One may wonder how violence can be made to look glamorous. Well, when you find a stylish man smashing a bunch of goons to pulp, with deadly kung fu moves to the accompaniment of catchy music, what you have is violence being sold in a glamorous package.
Since time immemorial, people have appreciated courage even in a violent and challenging conflict. That is why the tales of the fight between Ram and Ravan in the Ramayana and Samson and his opponents in the Bible have fascinated generations. So what is wrong if a teenager today supports a muscleman who breaks bones in a computer game? People enjoy a good fight and there is nothing wrong with it. That is why boxing is a respected sport. But getting addicted to violence and losing sight of everything else during a combat is a worrisome trait. That is why Mike Tyson’s fondness for human ears is not respected.
Times have changed and so have the values. If we read about the warriors in the Ramayana, Mahabharata or the Bible, they were all obsessed with fighting for justice and the right cause. Violence for its own sake has always been depreciated in these scriptures. The hero in these tales is a character who can serve as a role model for the young. The Mahabharata describes in detail the massacre of millions during the Kurukshetra war.
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Yet, the fact that it is a fight for justice pervades everything. Honour, loyalty and truth are values that are glorified. Can we expect teenagers to imbibe these values from contemporary video games where most games involve rampant assassination of every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes your way?
As if the murky violence were not good enough, we have sexually explicit content in these video games! There are surely better ways of introducing sex education in the teenager’s syllabus. A factor of very serious concern is that these video games mix up sex with violence and this can have an extremely destabilising effect on the teenager’s psyche. Parents should ensure that their children are not turning into video-game fiends, and a sense of right and wrong should be so ingrained in children so that they shun unnecessary violence on their own.