Based on consumer spending, video games have now become the biggest entertainment industry in the United states. The United States are obviously one of the biggest consumers of video games, along with music and other types of entertainment that I won’t get into. To make you realize how big video games have become let me show you an example. According to the Entertainment Software Association, Americans spent almost $36 billion on video game content in 2018.

Their revenue in 2018 was almost as much as what Americans spent on home video, cinema, and music all combined. You may not realize but that is mindblowing, I mean you should put into consideration how much bigger promotion cinema and music get, when put alongside video games.

Now, let’s look at these numbers globally. There are a whopping 2.3 billion gamers world wide, making gaming the biggest entertainment industry in the world. Gaming is globally huge, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon, with a very quickly rising revenue number and wide demographics, it’s influence is truly undeniable, with a clear presence in the music and movie industry as well. Though gaming already is a phenomenon, this seems to be only the beginning of them taking over the world. I mean look, they release thousands upon thousands of games yearly, and esports seems to be only in development, with prize pools being bigger than sports. The rise of streaming and V/R gaming is only adding to it. The global video game streaming market has predictions of growing by 27% a year between 2018 and 2026, according to Zion Market Research, surging from about $800 million in annual sales in 2017 to north of $6.9 billion. Companies having healthy competition with one another to make the best product for more sales is clearly working with an annual increasing revenue of $159 Billion In 2020 alone. I know I may have just thrown all these numbers at you, but these numbers are truly beyond magnificent.

With gaming growing rapidly every year, we may have to ask ourselves a few questions. 90% of viendo games that are rated E10+, mature, or teen have some kind of violent imagery or sequence. That isn’t the issue in fact, the problem is violence is seen as normal and often even portrayed as justified, without any negative consequences. There’s even a selection of games that relies on violence as it’s main source of promotion, among the likes of Mortal Combat and many more.

I’m not asking you to stop playing violent video games or anything like that, violence has been a huge factor of entertainment since as long as I can remember, but what I am asking is for people not to justify this as normal. It isn’t normal, and you need to consider the wrong-doings of the characters in the game.

You may ask why am I asking you to do this exactly? Well studies have shown that violent video games provoke and promote emotions and feelings of hostility and aggression, desensitize the player to violence, and skew the player’s perception of what constitutes violence. You, yourself can do an experiment. Get a couple of friends and make them play two different types of games. One containing violence the other not, and recording the reaction. The results shouldn’t be surprising. Finally, I’m not asking you to stop other people from playing video games that contain violence or even yourself. I’m just asking you to raise questions and beware of the violence in these games. How real can games get? Is there a line between reality and what can be told as a story in a video game? And to what extent can we draw this line between violence and reality?