Video Games and Violence

Priming and social learning, theories which essentially point to a link between what we observe in media (violence is often a key example) and how we act in real life, can both be used in the argument that violent video games promote violence. Proponents of this argument highlight the consequences-free environment video games provide for players to perform acts of violence usually far more extreme than would ever be seen in real life. This environment, the argument goes, desensitizes those people who play video games regularly and leads them to subconsciously dissociate violence from reality.

As a gamer myself, I have always found this argument ridiculous when applied to cases like school shootings where, in a desperate attempt to find someone to blame (somehow overlooking the shooters as targets), people almost invariably turn to violent video games, overlooking the fact that out of the millions of people who play video games only a small fraction go on to actually shoot up a school. However, a video I saw a couple of months ago did make me stop to reconsider my opinons.

In April of this year the anonymous watchdog organization WikiLeaks released terrifying footage from the gunsight camera of a US apache helicopter over New Baghdad from July, 2007. The footage shows the view from the helicopter of some airstrikes it carried out which resulted in the deaths of at least eighteen people, two of whom were journalists, and includes audio of the radio communications going on at the time. The airstrikes represented yet more in a long line of miscalculated attacks resulting in civilian casualties, but most disturbing was the insight into the minds of the soldiers carrying out the attacks, as the shooters can be heard being glibly encouraged to "Keep shootin'", and laughing when a target is hit.

The exchange that can be heard sounds frighteningly like what might be heard from a group of people playing one of the many video games that simulate war. With games getting more and more realistic, the view from the reach apache helicopter looks very similar to what would be seen on screen, and while I don't believe that the trained soldiers that can be heard in the video didn't understand the difference between a game and real life, their general tone and reaction to the situation resembled to an unsettling degree what could be found in reaction to a realistic video game.