Video shootout: the games kids play

MY MINNESOTA hometown is the sort of place where neighbors look in oil each other and leave the doors unlocked. As in Lake Woebegon, the children are all above average. In September one of those children brought a .22-caliber Colt semiautomatic to school and shot and killed two of his classmates.

As with similar shootings at Columbine and in Kentucky, the media were quick to note that the shooter (in this case 15-year-old Jason McLaughlin) had been an avid video game player. This almost goes without saying. The National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF) reported that in a survey of 778 students in grades four through 12, 87 percent of all students and 96 percent of the boys said they play video games regularly.

Shortly after the shooting in Cold Spring, I asked my college students about their experience with video games. The young men in the room had a lot to say--video games are a large part of their life.

Today's video games are far from the world of early games like Pac Man or Super Mario. They are visually stunning, complex and deeply immersive. There are role-playing games, puzzle and strategy games, simulations and sports games such as virtual soccer or skateboarding.

The largest category of games, however, and the ones my students prefer, are "first-person shooter" games in which the player faces down other players, monsters or characters. Favorite games have names like Street Fighter, Vice City, Doom, America's Army and Manhunt. One student noted, "Everything but the sports games requires you to kill."

And the killing has become increasingly graphic. In the '80s or early '90s, shooting an opponent resulted in the collapse of that figure on the screen. Today's graphics provide gore, flying body parts, realistic writhing and screams of pain. "There's blood everywhere," one student said. While most games used to come with a "blood off" default setting, today's games are generally "blood on." The new games involve not only more graphic kills, but more kills. The video world is especially hostile toward women--games often include rape scenes, prostitution, full nudity and disembodied body parts.

In response to this increase in violence, the Entertainment Software Rating Board has come up with a system designed to keep the most violent games out of the hands of young children. But this system is little understood by parents and often unenforced by vendors. The most restrictive rating, AO (adults only), is for games that include "graphic depictions of sex and/or violence." Most major retailers will not sell AO games, so this rating is almost never used.

Some games that include both graphic sex and violence, such as Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, are rated M (not appropriate for persons under 17). Yet according to the NIMF survey, 87 percent of boys in grades four through 12 play M-rated games, and 78 percent of the boys rank these games among their top five favorites.

But it's only a game, right? Killing a fictional character doesn't cross a moral boundary.

The question is what the simulated violence does to the player. Several recent studies offer evidence that playing violent video games increases aggressive behavior. A Japanese study of fifth and sixth graders showed a correlation between the amount of time spent playing video games and later physical aggression. Two other studies found a similar link between violent game playing and aggressive thoughts and behavior, even after controlling for innate temperament and exposure to violence in other sources, such as movies and television.

THE RESULTS of these studies are no surprise to the U.S. military, which uses video games as recruiting and training devices. America's Army, a first-person shooter game, is distributed on CD by army recruiters and is downloadable from the army's Web site. The Marine Corps has used the game Dune. David Grossman, retired professor of psychology at West Point, says that these games provide a script for rehearsing the act of killing: "It is their job to condition and enable people to kill ... [These games] teach a person how to look another person in the eye and snuff their life out."

While it is disturbing that these games imitate war, it is even more disturbing to realize that these days war seems to be imitating video games. The current policy of preemptive attack, for example, sounds like life in the video game world, where you must "get the bad guys" before "they get you." Video games are strong on quick reaction to threats and weak on reasoned response.

The administration's focus on the initial conflict rather than postwar planning also resembles the video game universe, where games never progress past killing. General Wesley Clark has described Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's vision for Operation Iraqi Freedom as simplistic--detect and destroy enemy forces with minimum risk to one's own forces. This vision emphasizes dominance through precision strikes. In the words of one senior officer: "Imagine a box of enemy territory 200 kilometers wide and 200 kilometers deep; we should be able to detect every enemy target there, and to strike and kill any target we want." War as video game.