by Alexander Howard

Created on: June 17, 2009   Last Updated: June 23, 2009

The argument about the harmful nature of violent video games on the people who play them has been well documented. And it has been largely grounded in reason and common sense. But it does not hold true in all or even a majority of cases.

Video games a participatory activity, meaning that unlike a film or book, the viewer is complicit, or even directing, the action and violence that goes on on their computer or television screen. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman (ret.) argues in his explanation of the psychology of killing or "killology" as he has termed it, that video games help condition players into being more willing to kill another human being. Grossman bases this idea in an explanation of how the Army increased the percentage at which enlisted men discharged their weapons during combat without being under the supervision of an officer.

The explanation goes something like this: soldiers who had been trained to shoot at a bullseye during target practice generally failed to fire their weapon at the enemy unless ordered to by an officer. So the Army shaped their targets to look like human beings. They immediately saw a rise in unsupervised engagement. Then the Army shaped their targets to fall to the ground after being shot, a mimicry of actual human behavior. Again, an increase in efficiency. Grossman conjectures that because in a video game human behavior is modeled in much more detail than practice targets, players are therefore engaging in an effective form of conditioning, breaking down the psychological barriers which would prevent them from killing. Consequently, because video games are for the amusement of the general public and not part of military training, Grossman labels first person shooters "murder simulators."

The media has latched onto this concept, especially as video games become more popular. For instance, there have been a number of school shootings where the media has linked video games to the shooter. Columbine, Virginia Tech, the recent Albertville shooting in Germany, all of these have been connected to video games, which have served as the media common link between each one. Of course, there have been other common factors, which are generally not discussed. All of the shooters are young males, all of them were social outcasts with very little being done by anyone near them to intervene, all of them had troubling home lives. But we are a people who generally make decisions by what we believe to be common knowledge, and as the adage

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