Charles Kheng

Video games have come under much scrutiny, but like all new media, researchers, news outlets and concern individuals have taken it upon themselves to find a relation between senseless mass murders and violent video games. It was back in 1965 where psychologist Albert Bandura developed the social learning theory to understand how children were socialized by violent television programs. The children watched an adult beating a Bobo doll and were left alone to replicate the same aggressive behavior on the doll [Sullivan]. However, social learning theory is not without its criticism. The crux of it is that social learning theory does not take into account intent. “Tedeschi & Felson (1994) define an intent to do harm as a behavior in which an actor expects the target will be harmed and values that harm” [Felson]. As such, it is unlikely that the children who were part of Bandura’s social learning experiment were truly aggressive or violent as they did not have any intention of harming the Bobo doll, but merely mimicking