Living in Brooklyn the way I do I am isolated from what goes on in most of the country. You see I live in a neighborhood where stuff goes on much as it did in the 1950's. Or at least for me. I mean I don't spend all my time in front of the TV playing Xbox. I don't have a video console. I am sure that is a function of my age because I bet young kids here have them and play with them all day long. Since I don't really have contact with them I guess I am out of the loop.
Anyhoo I am down in Florida waiting to go on the ship on Saturday. While I am there a young relative was over the house. He is a teen who is home schooled. Not really socialized. Spent the whole time playing Xbox. I think it was Call of Duty |Zombie or something. The whole game consisted of him killing Zombies. Reloading and pulling the trigger. That was it. Nothing else.
You can't tell me this shit doesn't have an effect on the kids who do it 24-7. Not all of them obviously. But it just takes one or two. Killing without remorse. No real blood or guts. Just reloading and killing.
When I was a kid the person who taught me to shoot to us out and put a can of tomato sauce on a fence and had us shoot it. Sauce flew all over the place. He told us to imagine that was blood. With these video games there is no imagination. Only desensitization if that is a word.
I have to say that the people who say these video games have an effect on some of these shooters might have something there. I don't know what to do about it.
But watching this kid....I was getting scared.
7 comments:
It is disturbing watching boys play these games like robots. One of our best drone joystick soldiers was a video game savant. I would like a GPS implanted in that motherfucker's body when he is discharged.
It's complicated, this thing of murdering as many people as you can. Are video games to blame? These guys don't put much stock in that. Unsocialized homeschoolers are a much overplayed and wrong stereotype. In fact, homeschooled kids are much more socialized than kids who went to public schools. Far more likely to be involved in politics as volunteers, candidates, and poll workers. Far more likely to be involved in Scouts, community league ball teams as players, umpires, and coaches, and far more likely to continue community involvement well into adulthood.
Are there wackos to try to shelter their kids from society and end up homeschooling as a means of escape? Absolutely. I know some. But none of their kids went on a murderous rampage. None appear to be unstable to that point. That's not to minimize any concern you have about the relative's kid, but mass murderers are far more likely to be a product of our public institutions than overprotective parents.
I know it's anecdotal, but here's a partial listing of homeschooling kids I know:
-the gal who majored in Linguistics at UNC (go Heels) on a full-ride scholarship and who aced the SAT. 1600.
-the guy who graduated from UNC (go Heels) to study computer programming and has a cush job coding.
-his older sister, who is a lawyer, former public defender, and now a legal advocate against international sex trafficking (who probably is on somebody's "I want to kill her" list).
-the sheriff's deputy, who is a resource officer in the local school (good guy with gun, just in case).
-the girl who's a pharmacist now.
You get the picture.
One of our friends took their homeschooled kids to Six Flags in Atlanta for a homeschooler's day. He pointed to some of the freakish people and said to his kid, "You see what we could have been like"? We did a similar thing, and my kid said to me, "Dad, I can see why homeschoolers have a bad name. These people are weird." And some are. So are the emos and stoners you'll find in public schools.
When we were kids, there were hand wringers who fretted over the coyote shooting the road runner. Someone who has trouble with the lines between reality and fantasy...has trouble with the lines between reality and fantasy. Anything and everything might be the trigger to unleash a crapload of crazy on the nearest target. For normal, rational, and healthy people, I don't think a video game or a cartoon is going to push them against to and over the line into murderous mayhem.
My $.02.
windbag, Great comment!
It's all about the father. If he's there most boys make it through adolescence into early manhood. If he's absent, big trouble. And the father doesn't have to be perfect, not by a long shot, just there.
Boys have also been taught that getting in a fight in school and acting like a boy is as bad as bringing a gun to school. It is not surprising a few snap.
More on the missing dad angle.
Just so, Windbag.
Troop, it's just your age. You're echoing what the old folks were saying about your spaghetti Westerns and porn and comic books or trashy novels.
And they were just echoing their elders, bitching about pulp fiction, jazz music and dungarees.
Also, while it's not impossible that one day there will be games that are genuinely desensitizing, what's going on when you watch someone else play is that you're seeing a literal depiction where a hardcore gamer just sees numbers.
There's an interesting book by a guy named Ralph Koster called "A Theory of Fun For Game Design", where he proposes this idea for a game:
You're a Nazi running a gas chamber, and you have to pack Jews into the chamber as quickly and efficiently as possible. When you pack them in just right, they get cleared out, but if you don't they start to pile up, until finally you lose when they overflow.
Horrifying, right?
It's also just Tetris. A noxious setting for it, but from a gameplay standpoint, identical.
What most people don't get is that, were there such a game, it would instantly become Tetris for serious gamers. That's how they'd see it.
From a video gamer's standpoint, complaints about desensitization are like someone coming upon a game of chess and complaining about all the murder.
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