Do Video Games Incite Children to Real World Conquest?

[under the rain]

World Conquest is a serious issue playing heavily on today's politics. The ones in my Civilization game anyway. Many parents decry such games for presenting children with an unrealistic view of reality, and some even claim that people like Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexander the Great were violent warmongers bent on world conquest because the video games of the day told them to be. Discuss?

[Kusuke]

I've thought about this for awhile, and no matter what I do I can't think of a response for this... Well, I mean, at least the second to last sentence.

The idea of world domination is planted in their head when they play such a game, whether or not they act on it simply depends on their mental capacity to understand the meaning of such an idea.

[Aku no Hikari]

World Conquest is a serious issue playing heavily on today's politics. The ones in my Civilization game anyway. Many parents decry such games for presenting children with an unrealistic view of reality, and some even claim that people like Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexander the Great were violent warmongers bent on world conquest because the video games of the day told them to be. Discuss?

Many parents

That's pretty much "/thread".

Read it as "whiny, lazy, ignorant parents." Those parents always whine about the content of what their children play and watch, be it violence, language or other ideas, because they can't accept responsibility over their children. It's the parents' responsibility to raise mentally-healthy, aware kids who wouldn't do something stupid. If their kids do do something stupid, it's ultimately the parents' fault; not the games'. But the parents always want something else to blame, other than their ignorance and irresponsibility.

I've been playing violent and other "crazy" games my whole life. I doubt it had any negative influence on me. And I know a lot people who do, and there are also those countless gamers all over the world, and none of them is doing anything stupid. People can discern reality from fiction. When someone does something inspired by a game, it's not a normal person who just happened to play a game and then all out of sudden thought "Hey, let's grab a gun and shoot people in the street like GTA!!1!", but someone who has always been sick. They were likely to do something like that whether they played games or not.

Though, when it comes to the world conquest fantasy, it's not really games in particular. Many teenagers and even adults dream about ruling the world. It's probably because they want to fix it (you know, the world sucks), and because they want power and all that. And because it's thrilling and amusing. But still, nobody does anything, again, because they can discern reality from fantasy. And many of them probably forget that fantasy in their adulthood because their life gets busy enough to keep their minds away from it.

[Skylar1]

Video games (along with many other forms of media, really) allow people to get a feeling of things/experiences that they most likely never will. war/violence/fantasy/magic/futuristic senarios/etc, etc.

It only really becomes a danger if you're unable to distinguish between reality and imagination, which if that's the case, video games are the least of your concerns.