Video Game Violence: Is the Gamer’s Ethics a Real Casualty of Virtual Mayhem?
“Yeah! Headshot!” my friend shouted triumphantly. I turned to see two dimly-lit faces illuminated by the flashing television screen. My friend continued with ecstatic glee, “This is why I love snipers in Call of Duty!” Silence then descended upon the two as their faces returned to a state of intense concentration. The tension in the air built as the tapping of buttons became more rapid and frantic. Then the silence was shattered. “Arg! Knifed from behind!” my friend cried in dismay as he tossed his controller to the floor.
This scene is a common sight in the living rooms of houses with teenagers. The addictive power of video games has ensnared a large percentage of today’s youth. Unfortunately, the most popular games are those in which the sole objective of play is violence, most notably the genre known as “first-person shooters.” In these games, one carries a gun and tromps around shooting at anything that moves. In single player mode, there is usually some formal enemy, such as the Russians, that one shoots at indiscriminately. This, however, is not even the worst part. The true popularity of the genre stems from the multi-player function, in which players arm themselves and attempt to murder each other without cause.
Spending hours killing and being killed in a virtual world must affect one’s perspective on right and wrong in the real one. Nonetheless, I do not agree with the classic argument that video games promote violence in children. I have seen no significant correlation between violent video games and physical violence in individuals. Rather, I believe that violence in video games makes the concept of death unreal.
In the minds of many teenagers, death exists only as a fantasy. While most would deny this assertion, its veracity shows itself in subtle ways. From my own experience, war is not a serious subject for today’s teenagers. Even young men returning from registering for the armed services upon their eighteenth birthday care little for stories of the recent casualties of the United States’ wars in the Middle East. While it cannot be said that such perspectives on war are entirely caused by video games, these games, I believe, do contribute to this modern teenage attitude. For many teenagers, killing is not wrong as long as the one being killed is an enemy. Likewise, dying is not frightening because death is not real. These powerful, yet almost unconscious beliefs are extremely influential in students’ attitudes towards what is perhaps the greatest moral and ethical dilemma man has encountered: war.
I do not expect teenagers to stop playing video games; however, I would like to ask all gamers to examine critically what it is that they are playing. Even if one rationalizes the violence by insisting that they know the difference between ethics in the game and ethics in the real world, the problem has been mostly solved. Simply giving the issue honest thought and acknowledging the difference is enough to keep the gamer in touch with the realities of violence.
Alexander Sogo