.

Violent video games have clear objectives, often set at multiple difficulty levels which adapt to the prior knowledge and skills of each learner. Furthermore, the pace of the activities can be adjusted for faster or slower learners, novices or experts, to truly deliver differentiated instruction. Inventing ways of matching objectives and pace to the capabilities of learners is no small accomplishment. Moreover, there is empirical evidence for many memory tasks that the average learning rate of the top third of any class is at least three times faster than the bottom third, with the fastest and slowest learners in the same class differing by even larger multiples.

Learning is active with practice, feedback and more practice to the point of mastery. This is in contrast to much classroom learning in which teachers lecture on or demonstrate a concept or skill, then take questions, and move on to cover other material. However, as is well known in the development of skills such as sports or music, learners have questions only after attempting to do what was demonstrated. Feedback and corrections operate only then, which in classrooms often happens only much later, for example, on a unit test. At this point, it is too late for help; one is already taking the test. Practice to the point of mastery, is predictive of how much is remembered later, as well as how much savings will occur in relearning at a later date. Once mastered, the knowledge and skills are practiced further to provide over learning. This helps the knowledge and skills become automatized and consolidated in memory, so that the learner can begin to focus consciously on comprehending or applying new information. In other words, the novice is beginning to process and organize new information with more expertise.

Mastery of an objective is reinforced both extrinsically and intrinsically. This is underappreciated by educators who have been told to praise often so as to increase children’s self esteem. However, a wide range of theorists agree that perceived self efficacy arises from competence or efficacy, and lack of competence leads to learned helplessness. Likewise, mastering the essential tasks of school results in solving the identity crisis of that age, I am what I can do, while non mastery leads to feeling of inferiority.

Moreover, video games in general, are well sequenced in levels of increasing difficulty, complexity or pace, with success at subsequent levels contingent upon competencies mastered at previous levels. For example, the popular first person shooter game, Halo begins by the first hour of play; the game not only sets up the story, but also teaches one how to play. The game characters and spaceship computer teach one systematically which control buttons to use to look around, to walk, crouch, jump pick up weapons and reload. This is necessary partly because of the complexity of the game controller. After teaching a specific skill, the game immediately gives you a chance to practice it. The game then gives immediate feedback, including adapting to ones specific skill using the controller. Each learning objective has identifiable prerequisites which, when mastered, facilitate transfer to the next level of difficulty, completion of a learning objective, or benchmark, in current education lingo.

Furthermore, because video games are adaptable in level of difficulty and pace, they encourage a close to optimal combination of massed and distributed practice. Initial attempts at the game, no matter how abysmal, receive feedback or a score immediately and few can resist trying again and again until they begin to show progress. Such massed practice eventually begins to produce diminishing returns. However, the repetition has begun to develop both physical and mental skills and habits on parts of the task, but always in the context of the whole sequence. Each subsequent encounter with the game provides the memory benefits of distributed practice, namely relearning anything that was forgotten. This combination of massed practice to build sufficient initial mastery to lay the game, followed by distributed practice over days or weeks to prevent forgetting is optimal for the development of automatized structures of knowledge, or schemas.

Knowledge or skills learned and practiced in multiple ways, on several problems, or in a variety of contexts are more likely to transfer than when practiced in only one way on a single kind of problem, or the same context. One reason for this is that with multiple contexts, students are more likely to abstract the relevant features of concepts and develop a more flexible representation of knowledge. Multiple contexts also provide a variety of cues for recall rather than memory having to rely on availability of cues from the original context or problem situation. Multiple ways of solving problems or performing skills also avoid the mental sets of rigidities that naturally arise from success with a particular method. To avoid the aversion so many Americans have to the metric system, for example, students needed to learn to measure in multiple ways, feet and inches, meter, pounds and grams and then practice using them in math, science, and social problems in school and in the rest of life. Learning multiple ways of representing division of fractions, rather than simply memorizing the invert and multiply algorithm is more likely to lead to greater comprehension than the same amount of time spent simply practicing the algorithm. Violent video games are set in many contexts. Some are set in historical times, some are modern times, some are very realistic, some are cartoonist and some are futuristic. Some portray hand to hand combat, some use small arms, and some use even a golf club as a lethal weapon. The common feature among all of these different games and contexts is that violence is the solution to whatever problem the gamer faces. This is exactly the best way to teach so that the student will be able to transfer the underlying concept to new situations.

Further, there is some research demonstrating that the brain releases dopamine in response to playing violent video games. Dopaminergic neurotransmission may also be involved in learning, reinforcement of behaviour, attention and sensory motor integration as well. Due to the difficulty of the games, which vary as one progresses, guarantees that reinforcement will be intermittent, not continuous, they take full advantage of the addictive nature of intermittent reinforcement. For example, slot machines, one typically finds it hard to stop once started playing. There is evidence that video games may be addictive for some people, perhaps as many as 15% of players. Video games are marketed widely as something everyone must have, making skill in such games an important social currency for popularity among children, especially among boys.

 

After my children have earned their allowance, I feel that they are free to spend their money, on what ever they would like. Although my son, Steven is 9, he does like to play both m and r rated games. He particularly likes blowing people up, and cutting heads off. My thought on this ….it often gives us subjects to speak of, that we ordinarily would not bring up in a conversation. For example, I ask my son if he ever feels like he would ever want to really kill someone. He tells me I am ridiculous, it’s only a game; I should not have to ask him if he would hurt anyone. He did however make me laugh when he stated that some times he gets really mad at me, and wants to kill me, but that is just a figure of speech, he really wouldn’t hurt me. Furthermore, we were led into a discussion on whether we thought aliens really existed, because of the alien game he was playing. Violent video games have not had a negative impact on my son.

 

On the rats…

 

The Boomtown Rats started their band in 1975. Their name derived from Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory. In the autobiography, at the age of 11, oil was discovered in Guthrie’s home town in Oklahoma. Teams of casual labourers moved in and the place became a boomtown, hence, the name of the band.

In January of 1979, Bob Geldof was in Atlanta University doing an interview, answering questions mechanically when news was broken that Brenda Spencer, from California was leaning out of her bedroom window with a gun, shooting people down in her school, across the street. A journalist telephoned her, she actually answered the phone which seems a bizarre thing to do in the middle of a murdering spree, he asked her why she was doing it, she paused and said, “something to do, I don’t like Mondays”. On the way back to his hotel, Geldof started to write the song, I don’t like Mondays. The shooting went on as Geldof continued writing. He tried to picture the girl, tried to visualize the scene; the police captains, the bullhorns, the playground and the parents. He thought the girl was some sort of automaton. And, he wrote, the silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload. And of course, why was she doing it? Tell me why. It seemed to Geldof the Californian ethos, didn’t allow for reasons or logic for doing anything, they just did it. Anyhow, that’s a little history behind, in my opinion, one of the best songs ever made. You have to remember, this shooting was well before Columbine. Brenda Spencer received 25 years to life in prison.

 

 

 

Feedback

Spelling errors, grammar errors and redundant sentences. I fixed those in my final draft. Other comments- good ideas-but how do these tie together? Well, they didn't, so I changed it!

 

Over all a very good paper. Easily suitable for at least an "A-" You give very good points on both sides of the argument.

I'm a child of the 70's and I was raised around guns and played "War" almost daily. Those of us who didn't have toy guns, fashioned our own using sticks or what ever we had that remotely resembled a gun, (I myself, used my fathers timing light, much to his chagrin, because it looked like a laser.)but we never played good vs. evil, it was always just us vs them, team A vs team B. I bring this up because this is frowned upon today for the same, in my opinion, overly liberal views. Do I think that there are people out there who maybe took the game a little too far? Sure. But, I believe that the ones that did already had their own problems. It is this same line of thinking that can be lent to the whole video game world. A grea majority of the children can seperate the differences from the game and real life. It should be up to the parents to determine where their child's mental wellness lies.

 

 

 

Cover Page

 

What is the purpose of your argument?

The purpose of my argument was to show the pros and cons of violent video games and the effects it has on children.

 

Who is your target audience?

My target audience was intended for anyone that is interested in the results that I presented in my paper.

 

What is your thesis statement?

The pros and cons of violent video games and the effects it has on children.

 

Did I learn/try anything new while growing this composition?

Maybe I should curtail the violent video games that I allow my children to play.

 

What did I like best about my composition and the composition process?

I like the fact that I was able to present both sides of the argument. I did integrate ideas from two different sources, and gave their opinions. I did post my personal opinion related to the composition.

 

Where would you like to see the most feedback/advice on your final draft?

Originally, I thought the assignment was to write three separate pieces from our postings. Boy, did I do that wrong! Seeing no correlation between the pieces that I wrote, I went with the longest piece that I had composed.

Furthermore, I would really just like someone to read the piece that took me several hours to compile.

 

 

 

 

 

Final Draft

There are always two sides to every argument, in anything in life that one does. My paper is on a subject that I find particularly interesting, the pros and cons of violent video games and the effects it has on children.

Firstly, many of my friends believe that I should limit my children to video games that are made for their age, that do not have violence in them. My children are ages 7, 9 and 11; I do not limit them to age appropriate video games. Ganyne, age 7 typically plays nintendogs, and all girly videos, violence is not inclusive in her video games. Steven, age 9 particularly enjoys playing teen or adult video games that are filled with violence. Steven enjoys blowing people’s heads off in the video game destroy all humans. Furthermore, he loves to blow people up, cut off heads and cut off various other body parts in the video games he plays. These games have not had a negative effect what so ever on my son. My belief is that the propensity for violence towards people certainly does not come from video games. I don’t personally believe that a video game can give you an identity. In the school curriculum, Wuthering Heights is a book that has to be read by students. This book is filled with transgressive behaviour . Is this not a double edged sword? Don’t play violent video games, but read a damaging book? Anyway, my son is an honour roll student, has an extremely high lexile level, and is enrolled in the gifted program through Pinellas county schools. He has not exhibited any violent tendencies since playing violent video games. Nychola, is 11 and she also enjoys playing violent video games. She likes to blow people up, and cut their heads off in the video games. I have not noticed any violent tendencies in her either. Nychola, like Steven is an honour roll student, has a high lexile level and is enrolled in the gifted program.

The pros of violent video games include the games are exemplary teachers of cognitive skills and learning principles. Typically, such games modify game play to suit the skill of the player. This allows the player to challenge themselves with a varying degree of difficulty. Mastering requirements of each skill level is encouraging players by building self esteem through a sense of accomplishment and competence. Additionally, through the repetition needed to master a specific level of game play, players reinforce cognitive and learning skills inclusive of memory and problem solving that eventually ensure success. Such skills are not limited to game play and can be transferred to other areas of learning, benefiting young people in academic development.

Violent video games have clear objectives, often set at multiple difficulty levels which adapt to the prior knowledge and skills of each learner. Furthermore, the pace of the activities can be adjusted for faster or slower learners, novices or experts, to truly deliver differentiated instruction. Inventing ways of matching objectives and pace to the capabilities of learners is no small accomplishment. Moreover, there is empirical evidence for many memory tasks that the average learning rate of the top third of any class is at least three times faster than the bottom third, with the fastest and slowest learners in the same class differing by even larger multiples.

Learning is active with practice, feedback and more practice to the point of mastery. This is in contrast to much classroom learning in which teachers lecture on or demonstrate a concept or skill, then take questions, and move on to cover other material. However, as is well known in the development of skills such as sports or music, learners have questions only after attempting to do what was demonstrated. Feedback and corrections operate only then, which in classrooms often happens only much later, for example, on a unit test. At this point, it is too late for help; one is already taking the test. Practice to the point of mastery, is predictive of how much is remembered later, as well as how much savings will occur in relearning at a later date. Once mastered, the knowledge and skills are practiced further to provide over learning. This helps the knowledge and skills become automatized and consolidated in memory, so that the learner can begin to focus consciously on comprehending or applying new information. In other words, the novice is beginning to process and organize new information with more expertise.

Mastery of an objective is reinforced both extrinsically and intrinsically. This is underappreciated by educators who have been told to praise often so as to increase children’s self esteem. However, a wide range of theorists agree that perceived self efficacy arises from competence or efficacy, and lack of competence leads to learned helplessness. Likewise, mastering the essential tasks of school results in solving the identity crisis of that age, I am what I can do, while non mastery leads to feeling of inferiority.

Moreover, violent video games in general, are well sequenced in levels of increasing difficulty, complexity or pace, with success at subsequent levels contingent upon competencies mastered at previous levels. For example, the popular first person shooter game, Halo begins by the first hour of play; the game not only sets up the story, but also teaches one how to play. The game characters and spaceship computer teach one systematically which control buttons to use to look around, to walk, crouch, jump pick up weapons and reload. This is necessary partly because of the complexity of the game controller. After teaching a specific skill, the game immediately gives you a chance to practice it. The game then gives immediate feedback, including adapting to ones specific skill using the controller. Each learning objective has identifiable prerequisites which, when mastered, facilitate transfer to the next level of difficulty, completion of a learning objective, or benchmark, in current education lingo.

Furthermore, because video games are adaptable in level of difficulty and pace, they encourage a close to optimal combination of massed and distributed practice. Initial attempts at the game, no matter how abysmal, receive feedback or a score immediately and few can resist trying again and again until they begin to show progress. Such massed practice eventually begins to produce diminishing returns. However, the repetition has begun to develop both physical and mental skills and habits on parts of the task, but always in the context of the whole sequence. Each subsequent encounter with the game provides the memory benefits of distributed practice, namely relearning anything that was forgotten. This combination of massed practice to build sufficient initial mastery to lay the game, followed by distributed practice over days or weeks to prevent forgetting is optimal for the development of automatized structures of knowledge, or schemas.

Knowledge or skills learned and practiced in multiple ways, on several problems, or in a variety of contexts are more likely to transfer than when practiced in only one way on a single kind of problem, or the same context. One reason for this is that with multiple contexts, students are more likely to abstract the relevant features of concepts and develop a more flexible representation of knowledge. Multiple contexts also provide a variety of cues for recall rather than memory having to rely on availability of cues from the original context or problem situation. Multiple ways of solving problems or performing skills also avoid the mental sets of rigidities that naturally arise from success with a particular method. To avoid the aversion so many Americans have to the metric system, for example, students needed to learn to measure in multiple ways, feet and inches, meter, pounds and grams and then practice using them in math, science, and social problems in school and in the rest of life. Learning multiple ways of representing division of fractions, rather than simply memorizing the invert and multiply algorithm is more likely to lead to greater comprehension than the same amount of time spent simply practicing the algorithm. Violent video games are set in many contexts. Some are set in historical times, some are modern times, some are very realistic, some are cartoonist and some are futuristic. Some portray hand to hand combat, some use small arms, and some use even a golf club as a lethal weapon. The common feature among all of these different games and contexts is that violence is the solution to whatever problem the gamer faces. This is exactly the best way to teach so that the student will be able to transfer the underlying concept to new situations.

Further, there is some research demonstrating that the brain releases dopamine in response to playing violent video games. Dopaminergic neurotransmission may also be involved in learning, reinforcement of behaviour, attention and sensory motor integration as well. Due to the difficulty of the games, which vary as one progresses, guarantees that reinforcement will be intermittent, not continuous, they take full advantage of the addictive nature of intermittent reinforcement. For example, slot machines, one typically finds it hard to stop once started playing. There is evidence that video games may be addictive for some people, perhaps as many as 15% of players. According to Jeremy Smith, video games are marketed widely as something everyone must have, making skill in such games an important social currency for popularity among children, especially among boys. Video games today are defined by their diversity, ranging from the innocent quests of Donkey Kong to the complex strategy of Civilization to the amoral brutality of Grand Theft Auto. Even video games with violence in them—like movies and books with violent content—are not all the same. What's more, new research shows that individuals experience the violence differently.

The cons of violent video games , as some have made commentary on, are to be believed by some to teach children how to kill. Violent video games are instructional simulations that show young players how to kill efficiently and without feeling. By treating the animated victims as feeders for the player’s killing spree, children become desensitized to the act of murder and its consequences. Players of violent video games are learning the uncaring and dehumanizing attitudes displayed by some of society’s most grisly serial killers. To counter act the potential dangers of video violence, parents need to oversee the types of games their children play. Some may argue how to alert parents to the dangers hiding in their children’s video games without sounding like just another voice on another broken record. If parents wanted their children to develop attitudes like Gary Ridgeway (He was convicted of being the green river killer, killing at least 48 women) then these games could provide a good training ground. Video games are not spectator activities, like going to see a violent movie; they use simulation techniques that are used to teach people to fly a plane, drive a car or fight wars.

Parents should not trust their neighbourhood stores to not sell hyper violent video games to young children. Violent video games make victims into something much less than human. The victim’s heads are cut off and blood spurts from their necks. The dead bodies are then kicked and urinated on. The killer laughs at them and makes crude sexual comments. Sex and violence weave into deadly behaviours, over and over. The video games use techniques known to be effective in teaching young people to drive cars or go to war. Simulation is designed to hone the trainee’s instincts, to help them build habits that they can carry out quickly, and without second thoughts. Video games laced with human atrocities help young, impressionable people practice killing without any care. The youngsters who hold the joysticks and sit at the keyboards hold the guns and axes. Young players practice cutting heads off of people. They rehearse shooting police officers and urinating on them. According to Nicholas Carnagey, an Iowa state psychology instructor, children who play violent video games become less physiologically aroused by real violence.

In conclusion, tastes, preferences, society and morals all shape a person. I believe that my own children have not suffered any ill effects from playing violent video games. I will continue to allow my children free choice in what they play for video games. Hindsight is just that, hindsight. If my children grow up and murder a person, I could always blame it on the fact that I allowed them to play violent video games.

 

 

 

 

Works cited

 

 

 

Smith, Jeremy. “Playing the Blame Game.” http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Playing_Blame_Game/

 

 

 

Carnagey, Nicholas. “Iowa State Psychologist Produces First study on violence Desensitization From video games.”

 

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/48277.php

 

 

David's Reviews

 

Review by Aldijana