Video Violence

In one day, over the weekend, I killed 138 people, most of them teenagers and younger.  I felt good that day.

That is the way teens grow up on the Internet, killing a few people every day with guns, rockets and electric bolts.  Most of the time, I don’t think about the killing, just about whether I’m good or bad at it at any particular moment.  There are some people out there who are much better killers than me.  I can’t help but think that we find killing more acceptable because we do it every day - we even pay to do it since playing on line is not free.

Suppose we killed aliens or cartoon characters like in Who’s Afraid of Roger Rabbit?  Would it matter that the violence was directed at something that is not human?  Some vendors have done that with zombies.  There you kill zombies who are already dead anyway, so it doesn’t matter.  The thing is, I don’t get the kick from killing a stupid zombie that I get from shooting some 15-year old kid who has shot me 5 times before that same morning.  I look for that guy and try to kill him.  I have asked myself more than once if there is something wrong with liking this kind of entertainment, and he answer was always no.  I know it isn’t real because those same people are back the next day.

The American Psychologial Association says this kind of behavior “increases aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, and aggressive affects” but they cannot show a relationship between that and real criminal or violent behavior.  They might want to look at that again. My intuition says that 15-year old is going to be damned good at killing if he decides to start doing it for real.