Effect of Video Games

Effect of Video Games

The proliferation in video game industry has brought about a change in the way children interact in the society, especially over the gender roles. Most of the video games available on the market tend to depict delineation of roles according to one’s gender. As such, video games and by extension the media influence the way children pick up roles according to their gender. It is on this basis that this research intends to focus on the available literature concerning the effects of video games on the development of gender roles in children. Utilizing a number of studies, the proposal seeks to identify the missing links exemplified in the available literature on this topic. The established missing links will be used to carry out a major study that will look into the effects of video games on gender roles development.

Justification/Significance of the Study

Video games have become an integral part of life of boys and girls as they grow up. However, the actual effect of video games on the definition of gender roles among children has not been given much attention. With the media increasingly being accepted as an agent of socialization, it is necessary to have extensive researches on the ways in which programs, such as video games which are rampant in the today’s media, influence the way male and female children identify their roles. It has been generally accepted that video games have trained male children to believe that they should be masculine and always demonstrate much power over female children. And conversely, they have portrayed female children as being softer and sexier compared to male children. Video games have, therefore, made it possible for these gender perceptions to be held by either of the genders. Irrespective of these negative influences of video games on the identifying of gender roles by children, it is believed that this cultural object can have positives effects on children, if utilized well. This can be in the areas of health, educational, and social development of children. These and other contradicting research findings form the subject matter of this research. The research will, therefore, help parents and children realize how video games can positively affect children.

Literature Review

According to Dietz (9), video games have contributed to stereotypical gender roles perception among children. Most of the video games that children play tend to depict a delineation of roles according to the gender of actors, and thus makes it easy for children to pick up these roles. Additionally, Milead (34) and Dill and Thrill (4) indicate that the concept of functional interactivity attests to the fact that people tend to behave exactly in accordance to what they see. This is especially so when one is at a younger age. This observation reinforces Dietz’s (9) findings that associate the high level of inclination that children depict in their roles while at home.

In Dietz’s research, male children were asked to write down the roles of women as depicted in the video games they had played in the previous month. The result pointed to the long held view that children have the capability to interpret the roles of characters in terms of their gender. The same was revealed in the case of girls who associated women actors with certain roles, such as cooking and attending to children. Generally, men characters were seen as powerful, mechanistic, and ruthless.

Similarly, proliferation of video games in homes means that the conventional tools for educating children become increasingly irrelevant. As has been argued by Dietz (12), teachers and parents are no longer in control of the behaviors of their children. Male children are increasingly becoming juvenile delinquents by choosing to engage in violent actions. Evidently, this rudeness culminates in children becoming choosy on the kind of chores they carry out in their homes. For instance, male children will cite cooking or washing of utensils as women’s work, while female children will view cleaning of a compound as a job that should only be done by their male counterparts. These perceptions are without any doubt originating from the observed roles played by different characters in video games.

Nevertheless, a departure from this view is expressed by Miller and Summers (7). The two had carried out a research which had shown that video games are an essential tool for exposing children to the universal practice even within the confines of their homes. They argue that what is depicted in video games is actually the universal truth and that defined roles, as expressed in gender terms, cannot be used to deter children from video games. Moreover, they make an interesting observation that it is the creators of video games that are having a stereotypical mindset about the roles of different genders. They argue that such roles were acquired not from video games but from the society itself. They also found that even non-gamers were equally predisposed to the stereotypical view of gender roles. This lack of consensus among the available literature, therefore, necessitates a clear-cut research into the effects that video games have on the acquisition of gender roles in children of both sexes.

Methodology/Research Design

As regards the missing links and lack of consensus in the literature review, this study considers how male and female children interpret their gender roles. This approach will enable the study to find out exactly how children acquire a stereotypic view of gender roles in the society. In order to obtain the necessary data, the study will use random sampling by interviewing 50 gamer and 50 non-gamer children of both sexes. The representation will be a half of each sex in each group of fifty, and only children under 16 will be considered for the study.

Each child in either of the group will be individually asked to name ten roles they undertake in their families, what they learnt about roles of women and men in a selected popular video game, as well as what they would do differently if they were of a different sex. This will be aimed at eliciting a non-biased personal view that will be free from the influence of any factors. This information will be obtained with the help of a questionnaire tool. Questions to different groups shall be the same, the only exception being gamers who shall be required to indicate the name of the video game they associate their preferred role with. This will be presented on a 1-10 scale where one will indicate the most preferred source and ten the least preferred sources. Additionally, there shall be a set of questions for 50 selected parents about their children’s behavior trends before and after playing a video game.

Results/Recommendations/Conclusions

From the literature review, it is evident that the influence of video games on gender roles is not fully investigated. Different researchers have continued to choose popular video games to analyze their content and make their own conclusions. There is, therefore, a need for an independent and unbiased research to focus on children themselves in order to identify what influences their roles as boys and girls. Such study will be useful in identifying the influence that video games have on gender roles in the contemporary cultural setup.