Not with a bomb, but an alternative world that "allows" us to practice anarchy.

You got it wrong, fella. Practice killing can harden your heart just like the real thing.

You won't fine me telling people how wonderful it is that killing is nuanced, but the universe is well featured.

You just don't get it. Remember the Marine firing range instructor who testified before Congress that his job was much easier since video games because the recruits no longer hesitated before firing on a human-shaped target?

What's YOUR expertise?

ormondotvos:

Not with a bomb, but an alternative world that "allows" us to practice anarchy.

You got it wrong, fella. Practice killing can harden your heart just like the real thing.

You won't fine me telling people how wonderful it is that killing is nuanced, but the universe is well featured.

You just don't get it. Remember the Marine firing range instructor who testified before Congress that his job was much easier since video games because the recruits no longer hesitated before firing on a human-shaped target?

What's YOUR expertise?

So millions upon millions of people have been playing this franchise for over 10 years now while violent crime goes down and you're betting that this Marine is the expert?

Whatever your criteria for valid proof is, it seems awfully low, because your average Iraq vet would laugh in your face -- games don't prepare you for war. They don't make killing easier. You're pressing a button in a game -- nothing more, nothing less.

Calm down, ormondotvos. This is an entertainment product, not a killing simulator. Are countless teenagers hardened and morally ruined by slasher flicks? Of course not. Video games are the same.

Anyone with a brain can tell the difference between 'killing' a construction on an array of lights (that is, a TV screen or computer monitor) and killing a real, living, breathing human.

There is simply no causal connection between the two.

Video games are the "satanic rock music" of our day. They are the bugbear of the nervous and the socially conservative. Gaming is a harmless commercial and artistic format that is pilloried because it is NEW.

Mark my words: anyone who claims that video games are dangerous or immoral in 2050 will be laughed out of the room.

I'm a gamer. So are all of my friends. The games I've played are almost uniformly violent -- from the outrageously stylized (Marines vs. Aliens in Unreal) to the morally abhorrent (Manhunt), to the morally ambiguous (GTA), to the frighteningly real (American Football games). I'm 31. I've been playing games of one sort or another for over 20 years.

I haven't killed anyone yet. Nor have any of my friends. Nor have any of their friends. Ad infinitum.

The truth is, video games don't make anyone any more or less violent than they already are. I suppose you could argue that video games make the world safer, since the naturally violent people can get it out of their system in a nice, safe, fictional universe.

Actually, I worry more about the kind of person who passes moral judgments on the basis of invalid comparisons more than I do about people who play video games.

Yeah, this is the way the US ends. Oh wait, you were talking about a video game. I assumed you were talking about something substantial, like the war, the economy, the environment...

Video games are harmless compared to the politicians who criticize them.

Based just on one anecdote, indeed. This was the impression of one Marine firing-range instructor. He must have been teaching for a long time, to form a baseline before 3D shooters and a good sample afterwards, and so may have had a generational problem with gaming. Obviously there was no control group.

If we're charitable about it, we can say that young people who are predisposed to join the military have become less hesitant about shooting human-shaped targets. What does that tell us about their empathy level, exactly? Cardboard targets can no longer walk the streets in safety? Maybe they are just more comfortable with the training process, from Medal of Honor or whatever, and not so worried about making fools of themselves. Doesn't mean they're going to go postal -- though the military is taking on more felons these days, which may be rather more relevant there.

It's not a good idea to expose your kids to media with graphic content, that much I will agree on. Childhood is not the time to be developing mental strategies to deal with the harsh realities of life. Kids just aren't up to that -- and I think anxiety would be as much of a resultant problem here as lack of empathy. But it's part of becoming an adult that we learn to cope with the fact of death, and can explore fictional portrayals of nasty or morally-ambiguous behavior.

A stressful environment can have seriously negative effects on brain development in children -- flattened affect, lack of empathy. Playing GTA would not be a positive contribution there. But what's a thousand times more important is real life stress and lack of security -- abuse, fear of crime, a harsh environment, etc. If a kid is playing GTA, the first thing to look at is whether that's a symptom of a generally neglectful and stressful environment, due to bad parenting, for example. That's what's really important here.

As for we well-adjusted adults, please don't patronize or try to infantilize us.

I've recently got into this game Defcon. Its basically a nuclear war strategy game. Very simple. The demo is free, and its excellent. The goal is to nuke more of you're enemy's cities than they do of yours.

<link>

Long story short, the next time that I'm commander at NORAD, you're damn right I'm pushing the red button. I'VE BEEN DESENSITIZED..................­...!

I wouldn't be as shrill as the original poster, but I don't think that you can discount the propaganda potential of all sorts of media on the people of a militaristic society (which we are).

When I was growing up in the 1980s me and the other boys loved Rambo. When we weren't watching it, we were playing it outside. It wasn't until I was older that I realized the propaganda value of the films; not that I'm the first to point it out, but Rambo re-fought (and won) Vietnam, and single-handedly took down the Evil Empire (well helping the Jihadists in Afghanistan). Before I knew anything about economics and politics, I knew that a Communist was the worst thing you could be.

I don't think that there's any way that a man of my generation goes off to join the military without thinking, at least once, about Rambo, Full Metal Jacket, or...Medal of Honor (the video game). Perhaps the films and games and cartoons didn't train them, or desensitize them, but I think it certainly normalized a mode of behavior and helped create a society, which encouraged them to be ready to fight, kill, and die for the concept that is America. You have to be made to love a nation. You have to be institutionalized into believing that a nation is worth your life. You have to be convinced that killing is OK.

We are a warrior nation. Our media helps keep us that way. If you doubt that, then I doubt your understanding of propaganda.

Those are some excellent points. However, representing, as it does, a criminal underworld continuously opposed the the police and the military, is it appropriate to consider GTA IV propaganda?

Propaganda of sorts, sure. Perhaps you'd call it pro-violence propaganda. How do you take a boy from Iowa raised to believe in the mostly non-violent teachings of Christ and get him to go to foreign lands, meet interesting people, and kill them? You have to first plant the seed that, under the proper circumstances, it's perfectly reasonable to scatter another man's thoughts on the wall.

the obvious contrary point to the above is: in war, it's kill or be killed. A rational person will kill someone to save his own life. Of course, a rational person would notice that a soldier has to travel thousands of miles with the full intent of putting himself in danger to be in that life-or-death situation. Without a lifetime of nationalistic and pro-violence propaganda, it would be far more difficult to encourage people who otherwise face little if any threat to their own family and friends to enlist to go and kill-or-be-killed.

And, I don't think we can ignore the fact that we are the most violent nation on earth. Not only have we killed hundreds-of-thousands in Iraq for nothing (and there's no great national depression over this -- we're far more likely to hear complaints about the cost in terms of dollars) but we kill each other at an alarming rate. Even with our decreasing murder rates we're still far more likely to be murdered than citizens of other developed nations are.

Let me say, too, that I can't wait to get my hands on the new GTA. I loved San Andreas, I love Call of Duty and the other shoot 'em ups on my 360. I'm also well aware of the fact that I'm a pretty violent person. I don't know that GTA made me more violent than I was before I played it, but I'm sure that GTA added to the life-long education in violence that this culture has provided me.

I wonder, if you saw a sixteen-year-old whose past-times included reading Dostoyevski, practicing equations in math club, and photography would you expect him to be more, or less, well adjusted than he whose entertainment is found in hours of simulated murder and problem solving games in which moral clarity is a hinderence to achievement of goals?

I'd argue that really depends on what we want him to be adjusted to.

Hmm, I always figured the U.S. would end by morphing into a cultural police state where even entertainment, fantasy, and imagination itself are strictly regulated (for the greater good of society, of course!). That, and the decision to abandon the scientific method for determining causation and go for anecdotal evidence and wild conjecture instead.

I guess we disagree about whether the game promotes violence.

I propose that media violence in general represents and serves our collective cultural yearning to understand and accept the violence inherent in our world - violence that we are powerless to put a stop to. Viewed in such a way, media that present intense violence and killing are no different from films and books about, say, hostile alien invasion or nuclear holocaust. It is evident to all the the human spirit contains great darkness - many of our stories represent attempts to understand and accept the horrible things that humans do to one another. What better way to understand a killer than to take on his role, in an ethically null zone? Killing digital represtentations of humans clearly harms no one.

You consider yourself a violent person because you enjoy violent video games. Why? Violence is a violence does. My wife loves the play Titus Andronicus, but couldn't harm a living thing. Is she violent?

I suspect that much of the backlash regarding GTA IV is from people who chose not to accept the intense horrors that take place in our world on a daily basis. I have little patience for those with such wilfully selective perception.

As a point of contrast, I do find ethical issues with the overtly sadistic (see SAW, Hostel, etc.) and insofar as GTA ventures into this territory, it troubles me.

faxmebeer:

What do you mean when you say you are a violent person? I hope you don't think that playing a violent video game makes you a violent person.

I only point this out because you are not a violent person unless you are committing acts of violence. If you are, then you should be with your doctor and/or your parole officer and not on internet boards. I doubt that this is the case, but I just wanted to clear up that playing a video game in no way makes you violent, by any reasonable definition of that word.

For a more in depth and thoughtful argument about the link between real violence and simulated violence, read Dave Grossman's On Killing. I disagree somewhat with his conclusions, but I also don't deny there may be some link. Will videogames push a kid over the edge to become a killer? I doubt it. Do video games and mass media innoculate society as a whole to violence? Well, that question isn't settled.