The Effects of Mass Media on Society Research Paper

The Effects of Mass Media on Society - Research Paper Example One of these is video games which are products of man’s quest for excitement and entertainment. In this regard, this essay is written with the objective of determining the effects of video games on society. It would initially start on the origins of video games and rationale for playing video games. The discourse would also present the advantages and disadvantages of video games to find out their implications to the users and to society, as a whole. The exact date for the creation of video games could not be pinpointed due to its reference and interrelationships with people, games, companies and culture which actively influenced it. According to Herman, Horwitz, Kent & Miller (2009), video games started with Ralph Baer’s assignment of creating a television set incorporated with a game. They averred â€Å"it would take another 18 years for his idea to become a reality, and by that time there would be other people to share in the glory, like Willy Higinbotham, who designed an interactive tennis game played on an oscilloscope, and Steve Russell, who programmed a rudimentary space game on a DEC PDP-1 mainframe computer. And then there was also Nolan Bushnell, who played that space game and dreamed of a time when fairground midways would be filled with games powered by computers.† (Herman, Horwitz, Kent & Miller, 2009, par. 1) The golden age in video games was identified as spanning the years 1978 to 1981with the emergence of famous brands synonymous to video games such as Atari, Nintendo, Magnavox, Microvision and Intellivision, among others. (Herman, Horwitz, Kent & Miller, 2009, 3) The evolution continues until brands such as Sega, Game Boy Playstation and Xbox remain imprinted in the minds of millions of patronizers. But what exactly are video games? Allwords (2009) define video game as â€Å"a style of game existing as and controlled by software, usually run by a