What Are Video Games Turning Us Into?
Page 3 of 6 -- So goes a game of Grand Theft Auto, or GTA as it's universally known, the ne plus ultra of video games, the media's favorite whipping boy, the one conservatives have in mind when they talk about our poisonous popular culture. The game is rated "M," for mature, which it earned for "blood and gore, intense violence, strong language, strong sexual content, [and] use of drugs."
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Yet when I stood in line to buy the latest version, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, on its first day of release last October, I waited beside a remarkable array of ordinary-looking people: preteens out late on a school night; high school jocks holding hands with their skinny, shy girlfriends; young marrieds on their way home from work; gray-haired guys in business suits and expensive shoes.
As it turns out, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas generated a staggering $235 million in revenue in its first week on the street and became the best-selling video game of 2004. Can it possibly be that all those avid GTA-ers are on track to become violent killers?
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Scientists don't agree, yet, anyway, on whether violent video games cause violent actions. But what is clear is that video games can be an excellent teacher of mayhem for people, teenagers in particular, who are already experiencing mental, emotional, or societal conflicts - bullying, a violent home life, depression - and are prone to or are contemplating violence.
In 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal brought a stolen .22-caliber pistol to a prayer group at his Paducah, Kentucky, school. He had taken only a few practice shots with the rifle, yet each of the eight shots he fired hit someone. Three teenage girls were killed in the attack. Turns out Michael had learned his sharpshooting from video games, particularly Quake and Doom. The latter was also a favorite of Littleton, Colorado, school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
Those kinds of "first-person shooter" games, in which the player views the action through the eyes of an on-screen character, are an efficient way to learn how to kill without holding a gun, according to research by Dave Grossman, a retired US Army Ranger who studies the psychological aspects of human aggression. Violent video games do their work, Grossman says in his book Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, by honing the physical skills needed to shoot and hit a target while simultaneously desensitizing players to the act of killing - in essence, overriding the natural human aversion to murder.
But desensitization isn't just a worry for potential school shooters. It can affect average kids as well, making them more willing to choose and tolerate violence. "As a society, we can inoculate against aggression, but we don't have the same set of social checks and balances against desensitization," says John Murray, a visiting scholar at the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital in Boston. Murray uses MRI technology to map the brains of children as they experience violent media images. He found that though children consciously know they're being entertained, their brains store those violent images in the area reserved for significant events, the same place where events that can trigger post-traumatic stress disorders are stored. "This begins to explain why kids who watch a lot of violent images are more likely to lash out in a confrontational situation," Murray says. Continued...
