(featured image: Pacer graphic / Miranda Conrad)

TW: mentions of sexual assault, school shootings and murder. Reader discretion advised.

When you think of video games, you think of pixelated worlds for creativity, puzzles that challenge your mind and maybe cool-looking characters. But what happens when those video games come with graphic violence, blood and gore?

The main victims are our kids. According to The National Journal of Clinical Skills, 42% of children ages 2 to 18 play action video games, a genre considered violent. The age-specific data says 40% of kids ages 7 to 12 reported wanting to imitate actions they saw in games, which is alarming.

According to a paper published by the American Psychological Association, more than 87% of video games sold and marketed to kids contain some form of violence. This has caused a public outcry, especially after a Steam game was released in 2025 called No Mercy. Launched on April 19, 2025, the game was advertised for ages 12 and up on a platform with millions of users, including small children.

The game involved playing as a man who sexually abused and then killed women. Keep in mind, small children were on this server. How many of them played or saw this game through gameplay channels before it was banned from Steam in June? It is a nightmarish thing to consider, especially for children between the ages of 5 and 10.

This also brings to mind the recently released game Dispatch, where you play as a former superhero turned emergency dispatcher trying to manage a ragtag group of villains turned heroes. As good as the storyline is, the game is vulgar and violent. Although it is clearly intended for adults, there are 13-year-old kids playing it online.

This raises the question: Should we place stricter parental controls on certain games to protect our children? I believe we should. I am not saying these games cause tragedies like Uvalde or Sandy Hook, but I do believe we should monitor the media our kids consume. Kids are like sponges; they absorb everything they see and hear.

Maybe we should stop raising tablet kids and start raising children the way our parents did, by using common sense. Common sense has become rare. Our children should be protected and not exposed to such vulgarity. This is a call to action for parents to protect their children from violent media.