Marshall Brain's Blog

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Blood Games

In Time Magazine there is an article that reviews the new computer game Manhunt. It is a game about killing people. Here is how Time's reviewer describes it:

Manhunt is an exceptionally violent game - garrote a villain with a sharp wire, and a finely rendered mist of blood sprays from his severed carotid.

What sort of sociopath enjoys a game like this?

Why do we destroy terrorist training camps? They are simulations -- nothing more. No one is actually killed in a terrorist training camp. We tear these camps down because we believe that people who practice terrorism in a training camp have a high probability of terrorizing people in the real world.

If I make a video game that teaches people terrorist tactics, can I sell the game? If not, then why can someone sell a video game where people act out murder over and over again on-screen? How is it different?

There is an interesting and unintended postscript in the December 7 issue of Time. The article is called "Does Kindergarten Need Cops? The youngest schoolkids are acting out in really outrageous ways. Why?" Here's a quote from it:

...a 6-year-old who told his teacher to "shut up, bitch," a first-grader whose fits of anger ended with his peeling off his clothes and throwing them at the school psychologist, and hysterical kindergartners who bit teachers so hard they left tooth marks.

"I'm clearly seeing an increasing number of kindergartners and first-graders coming to our attention for aggressive behavior," says Michael Parker, program director of psychological services at the Fort Worth Independent School District, which serves 80,000 students. The incidents have occurred not only in low-income urban schools but in middle-class areas as well. Says Parker: "We're talking about serious talking back to teachers, profanity, even biting, kicking and hitting adults, and we're seeing it in 5-year-olds." And these are not the kids who have been formally labeled emotionally disturbed, says Nekedria Clark, who works in Parker's department.

Several possible explanations are offered. Here is one:

Hinshaw and other experts on child behavior also point out that aggressive behavior in children has been irrefutably linked to exposure to violence on TV and in movies, video games and other media. "Dozens of studies have shown this link. Probably hundreds," says psychologist Jerome Singer, co-director of the Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center. "The size of the effect is almost as strong as the relationship between smoking and cancer."