Hey, this is actually a more serious article than I thought. (I thought it was going to be about defending the sequel-after-sequel business model.)

This page has a decent section on violent games that I snipped below: http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/ (I mostly use it as a link in the argument over letting students use calculators in Calculus and above.) I thought the following section was pretty interesting. On the one hand it seems that violent games can condition a person to react more violently in certain circumstances, but on the other hand the existence of violent media seems to decrease the number of those circumstances (depending on which data you look at anyway, the freakonomics post linked here is certainly intriguing, and a decrease in crime is probably more strongly linked with an increase in median standard of living).

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Theo: Let's start with something I'm sure most people would agree has little educational value, the video game. We'll discuss later how video games are related to educational software.

To understand the effects of video games, one needs to go back to debriefings conducted by the U.S. Army after WWII. Interviewing soldiers returning from battle, researchers discovered a very disturbing fact. A significant number of soldiers had been face to face with an enemy soldier, rifle in hand, enemy in their sights, gun not jammed, and had not fired . Something deep in their being, some sort of innate humanity, had prevented them from actually pulling the trigger.

Needless to say, this was very disturbing to the military. They began a research effort to figure out what to do about this problem. They discovered that in the heat of battle, under the incredible physical and psychological stress of being faced with another human being you were supposed to kill, the higher mental functions were largely absent. Under such conditions, the mind reverts to much simpler modes of operation, to deeply wired, almost instinctive behaviors. In other words, no amount of target practice at bullseye targets and classroom lectures about how you're supposed to kill the enemy had much effect when it counted.

Over the following decades and wars, the Army learned that the way to get soldiers to reliably pull the trigger was to use very basic, repetitive operant conditioning, along the lines of standard behaviorist theory. Now, behaviorism provides a very poor model for how humans act in everyday life, but it turns out to be a pretty good model for how humans act when they are under stress and have to act quickly, and are responding primarily to fear. Under stress, fearful people do what they have been conditioned to do.

The Army's solution was to replace dry target practice with realistic training grounds, complete with pop-up targets, loud noises, smoke, stress, the works. The goal was to condition the soldiers: If it moves, shoot it now, don't think about it. Repetition, repetition, repetition: Target pops up, you shoot. Target pops up, you shoot. Do that often enough, and, research shows, next time you see something pop up, you are more likely to shoot it, even if it's a real human in a real battle. This is not just a theory, it is documented by exit interviews from soldiers in later wars: The Army got what it wanted. (What armies do, and how that is similar to video games, is forcefully presented in the book On Killing by David Grossman, a former military officer (Little Brown, 1995)).

Now, what does this have to do with video games? The answer should be obvious by now to anyone who's ever seen one. The whole point is, if it moves, shoot it. Again and again and again.

Jerry: Well yes, but it's aliens and other fantasy figures they are shooting at, not people. Does it really carry over?

Theo: Yes it does. (And by the way, it's not all aliens; many video games have photo-realistic people complete with recognizable human faces, and blood splatters. You stick your handgun in their face at point blank range and pull the trigger.) Intellectually, no one would confuse a video game with real life, but we're not talking about an intellectual situation. We're talking about a scared kid with a Saturday night special in his hand seeing a member of a rival gang move his hand around in his coat. That kid is thinking at an operant conditioning level; what matters more than anything else is how many times in the past he has pulled the trigger. In reality or in a video game, it doesn't make that much difference. For a good discussion of the current consensus opinion on the effects of violence on TV and in movies and video games, see the book Mayhem by Sissela Bok (Perseus Books, 1998).

If you think watching violent TV is bad, video games are much, much worse. TV is a passive medium, requiring no participation from the viewer. A kid watching a murder on TV may not be benefiting much from it, and maybe he's learning a certain degree of callousness, but at least he is not being conditioned to pull the trigger. He is just watching. In the video game, he is the murderer, he pulls the trigger, he participates in the violence.

When soldiers are trained to kill, it is with a certain amount of context, with an effort to teach honor, duty, self restraint, and the difference between civilian and military life. When a 12-year-old kid comes out of his bedroom after spending three hours actively participating in the killing of people, what context has he had? what debriefing does he get?

I should mention that most of this chapter was written before the recent outbreak of kids shooting their classmates at school. To what degree video games contributed to those incidence is of course subject to endless debate, but the public does seem to have been alerted to the topic. There are even reports of, for example, Disney resorts removing violent video games that include humans as targets. A fine move, but obviously mainly symbolic. As long as parents pay to have killing arcades installed in their kid's bedrooms, the harm will be done.