Influence of Video Games on Children’s Behavior
Dietz’s study (1998) seeks to analyze how different genders are depicted in video games and the effects that this has in children. The study notes that people are bound to interpret and perceive things around them according to how the society represents them and give them meaning. As a result, when it comes to plays or videos, the people involved assume the roles and characters that suit society’s perception and expectations. As such, Dietz’s (1998) review on literature reveals that children are confined to the identities that are aligned to society’s preconceptions and represent them as the society expects them to do. The literature review further reveals that media is a huge potential of acting as a teacher to ideologies, values and people’s beliefs, consequently impacting on their socialization. Accordingly, the research is important because it critically examines the impact that media; in this case video games, has to children’s identities. Therefore, the questions raised in this study are: how mass media displays different gender roles, whether mass media can teach violence and whether video games are agents of socialization. For this study, Dietz (1998) hypothesizes that like other media forms, video games do influence on the identity of children. The research used a nonrandom sample of international video games that were most popular at the time. To draw this sample, the study made use of four video renting stores and two selling stores. The data was collected by watching the videos and obtaining the information about use of violence and how women were portrayed. The research found that most of the video games incorporated violence, whereas women were presented as sex objects and more than half ignored the use of female characters. The implications of these findings are that mass media have different gender role representations, which have a high potential of influencing children identities. Children are...