Video games have become their own industry that have revolutionized every part of entertainment ranging from television all the way to sports. Through all the different companies and organizations, it generates about 19 billion dollars in revenue annually, which is much more compared to Hollywood or any other competing form of entertainment. This industry was created and is still evolving from products that are so mesmerizing that people of all ages stay up all night in front of a store before it opens to receive them. How did the miniscule and intense arcade games transform into the high-tech and high definition games out today such as Counter Strike, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends? It is not just about the circuit boards and wiring in the technology, but it is about the people who were all driven by at least one thing: whether it was an obsession, dreams, family, goals, etc. It is mainly about the programmers and developers or masterminds behind the games such as Kim Taek-Jin who specializes in the creation of MMORPG’s, the creator of Minecraft Markus “Notch” Persson, and Gabe Newell the owner of valve corporation.These programmers and developers created the entire entity of “gaming culture” and later helped lead the swarm of people to the internet and the modern game industry we see today - the one people tend to blame for violence, lack of social relationships, and poor academic performance in adolescents. These people and many more discovered how to get a whole generation of young people to grab a controller and get hooked on video gaming, and the effects of this addiction to video games has had a profound impact on this generation.

Violence in adolescents, specifically young males, has many people convinced that this aggressive behavior derives from video games or them spending too much time behind a screen. In their article, “Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior”, Craig Anderson and Brad J. Bushman provide statistics on how much time young men play video games claiming that “Among 8- to 13-year old boys, the average is more than 7.5 hrs per week ...13.3% of men entering college played at least 6 hours per week as high school seniors. By 1999, that figure has increased to 14.8%.” (par. 10) Clearly this number has gone up significantly since the late nineties due to the increase in the quality and quantity of technology. The violent material that this new form of technology has brought up in violent video games affects the cognitive abilities of young males.

Depending on the circumstances, it is possible that aggressive actions can take place in nonviolent games as well if a person becomes aggravated and the game turns from being entertaining to being a nuisance. These nonviolent games that can cause players to have these emotions develop aggressive symptoms through the thoughts and feelings in the players’ mind. However, violent video games only engage a person’s aggressive side through long term use. According to Anderson and Bushman the “long-term effects of exposure to violent media result primarily from the development, rehearsal, and eventual automatization of aggressive knowledge structures such as perceptual schemata, social expectations, and behavioral scripts.” (par. 25)

Whether the content of a video game or media someone consumes seems violent or not through long term exposure it can cause aggressive thoughts which in turn will eventually lead to aggressive behavior and actions unless people can find a way to balance the time spent on video games with other activities.

As more and more video games are produced with more and more technology, online communication becomes the norm for adolescent conversation. This young generation have developed multiple methods for communicating with friends, strangers, and everything between. The most common instant messaging apps or platforms such as snapchat, Imessage, instagram, and many more are used when people want to communicate and keep in contact with offline or disconnected friends, Whether it be with friends that they see on an everyday basis or friends that they have not seen for a while. The exact details of their daily lives are placed on these different media platforms for practically everyone to see. In the same way, video games have become increasingly popular for online communication as can be seen In the article “Online Communication and Adolescent Relationships” by Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia Greenfield. Subrahmanyam and Greenfield explain how “The digital landscape continues to be populated with anonymous online contexts such as bulletin boards, massively multiplayer online games (MMOG), massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG), and