When Life Imitates Video By John Leow
when Life Imitates Videoby John Leowas It Real Life Or An Acted Out Vi
When Life Imitates Video By John Leo Was it real life or an acted-out video game? 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 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 morbid video games 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 their parents, many of whom like to blame the entertainment industry for their own failings. But there is a cultural problem here: We are now a society 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 video games 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 electronic games involve violence. Can it be that all this constant training in make-believe killing has no social effects?
Dress rehearsal. 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 unsure about the difference. Many of these 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 a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Psychologist David Grossman of Arkansas State University, a retired Army officer, thinks "point and shoot" video games have the same effect as military strategies used to break down a soldier's aversion to killing. During World War II only 15 to 20 percent of all American soldiers fired their weapon 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." Video games are much more powerful versions of the military's primitive discovery about overcoming the reluctance to shoot. Grossman says Michael Carneal, the schoolboy shooter in Paducah, Ky., showed the effects of video-game 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 video games. 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 video games help blur the boundary between fantasy and reality--guns carefully modeled on real ones, 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 intended victims of some video-game killings. This has the effect of exploiting resentments toward law enforcement and making real-life shooting of cops more likely. This sensibility turns up in the hit movie Matrix: world-saving hero Keanu Reeves, in a mandatory Goth-style, long black coat packed with countless heavy-duty guns, is forced to blow away huge numbers of uniformed law-enforcement people. "We have to start worrying about what we are putting into the minds of our young," says 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 effects of the killing games more seriously. Violent Media is Good for Kids Renowned comic-book author Gerard Jones argues that bloody videogames, gun-glorifying gangsta rap and other forms of 'creative violence' help far more children than they hurt, by giving kids a tool to master their rage. Is he insightful, or insane? —By Gerard Jones · At 13 I was alone and afraid. Taught by my well-meaning, progressive, English-teacher parents that violence was wrong, that rage was something to be overcome and cooperation was always better than conflict, I suffocated my deepest fears and desires under a nice-boy persona.
Placed in a small, experimental school that was wrong for me, afraid to join my peers in their bumptious rush into adolescent boyhood, I withdrew into passivity and loneliness. My parents, not trusting the violent world of the late 1960s, built a wall between me and the crudest elements of American pop culture. Then the Incredible Hulk smashed through it. One of my mother's students convinced her that Marvel Comics, despite their apparent juvenility and violence, were in fact devoted to lofty messages of pacifism and tolerance. My mother borrowed some, thinking they'd be good for me.
And so they were. But not because they preached lofty messages of benevolence. They were good for me because they were juvenile. And violent. The character who caught me, and freed me, was the Hulk : overgendered and undersocialized, half-naked and half-witted, raging against a frightened world that misunderstood and persecuted him.
Suddenly I had a fantasy self to carry my stifled rage and buried desire for power. I had a fantasy self who was a self: unafraid of his desires and the world's disapproval, unhesitating and effective in action. "Puny boy follow Hulk!" roared my fantasy self, and I followed him to new friends -- other sensitive geeks chasing their own inner brutes -- and I followed him to the arrogant, self-exposing, self-assertive, superheroic decision to become a writer. Eventually, I left him behind, followed more sophisticated heroes, and finally my own lead along a twisting path to a career and an identity.
In my 30s, I found myself writing action movies and comic books. I wrote some Hulk stories, and met the geek-geniuses who created him. I saw my own creations turned into action figures, cartoons, and computer games. I talked to the kids who read my stories. Across generations, genders, and ethnicities I kept seeing the same story: people pulling themselves out of emotional traps by immersing themselves in violent stories.
People integrating the scariest, most fervently denied fragments of their psyches into fuller senses of selfhood through fantasies of superhuman combat and destruction. I have watched my son living the same story -- transforming himself into a bloodthirsty dinosaur to embolden himself for the plunge into preschool, a Power Ranger to muscle through a social competition in kindergarten. In the first grade, his friends started climbing a tree at school. But he was afraid: of falling, of the centipedes crawling on the trunk, of sharp branches, of his friends' derision. I took my cue from his own fantasies and read him old Tarzan comics, rich in combat and bright with flashing knives.
For two weeks he lived in them. Then he put them aside. And he climbed the tree. A scene from Gerard Jones and Gene Ha's comic book "Oktane" But all the while, especially in the wake of the recent burst of school shootings, I heard pop psychologists insisting that violent stories are harmful to kids , heard teachers begging parents to keep their kids away from "junk culture," heard a guilt-stricken friend with a son who loved Pokémon lament, "I've turned into the bad mom who lets her kid eat sugary cereal and watch cartoons!" That's when I started the research. "Fear, greed, power-hunger, rage: these are aspects of our selves that we try not to experience in our lives but often want, even need, to experience vicariously through stories of others," writes Melanie Moore, Ph.D., a psychologist who works with urban teens.
"Children need violent entertainment in order to explore the inescapable feelings that they've been taught to deny, and to reintegrate those feelings into a more whole, more complex, more resilient selfhood." Moore consults to public schools and local governments, and is also raising a daughter. For the past three years she and I have been studying the ways in which children use violent stories to meet their emotional and developmental needs -- and the ways in which adults can help them use those stories healthily. With her help I developed Power Play, a program for helping young people improve their self-knowledge and sense of potency through heroic, combative storytelling. We've found that every aspect of even the trashiest pop-culture story can have its own developmental function.
Pretending to have superhuman powers helps children conquer the feelings of powerlessness that inevitably come with being so young and small. The dual-identity concept at the heart of many superhero stories helps kids negotiate the conflicts between the inner self and the public self as they work through the early stages of socialization. Identification with a rebellious, even destructive, hero helps children learn to push back against a modern culture that cultivates fear and teaches dependency. At its most fundamental level, what we call "creative violence" -- head-bonking cartoons, bloody videogames, playground karate, toy guns -- gives children a tool to master their rage. Children will feel rage.
Even the sweetest and most civilized of them, even those whose parents read the better class of literary magazines, will feel rage. The world is uncontrollable and incomprehensible; mastering it is a terrifying, enraging task. Rage can be an energizing emotion, a shot of courage to push us to resist greater threats, take more control, than we ever thought we could. But rage is also the emotion our culture distrusts the most. Most of us are taught early on to fear our own.
Through immersion in imaginary combat and identification with a violent protagonist, children engage the rage they've stifled, come to fear it less, and become more capable of utilizing it against life's challenges. I knew one little girl who went around exploding with fantasies so violent that other moms would draw her mother aside to whisper, "I think you should know something about Emily...." Her parents were separating, and she was small, an only child, a tomboy at an age when her classmates were dividing sharply along gender lines. On the playground she acted out " Sailor Moon " fights, and in the classroom she wrote stories about people being stabbed with knives. The more adults tried to control her stories, the more she acted out the roles of her angry heroes: breaking rules, testing limits, roaring threats.
Then her mother and I started helping her tell her stories. She wrote them, performed them, drew them like comics: sometimes bloody, sometimes tender, always blending the images of pop culture with her own most private fantasies. She came out of it just as fiery and strong, but more self-controlled and socially competent: a leader among her peers, the one student in her class who could truly pull boys and girls together. The title character of "Oktane" gets nasty I worked with an older girl, a middle-class "nice girl," who held herself together through a chaotic family situation and a tumultuous adolescence with gangsta rap. In the mythologized street violence of Ice T, the rage and strutting of his music and lyrics, she found a theater of the mind in which she could be powerful, ruthless, invulnerable.
She avoided the heavy drug use that sank many of her peers, and flowered in college as a writer and political activist. I'm not going to argue that violent entertainment is harmless. I think it has helped inspire some people to real-life violence. I am going to argue that it's helped hundreds of people for every one it's hurt, and that it can help far more if we learn to use it well. I am going to argue that our fear of "youth violence" isn't well-founded on reality , and that the fear can do more harm than the reality.
We act as though our highest priority is to prevent our children from growing up into murderous thugs -- but modern kids are far more likely to grow up too passive, too distrustful of themselves, too easily manipulated. We send the message to our children in a hundred ways that their craving for imaginary gun battles and symbolic killings is wrong, or at least dangerous. Even when we don't call for censorship or forbid " Mortal Kombat ," we moan to other parents within our kids' earshot about the "awful violence" in the entertainment they love. We tell our kids that it isn't nice to play-fight, or we steer them from some monstrous action figure to a pro-social doll . Even in the most progressive households, where we make such a point of letting children feel what they feel, we rush to substitute an enlightened discussion for the raw material of rageful fantasy.
In the process, we risk confusing them about their natural aggression in the same way the Victorians confused their children about their sexuality. When we try to protect our children from their own feelings and fantasies, we shelter them not against violence but against power and selfhood.
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The debate surrounding the influence of violent media, especially video games, on youth behavior has been longstanding and complex. Critics argue that exposure to realistic and graphic violence in video games can desensitize children to violence, erode empathy, and potentially incite real-world aggression. Conversely, some psychologists advocate viewing violent entertainment as a means for children to explore and process intense emotions such as rage, fear, and powerlessness in a controlled environment, thereby aiding emotional development and social resilience.
One of the central concerns is whether violent video games contribute directly to violent acts like school shootings. High-profile tragedies such as the Columbine massacre have fueled fears that immersive, realistic violent games influence unstable or vulnerable youths to commit acts of violence. Research indicates that many violent offenders, including perpetrators of mass shootings, have played such games extensively, which some believe cultivates a dangerous desensitization or trains violent responses. For instance, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris's known gaming habits, including their use of weapons resembling those in popular violent games, support claims of a link, even if causal relationships are complex and multifaceted. The simulation of violence in these games, often without moral consequence, can create a "dress rehearsal" effect, in which children become accustomed to violent responses and less empathetic toward victims.
Psychologist David Grossman emphasizes that violent video games can serve as military-style training tools that lower the psychological barriers to killing. Historical military practices during World War II demonstrated that exposure to simulated violence increased soldiers' willingness to shoot. Modern violent games elevate this effect, making the act of violence more accessible and acceptable to impressionable youths. The blurring of fantasy and reality through high-fidelity graphics and realistic sound effects can erode empathy, transforming players into sociopathic virtual killers. Some newer games explicitly target vulnerable populations by encouraging the killing of ordinary people or law enforcement officials, fostering a dangerous normalization of violence and chaos.
Nevertheless, proponents of violent entertainment argue that such media can have positive developmental functions. Gerard Jones, a comic book author, contends that violent stories provide a safe outlet for children to master their rage and explore power in a symbolic manner. He reflects on his own experiences growing up with Marvel Comics and superhero stories that embodied themes of pacifism and tolerance, even amid violent settings. Jones posits that violent narratives allow children to integrate their feelings of anger, fear, and frustration into their identities, fostering resilience and self-control. For example, his own son, initially frightened by the world, transformed fear into courage by engaging with stories of combat and heroism, ultimately developing confidence without resorting to destructive behavior.
Research by psychologists like Melanie Moore supports this perspective, highlighting that violent entertainment enables children to confront and process feelings of helplessness, rage, and powerlessness that are natural during developmental stages. Such stimuli help children develop a sense of potency and agency, teaching them to push back against cultural messages of dependency and fear. By engaging in imaginative combat and adopting heroic roles, children learn to manage their emotions constructively. Moore advocates for a nuanced understanding that recognizes the developmental value of violent stories, provided they are integrated into broader educational and emotional literacy efforts.
Critics caution that excessive exposure or poorly guided engagement with violent media can foster antisocial behaviors or diminish empathy. For instance, children exposed to violence without adequate adult guidance might imitate aggressive actions or develop distorted views of morality. The challenge lies in balancing protective measures with allowing children to explore their natural feelings. Overprotection, reminiscent of Victorian-era prudery about sexuality, risks suppressing healthy emotional development. Instead, fostering safe opportunities to express and understand anger and violence through storytelling and play can promote self-awareness and social competence.
Moreover, the cultural narrative often depicts violence as inherently harmful or corrupting, leading to censorship, scaremongering, and neglect of the possible benefits. Some scholars argue that the societal emphasis on preventing "youth violence" paradoxically results in increased passivity, distrust, and manipulation among children. Instead of shielding children from violence altogether, educators and parents should aim to guide their engagement, helping them channel violent fantasies into empowering and socially constructive outlets. Incorporating violence as a metaphor for overcoming challenges and mastering internal conflicts aligns with the idea of "creative violence" as a developmental tool.
In conclusion, the influence of violent media on youth is multifaceted. While there are undeniable risks associated with unmoderated exposure, denying children access altogether disregards their innate emotional needs