Although violent entertainment has existed for centuries, the media have made it more accessible than ever before. In modern societies, people are immersed in media, like fish in water. Using hand-held devices, people can consume media just about anywhere they want, anytime they want. Moreover, violence is a common theme in the media, and research…

Increasingly prevalent educational discourses promote the use of video games in schools and universities. At the same time, populist discourses persist, particularly in print media, which condemn video games because of putative negative effects on behaviour and socialisation. These contested discourses, we suggest, influence the acceptability of…

This paper describes the development and evaluation of an interactive, narrative-based, multimedia game to promote learning and communication about sexual violence and health topics. High school-aged participants created the game concept in a three-week workshop, after which assets were assembled and refined by a university-based game design lab.…

This study attempts to identify the typological-research domain of the extant literature on video games related to college-age samples (18-29 years-of-age). A content analysis of 264 articles, from PsycINFO for these identifiers, was performed. Findings showed that negative or pathological aspects of video gaming, i.e., violence potential,…

In their paper, Munoz and El-Hani propose to bring video games into science classrooms to promote culturally sensitive ethics and citizenship education. Instead of bringing "educational" games, Munoz and El-Hani take a more creative route and include games such as Fallout 3[R] precisely because they are popular and they reproduce ideological and…

American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) youth are disproportionally burdened by many common adolescent health issues, including drug and alcohol use, injury and violence, sexually transmitted infections, and teen pregnancy. Media technologies, including the Internet, cell phones, and video games, offer new avenues for reaching adolescents on a…

This article presents conceptual and empirical analyses of several of the "best practices" of learning and instruction, and demonstrates how violent video games use them effectively to motivate learners to persevere in acquiring and mastering a number of skills, to navigate through complex problems and changing environments, and to experiment with…

Sex and violence in video games is a social issue that confronts us all, especially as many commercial games are now being introduced for game-based learning in schools, and as such this paper polls teenage players about the rules their parents and teachers may or may not have, and surveys the gaming community, ie, game developers to parents, to…

Children have a right to play. The idea is so simple it seems self-evident. But a stroll through any toy superstore, or any half-hour of so-called "children's" programming on commercial TV, makes it clear that violence, not play, dominates what's being sold. In this article, the author discusses how teachers and parents share the responsibility in…

This article describes a project that incorporated interactive technology to teach violence prevention knowledge and skills to second grade students. The educational video games presented lessons consisting of animated characters in a story, accompanied by a number of exercises. The research issue was whether students would develop an appreciation…