Violence and mobile phone

People get easily distracted by mobile phones and spend hours on their phones. They are becoming fools while using smartphones. As people spend time on their phones, they don’t talk to each other much. Nowadays we see our young generation will sit in the same room and be busy on their phones instead of talking to each other. They do not do their work and concentrate on using the phone.

Most importantly, young generation spend most of their valuable time in sending harassing phone calls or SMS or pictures, excessive phone calls, sending abusive SMS messages, excessive SMS messages or WhatsApp pictures, or tampering with a person’s profile image from mobile phones and later get frustrated and committed suicide or lean toward crime. Due to this, crime is increasing in the society. A number of fatal murders and other crimes committed by young adults and youth were found to have ties to shooting and reckless driving games.

As per National Institute of Health (NIH)sources, by the end of June 2020, there were 730 million cumulative Player Unknown’s Battle Grounds (PUBG) mobile downloads; by December 2020, there were 30 million active daily users of PUBG globally. The game was banned in India, which led to a decline in Indian users of PUBG. Notably, before the ban, approximately half of the global users of PUBG were from India. Nearly three-quarters of PUBG users in India are males. Several Southeast Asian countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal ban online games with violent content like PUBG due to emerging psychological issues. Southeast Asian countries have huge numbers of youths who are potential targets of the online gaming industry. During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, entertainment sources were limited to online platforms, which resulted in an excessive surge of online games, including PUBG and increased digitalization and smartphone users in Southeast Asia facilitate the easy availability of online games.

In the recent years, the leading newspapers in India highlighted the horrific incident of a son killing his mother due to an argument over playing online games. As per media reports, the incident happened on June 5, 2022, early morning, in the city of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. PUBG is a well-known online game launched in 2018 that involves fighting in battlegrounds. Due to its thrilling and bold nature, it attracts the attention of children and adolescents. It is well known that excessive, unrestrained use of the internet (for gaming, social media, pornography, and shopping) may lead to the development of behavioural addiction.