What class is Professor Ninteno teaching?

Video games have always been a facet of entertainment that the youth of our nation have adored since the late 1980's. Nowadays, the video game industry accounted for 9.7 billion dollars in 2007, with tournaments across the nation for different games and even some "gamers" that are being sponsored by companies to compete. They have developed from games with minimal objects and space, simplistic designs and lack of a storyline to epic tales with life-like graphics and systems that cost as much as $300 dollars retail.
Video games have also expanded into the older age group. If you were to walk into any college residence hall across the nation you'd be sure to find a video game system in nearly every room, especially those that men reside in.

What our society is now beginning to study is the worth of all of these games. Are they a benefit to our youth or are they detriment. There have been lawsuits against video game companies because they drove a young man to commit a crime and followed the directions that one of his mission was in the virtual world. Are video games to blame for these actions of violence? Andrea Norcia looked into the studies that have been done in her story,

http://www.pamf.org/preteen/parents/videogames.html

The study suggests that those that are playing video games that are violent for extensive periods of time are more aggressive and more likely confront their teachers about certain objects. I don't think that a young man playing Grand Theft Auto for an extended period of time changes his actions in school, I think its much more likely for a young man to already be rather aggressive and ask for these types of video games to play. I think that yes, violent video games can desensitize people to the violence in our culture but no more than movies with our favorite actors committing crime or TV shows about acts of violence. Blaming video games for the youth's rise in violent crime portrays a severe lack of responsibility in our nation, a severe lack of responsibility that has been around for ages but is shown recently in these studies. It is the responsibility of those making video games to create games that people will buy, nothing more nothing less. They have to make money to put food on the table for their family and if people are willing to buy violent video games for their children, someone wil make them. It is the responsibility of the parents to make sure that their son or daughter is not being morally changed by the virtual world, not the producer of the video game. Video games hold great potential in the learning of America, but only if we stop blaming them for destroying our children first, after all, usually it is the parents buying these games for their children.