Tuesday, October 8, 2013

The effects of Visual Media: Television vs. Video Games

In my opinion, interactive mediums like videos games, certainly influence an individual more than a passive activity like watching television. Studying the effects of media have been going on for decades. During the 1920‘s, researchers came up with a model known as the Hypodermic-Needle Model. The Hypodermic-Needle Model states that a message conveyed in media has a profound and direct impact on an individual. With that being said, I believe that watching television has much less of an impact than playing video games. Watching television does not require the user to do anything but sit there, and enjoy the programming. Video games are the complete opposite. Video games convey a message, much more so than watching television. For example, watching a murder drama on tv is much less influential than actually committing a murder in a video game. Games such as Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty, convey this type of message all the time. Every action in a video game is in response to an action taken by the player; thus every outcome is a direct reaction to the player’s performance. Since the player controls the actions of the video game, he or she becomes very caught up in the emotional state of the game. When the user does something right, he is happy, but when the user does something bad, he becomes very aggravated. This idea of aggravated video game play is no myth, the American Psychological Association researched the effects of violent video games and found that violent video games begin to change a persons mental state over time, making them naturally more aggressive and agitated for no reason. Therefore, I believe the emotional influence seen from video games makes it very apparent that they are more influential than watching television. 

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