I’m doing a research paper on violence in video games. Unfortunately, we can only use data from 6 papers. At least we chose those 6 ourselves. When we have completed this paper, I will post mine on this weblog. After I’m done, I may take it upon myself to add data from other sources and write a new version (not for school, just for here).

The quick statement I wanted to make was about people thinking video games teaches people how to kill, even going so far as to say it improves one’s accuracy with a gun. Their statements’ accuracies are far from good. Can moving a mouse or joystick to make the cursor move from one side of the screen to the other really improve your accuracy with a real gun? Even with gun-shaped controllers, the distance from the screen is very small. I’ve played duckhunt using a projector and even then I couldn’t have been further than 5 yards away. And one tries not to shoot at the screen from an angle. Using a controller that looks more like a sci-fi laser gun is really far from using a real gun. Aiming is different, the way you hold them is different, and there’s no recoil. It just doesn’t seem to work.