George Drinka is a children and adolescent psychiatrist who has conducted research over this debate of whether or not video games impact the amount of violence individuals display after playing violent video games. His stance on this debate is that they are a factor of the violence displayed and he uses Sandy Hook’s mass shooter, Adam Lanza, as the central example to further explain his standpoint. Adam Lanza is described as a twenty-year old man who was socially withdrawn, possibly had a mental disorder, that being either autism or Asperger's Syndrome, and most importantly, an avid gamer who would keep to themselves in the basement and continuously play Call of Duty for hours on end until the day of the shooting (Drinka). Drinka makes this connection to another mass murderer, Anders Breivik, who also used the game, Call of Duty, as training before also committing his heinous crimes. With Call of Duty being a first-person shooter game, Drinka brings up …show more content…
the more days in a row that children played [violent games], the less empathy they manifested, and the more likely they were to demonstrate aggression in a laboratory setting”, which makes sense since the more one plays a game, the more used to it they get and the less they feel guilty about the awful deeds they committed inside the game (Drinka). In a game such as Call of Duty or even Super Smash Bros players know that the in-game avatars that they use to fight are not real, physical people who feel pain in the same manner as other human beings; so, this causes players to go all out since the ultimate goal in these games is to be the last one standing as the victor, no matter the cost. However, this does not mean it is the same in-game experience when one goes out to kill multiple victims who had possible futures lying ahead of them alongside with families who deeply cherished them unlike video game avatars who have their future pre-planned by the coding done for