DDOCentral

Welcome to our third and final part of this Held Hostage miniseries on the effect of violence in video games on gamers/children. For part one (an introduction to the topic), click here, and for part two (delving into the research pertaining to children), click here.

Backstory

Over the past few weeks, we’ve discussed the differences between violence and aggression, posed ideas about desensitization and observational learning, and jumped into research pertaining to whether or not video games make adults and children more aggressive or more violent. Long story short, the answer is that video games do cause increased aggression in children and adults, which can lead to violence, but video games, by themselves, have not been shown to cause an otherwise non-violent human being to become violent.

Remember, instances of drowning doesn’t increase ice cream consumption.

But there’s so much more to the story than what…

Esports is a thing. Even though there are still a lot of people that can’t wrap their head around the competitive side of video games, esports is a thing. And it’s an incredibly huge business that should be taken seriously by everyone, especially those in media. Not only are the prize money getting bigger, but the viewership numbers are just ballooning each and every year.

While most of these numbers come from MOBA games like League of Legends and DOtA, I do believe that a good chunk of those figures comes from fighting games. While MOBAs generally pull in bigger numbers than fighting games, it does seem like games like Capcom’s Street Fighter and Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros are more mainstream. In fact, just last week, the EVO finals for both of those games were broadcast live on non-gaming channels. The EVO finals for Street Fighter V was shown on…