Earlier this evening I watched a documentary about the history of the video game industry and was pleasantly surprised to see a friend of mine being interviewed. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, since he’s a leading expert in analyzing video games and their psychological/cultural effects. Dr. Henry Jenkins, the founder and Director of the Comparative Media Studies lab at MIT, was speaking about violence in video games, its relation to such incidents as the Columbine shooting, and what possible link there may be between media violence and acts of agression in the real world. Hearing that in the context of the history of the industry and the progressive development of gaming got me thinking.

    The documentary illustrated the two opposing sides in the debate of whether or not video games are too violent. The game developers claim that gamers know the difference between fantasy and reality, and that the violence may actually provide an outlet for teenage frustration. The opposing side, mostly helmed by parents, accuse the gaming industry of not taking responsibility for desensitizing children to violence, sensationalizing gore, and – in the case of Columbine – allegedly even inducing violent acts.

    Since they used the Columbine shootings as their example, I’ll follow suit. It should be no surprise that both Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were avid players of Doom and Quake. Those games were not solely responsible for enticing these young men to act out in such a horrific manner, but I do think they hold some of the blame. Yes, the parents are at fault. Yes, the bullies at school went too far. But I have yet to hear anyone address what seemed so suddenly obvious to me while watching the documentary.

    Most of the innovations in gaming artificial intelligence and war-related games has stemmed from development within the military to create training simulators for the soldiers. Using video games, soldiers are trained how to navigate battles, kill effectively, and – in the case of some specific training programs – learn to remove themselves emotionally from a war scenario. The structure and foundation for Doom, Quake, and other first person shooter games came from these military programs.

    How does this apply to Columbine? While the boys may have been disturbed enough to be violent without any help from a video game, I believe that having spent so many hours playing Doom, they had essentially trained themselves to be more effective killers. They developed psychological responses to battle-like situations, heightening their abilities to kill quickly and effectively, while also learning to distance themselves. Or, in other words, they had become “desensitized,” but in a far more deadly way. Like a highly trained Marine, they could kill and not be affected by it. The game may not have been the root cause, but it increased the scope of the attack.

    One game developer they interviewed about this argument actually had the nerve to say that the violence didn’t matter, because the only people playing were “geeks who couldn’t hurt anyone even if they tried.” We’ve already seen what geeks can do when they’ve been pushed too hard, when they’ve had too much training, when they feel too comfortable with a gun in their hand – virtual or otherwise.

    I don’t think all violence in video games is bad, just like I don’t think all violent movies are bad. I just question the appropriateness of senseless violence, especially in the hands of young children or – most especially – teenagers. I’m especially uncomfortable with games like Grand Theft Auto. You can say “it’s just a game” all you want, but it won’t change the sociopathic nature of the objectives within the game. When you can gain extra points for bludgeoning pedestrians to death with a baseball bat, shown in your living room in graphic detail, what are you really programming into your sub-conscious? When young teenage boys are telling their avatar to have sex with a hooker in the backseat of a stolen car, then killing her afterward just to get the virtual $200 back, what does that teach an impressionable mind? I’m not saying a fourteen year old boy will go on a rampage necessarily, but they may develop abusive habits without any thought for the consequences. Cause hey, at least it’s not as bad as the video game they play every afternoon.

    Not all games are as sociopathic as Doom or Grand Theft Auto, but I still find some of them concerning. For the past couple weeks, my local movie theater has been playing a commercial before the movie for ‘Call of Duty’, a game that I’ve heard some call “violence with a purpose.” They excuse the realistic violence in the game as okay because it’s supposedly not senseless – players are reenacting battles from World War II. They’re not just shooting random aliens, they’re shooting Nazis, and somehow that makes it okay.

    As games become more and more realistic, I believe games like ‘Call of Duty’ may present even more complex problems than what we’ve already experienced with the likes of Klebold and Harris. There is a reason those soldiers in WWII endured the horrors of war – so we wouldn’t have to. War is hell. Because of this, after every war in the past century, soldiers return home with a mass of psychological disorders related to the traumas of war. As we watch the graphics improve, the bits increase, the experience become all the more realistic, is it that unreasonable to believe we may be facing similar psychological disorders among future adolescent gamers? Teenagers who fought in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam came back with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or one of its predecessors. Well-adjusted gamers, when so fully immersed in even a simulated war experience may develop similar psychological disorders. Or worse, they won’t develop any disorders at all, because they’ve become so well trained that even the horrors of the Holocaust won’t make them flinch.

    I think it’s very worrying. Again, I don’t think these games are the root cause of violence. There are always underlying issues, and I think it’s the effects these games are having on the underlying issues that people are ignoring. I’ve met my fair share of men who have been desensitized to violence and its consequences. I can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, their ability to accept actual, real-world violence with that degree of carelessness isn’t at least partly related to their gaming habits. Games have become so ugly, so real, so gorey, and yet these images never seem to evoke the emotional responses a normal, well-adjusted person would have when faced with such perversions of human nature. And that scares the crap out of me.