by Arthemus Black

Created on: November 22, 2009   Last Updated: November 23, 2009

Real life violence and video games. Do these terms mean what we think they mean? This is the first question people must ask themselves, when talking about these two things in the same sentence. Are violent video games any less real, than the stuff we see on the evening news?

Is real life violence any more real, than the pixelated blood and gore we see in those games? As technology advances, it is becoming more and more difficult to see the difference between a well animated headshot in Call of Duty 4 and a shaky, covertly circulated camera footage from Iraq on which some random guy is shot in the face.

Yet, somehow we do have the ability to tell the difference, no matter how well animated or designed the video game, or how shaky and blurry the footage really is. This is not an innate, natural ability, this is a learned trait, that we acquire growing up, and that learning process has been disrupted for some time now.

To be able to tell apart real and simulated violence, we must experience both of these in order to learn the differences between them. That's how our brain works. The more we experience these, the more we are able to tell the difference.

In the 90's movies were blamed for violence, because they contained simulated aggression and gore, just like now video games are blamed for the same thing. As kids, we experienced those movies with a very underdeveloped sense of reality.

As soon as we were able to walk and talk, we saw John Rambo mow down an entire army of soldiers in the bloodiest ways possible. We saw aliens bursting out of peoples' chests, we saw Predators skinning humans and hanging them upside down from trees and rooftops. We saw slasher movies and gore flicks chock-full of blood, tearing flesh, mutilation and agonizing death-screams.

We saw people getting maimed, tortured, humiliated and killed in almost life-like and in totally impossible ways. We read comic books, violence, anger and frustration leaking from every page. We played out these experiences using action-figures and role-playing games, and we invented our own stories using these experiences.

By the time we reached the end of puberty, we experienced death, destruction, blood and violence in levels difficult to comprehend. But with pure common sense, education and guidance from our peers and family, we were able to process these experiences and learn to handle them, to put them on the right shelf, so to speak.

We knew the things in movies weren't real, we knew those people didn't

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