Cold-Blooded Killing Rocks Their World
Was it real life or an acted-out videogame?
Marching through a large building using various bombs and guns to pick off victims is a conventional video game scenario. In the Colorado massacre, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris used pistol-grip shotguns, as are seen in some video arcade games. The pools of blood, screams of agony and pleas for mercy must have been familiar; they are featured in some of the newer and more realistic kill-for-kicks games.
“With each kill,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “the teens cackled and shouted as though playing one of the more morbid videogames they loved.” And they ended their spree by shooting themselves in the head, the final act in the game Postal, and in fact, the only way to end it.
Did the sensibilities created by the modern video kill games play a role in the Littleton massacre? Apparently so. Note the cool and casual cruelty, the outlandish arsenal of weapons, the cheering and laughing while hunting down victims one by one. All of this seems to reflect the style and feel of the video killing games they played so often.
No, there isn’t any direct connection between most murderous games and most murders. And yes, the primary responsibility for protecting children from dangerous games lies with parents, many of whom like to blame the entertainment industry for their own failings.
But there is a larger problem here: We are now a culture in which the chief form of play for millions of youngsters is making large numbers of people die. Hurting and maiming others is the central fun activity in videogames played so addictively by the young. A widely cited survey of 900 fourth- through eighth-grade students found that almost half of the children said their favorite games involve violence. Can it be that all this constant training in make-believe killing has no social effects?
The conventional argument is that this is a harmless activity among children who know the difference between fantasy and reality. But the games are often played by unstable youngsters who are unsure about the difference. Many have been maltreated or rejected and left alone most of the time (a precondition for playing the games obsessively). Adolescent feelings of resentment, powerlessness and revenge pour into the killing games. In these children, the games can become dress rehearsal for the real thing.
Psychologist David Grossman of Arkansas State University, a retired Army officer, thinks “point and shoot” videogames have the same effect as military strategies used to break down a soldier’s aversion to killing. During World War II, only 15 percent to 20 percent of all American soldiers fired their weapons in battle. Shooting games in which the target is a man-shaped outline, the Army found, made recruits more willing to “make killing a reflex action.”
Videogames are much more powerful versions of the military’s primitive discovery about overcoming the reluctance to shoot. Grossman says Michael Carneal, the shoolboy shooter in Paducah, Ky., showed the effects of videogame lessons in killing. Carneal coolly shot nine times, hitting eight people, five of them in the head or neck. Head shots pay a bonus in many videogames. Now, the Marine Corps is adapting a version of Doom, the hyperviolent game played by one of the Littleton killers, for its own training purposes.
More realistic touches in videogames help blur the boundary between fantasy and reality - carefully modeled real guns, accurate-looking wounds, screams and other sound effects, even the recoil of a heavy rifle.
Some newer games seem intent on erasing children’s empathy and concern for others. Once, the intended victims of video slaughter were mostly gangsters or aliens. Now, some games invite players to blow away ordinary people who have done nothing wrong - pedestrians, marching bands, an elderly woman with a walker. In these games, the shooter is not a hero, just a violent sociopath. One ad for a SONY game says: “Get in touch with your gun-toting, testosterone-pumping, cold-blooded murdering side.”
These killings are supposed to be taken as harmless, over-the-top jokes. But the bottom line is that the young are being invited to enjoy the killing of vulnerable people picked at random. This looks like the final lesson in a course to eliminate any lingering resistance to killing. SWAT teams and cops now turn up as the targets of some videogame killings. This has the effect of exploiting resentments toward law enforcement, making shooting of real cops more likely. The sensibility turns up in the hit movie, “Matrix”: world-saving hero Keanu Reeves, in mandatory Goth-style long black coat packed with countless heavy-duty guns, is forced to blow away huge numbers of law enforcement people.
“We have to start worrying about what we are putting into the minds of our young,” says David Grossman. “Pilots train on flight simulators, drivers on driving simulators, and now, we have our children on murder simulators.” If we want to avoid more Littleton-style massacres, we will begin taking the social efects of the killing games more seriously.