Violent Video Games, Violent Kids?

"I think Doom fulfills our need for violent spiritual entertainment, because church doesn't do it anymore...We really want the fire and brimstone, and Doom gives us this."
--Joystick Nation author J.C. Herz in Hotwired magazine, 1997.

"Play a first-person shooter long enough and its morbid reality seems to descend over your awareness like a grid, accompanied by a kind of adrenalized hyper-awareness and euphoric rage. Grid, adrenaline and rage stay with you, far past the point when you exit to the desktop. Walk away from the computer, and they still persist. You find yourself stealing up on street corners as if preparing to strafe the adjoining block; you seem to see a crosshair traced across the bodies of passersby. For the overwhelming majority of us, with well-adjusted social lives...the grid recedes."
--Wagner James Au, new media critic, Salon and Wired, from Salon, "Quake, Doom and Bloodlust," May 1999.

Tuesday, April 20, 1999, two teenage boys went on a rampage at a high school in Littleton, Colorado. The Columbine High School incident would change how security in high schools functioned forever. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were two teenage boys whom some said were social pariahs. They established a private website in 1996 which hosted different levels of the video game Doom. It is said that this game was the beginning of the violent tendencies of the two teenage boys, which would later result in the making of explosives, petty theft, and the large-scale shooting spree and suicide at Columbine High School.
So what is society to think? Are video games responsible for the increase in violence amongst school-aged children? There are some studies that link video games to violent behavior in children. Some say that this view of video games is unbalanced. There is an element of fine art in such video games if you can just get through the violence. What do you think? Are video games indeed responsible for the increase in violence amongst school-aged children? Before you answer read the following link on culture shock.