Jasmine Verdell was shocked when she walked into a room and found blood on the bed sheets. Her screaming 5-year-old son had just broken his two bottom teeth and fractured his ankle after wrestling with his 6-year-old cousin.
This wasn't a real fight-they were just emulating a video game named "WWE Raw". But unlike the game, the injuries were very real.
Researchers have been studying and debating the effects of violent video games on children's behavior since the 1980s.
According to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a study showed that girls played video games for an average of five hours a week, whereas boys averaged 13 hours a week.
Amity Bolden, 24, a graduate teacher assistant at Western Kentucky University, studied child and adolescent psychology and has done research on how the environment affects children's brain's development and behavior.
"Everything children do is a learned behavior," Bolden said. "The more time they spend playing the video games, the more they will learn from it and will most likely imitate the actions that are learned."
Playing video games may increase aggressive behavior because violent acts are continually repeated throughout the video game.
Verdell, a 26-year-old Memphian, agrees with Bolden's study. She allowed her son to play violent video games such as "Call of Duty" and "WWE Raw" until his behavior became aggressive, and he suffered a fractured ankle and missing teeth.
"My son knew every wrestling move from the game," said Verdell. "Every time he got with his cousin or other kids, he pretended they were having a wrestling match."
In Bolden's study, she also found that aggression may affect children differently depending on the age of the child.
"As the child grows, they develop more self-control," Bolden said. "They begin to learn right from wrong."
Joe Glass, 26, of Brighton, Tenn., plays violent video games on his game console as well as his computer to relax.
"Games are a sense of therapy for me," Glass said. "I play them daily for hours, shooting people's heads off. However, I never had thoughts of shooting someone in real life."
Glass, however, still experiences aggression. It's not physical aggression but verbal aggression. His level of verbal aggression increases when he encounters confrontation.
"I play online with other players and am able to talk to them through my headset," he said. "I found myself cursing them out when they shoot me. I have to realize it's just a game."
Along with aggression, violent video games also cause people to become less social than children who don't play video games.
According to the American Psychological Association, one out of two people who play video games experience a strain in their social relationships.
Many people who are addicted gamers neglect their personal relationship and cause the relationships to sometimes disappear altogether.
Lena Fulton, 23, of Cordova, Tenn., agrees that video games affect personal relationships, because her brother is an addicted gamer.
"He spends so much time on the game, he can't have a decent conversation at the dinner table," she said. "His conversation with people is limited because he'd rather sit in his room and play the video game all day."
Bolden's study showed that children who spend a large amount of time playing video games will develop more slowly than children who don't.
"A child who spends a lot of time playing video games will have poor social skills," she said. "He will not know how to make friends or enjoy people's company."
A person who compulsively plays video games may retreat back to the game because establishing relationships is harder.
According to the American Psychological Association, Academic achievement can be affected negatively and positively by violent video games.
Their study showed that people could learn iconic, spatial and visual attention skills from video games.
APA's study also showed that video games even the violent ones, teach children how to multitask, make fast analysis and decisions, concentration and situation awareness.
Academic achievement may be negatively related to over all time spent playing video games. Studies have shown that the more time a kid spends playing video games, the poorer is his performance in school.
Argosy University's Minnesota School on Professional Psychology found that video game addicts argue a lot with their teachers, fight a lot with their friends and score lower grades than others who play video games less often.
Kera Smith, a social worker for Shelby County Schools system, has observed a negative impact of video games.
"Children should spend more time studying than playing video games," she said. "I feel they will learn better by using pencil and paper rather than a controller."
According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, kids are not necessarily drawn to video games because of their violence. The attraction lies in their being rewarded by awesome displays of explosions, fireworks and even blood splattering.
While some believe video games have a negative effect on children's academics, others like Joslin McNeil sees a positive side to the games.
"It was surprising to me when my son started counting from twelve hundred to thirteen hundred and only in the first grade," she said. "He told me that's how many points he gets on the game."
