Any parent that let’s his kids sit around the house and play this inane video game crap should have their muddled heads examined. Get the kids a soccer ball and send them out doors to get some exercise and fresh air. No, playing cowboys and Indian’s is not the same. The kids are moving around, interacting with other kids and using their imaginations as well as their legs.

I can't wait for the PX to sell Civilization V.

I'll play the British, and crush the American Rebellion under my jackboot. Long live the King!

Few things:

Call of Duty: Black Ops is made by Treyarch, not Infinity Ward. Both are studios within Activision. Black Ops is not part of the Modern Warfare moniker, either, it's set in the Cold War.

The game that featured the Taliban as an opposing force was Medal of Honor, not Call of Duty. Medal of Honor is made by Electronic Arts.

I spent quite a bit of effort on other forums, sometimes under my GSF moniker other times with my real name, fighting the whole concept of these games. I received ALOT of vile feedback from game addicts who never attempted to understand the hurt that video games that "kill" US troops are not games at all.
My main complaint, along with others in my situation, was the too ultra reality aspect especially when the game "Fallujah" was to be introduced. I went strongly against my Marine bretheren--Fallujah battle veterans who colluded with the manufacturer when it was revealed that either real Marine KIA's were part of the game or the circumstances of their death. I can assure any player that when a Marine dies, there is no real life end of game, reboot, and play again. The hurt that some gold star families felt that the manufacturer was to use their son's death in some type of "entertainment" was beyond conception. I have seen others play these video games--"others" being pre-pubesecent kids--who can only fantasize that war equates to glory. How many times have I read that PFC or LCpl Smuckatelli was only in 6th grade when 9/11/01 occurred and "he always wanted to be a Marine" and now he is but another name on a KIA list. Far too many times.
Please, give your kids soccer balls for Christmas.

Very well researched. I am a big fan of Grossman and agree that these games aren't for kids.

That said, I think adults should be free to play what they want. I don't think AAFES made a good call on restricting this game. Whatever, seems resolved now.

I watched my soldiers in MWR nightly playing Call of Duty - I only embarassed myself once or twice by trying to play (and only upon their insistent invitation). I'd kick their ass with an Atari 2600 controller, or even a mouse and WASD, but those Playstation controllers are beyond my digital management capabilities. I thought morosely that they don't even get away from the war when they are trying to get away from the war...but I am also thankful that they fired far more rounds on the screen than they ever did on the roads of Iraq.

I don't want to raise GSFs ire again, but I was glad he brought up the Fallujah game. My question has to be though, what makes Black Hawk Down ok and Fallujah not? The distance of time? The relevance of the number and type of casualties? Just seems a bit arbitrary. I know that many families were upset by the Fallujah game, but others were supportive and even quite a few of the developers were Vets. Where is that thin line between honoring some one and capitalizing upon their misfortune...I bet there's some Chilean miners about to find out.

I don't know the answers on this one, I'll get right back to you after I come back from the movies...gonna see "I Spit on Your Grave."

(P.S. I am not actually going to see that movie, I was trying to prove the point that lots of our entertainment is really sick these days. I will admit I have seen most of the original version of that movie, but I ain't proud of it)

I made a typ-o regarding the name on the box. I'm glad to see the message regarding the contents wasn't dismissed as a consequence.

I would like to point out that games have been shown to produce positive outcomes, and that not every game is evil. Despite the popularity of the FPS genre (70 million people logged 6,000 years worth of playing time in the first week of the new Halo game's release alone), more people still play "bored" games like mah jong, bejewled, tetris and luxor. These can actually promote intelligence like a crossword or sudoku.

I think one of the most successful educational games ever has to be Oregon Trail. I knew what dysentery and whooping cough were by the time I was six thanks to that game. I also came away with the mindset that the exploration of America was not some happy affair with Laura Ingalls Wilder running down a flowery hill to the new family homestead. People died going West, often in horrific ways. The game provided a historical context of 1800's hardship. It was a valuable context to have when I was a PL in 2003 in Iraq and a guy told me his daughter had just died of dysentery. "Oh," I thought. "So we're kind of on THAT level here." Literally and figuratively, it put me a little ahead of the game.

That's the core of the writing-- what is the context here? If we're angry that "Taliban" kill Soldiers in a game, why are we not angry when they're generic terrorists? Why is it that eight troops dying in a helicopter crash is a tragedy, but you have to kill a hundred guys in a game to unlock an achievement? For that matter, why are game makers calling something like killing one hundred people an achievement in the first place?

For those making the "soccer ball" argument for a more active lifestyle, consider your opinion on a paint ball instead. Just because the kid has to run through a grassy field and sweat to play, does that make things better? I don't know the answer to that question.

There's no putting the demons back in the box. The question now is how we live with them. I don't believe that every game player will be turned into a murderer or terrorist by a round of either Medal of Honor or Call of Duty, but if there is a line to be drawn, it should be drawn clearly. AAFES doesn't seem to abide by its own standard all the time.

"I don't believe that every game player will be turned into a murderer or terrorist by a round of either Medal of Honor or Call of Duty,"

I don't believe any of them will be.

US Murder Rate per 100,000 in 1992, the year Wolfenstein 3D was released:

9.3

US Murder Rate per 100,000 in 2009:

5.0

I'm not sure I share all the same concerns about "video games messing with people's heads", but I think the piece here is thought provoking and well written. Definitely a more insightful read than most that take on this topic. No disrespect to JPWREL, but your response is the more run-of-the-mill view... "kids should be outside running around!"; I don't disagree, but it fails to examine the specific relationship people have between games and 'real life', which this piece attempts to do...on top of the amusing analysis of the social dynamics of "OpFor" sensitivities. (I recall Far Cry 2 catching heat for being an African-shoot-em-up as well...)

There have been studies (no I dont have any citations off the top of my head) showing that people who play lots of 'violent video games' are no more violent than the average, and are in fact more likely to be emotionally stable than kids that never play them. Some of these speculated that the 'fantasy' element of violence actually helps dissipate the impulse for violence, as opposed to reinforcing/feeding it or inuring people, desensitizing people to violence. However, I generally think most studies like this are 90% bullshit anyway...but I thought the idea kind of interesting.

Increasingly there are games that allow people (or even encourage) to "choose" whether to be a good-guy or a amoral killing machine (Fallout 3 comes to mind)... and provide different outcomes for each path chosen. In Fallout you can actually choose to nuke an entire innocent village... enslave children...Murder anyone for any reason and loot their corpse, etc. etc. Do I think the game 'encourages' amoral behavior, or has a deleterious effect on people's psyches? Not really. But its interesting to note that games increasingly provide the *option* to do bad things and witness their consequences, unlike, say, America's Army, where an American Soldier can do no wrong. I think its possible that the sanitized version of reality, where the world is divided between Perfect Soldiers and the Universal Hajji, is potentially more dangerous. If 'Evil' is stripped out of the choice matrix, then you're never put in a position to actually choose to be Good.

I wonder if 'choose your own adventure' books harmed me as a child... :)

is that it treats video games as something special - which they are - and which they are not.

To be sure, there are problems with video games: most critically that they create a (possibly addictive) way to escape from reality, and that the realistic violence in them may desensitize users to real violence. But what makes videogames different from other forms of entertainment, and dare I say art?

Noted movie critic Roger Ebert has argued that videogames cannot be considered art because they are interactive and malleable. However, I disagree; even the act of watching a movie or reading a book is interactive, and different people will experience the same book or movie differently at different times. In any case, Ebert has given up the argument, not because his opinion has changed, but because he confesses he doesn't have much experience with videogames, and has no wish to obtain more (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html).

So, again, what makes videogames different? Is there really any difference between an extreme bibliophile who shuns other people and a 30-something playing games in his parents' basement? As others have pointed out, games can be social experiences, and perhaps they can even teach the same concepts of teamwork and leadership as sports:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_270/8060-The-12-Year-Old-English-Kid-Who-Carried-Us-to-Victory

Graphic violence is ever present in media, and always has been; consider the Illiad's stomach-turning death scenes that make the standard FPS red mist look tame in comparison. And yet realistic depictions of the brutality of combat have always met with acclaim from soldiers, from the Illiad to Saving Private Ryan.

And this is why the criticism of 6 Days in Fallujah irritates me so much. We've all seen American soldiers' deaths in media, including ones based on real people. And every gamer has probably shot a few 'good guys' playing glorified versions of real conflicts (such as in the new Medal of Honor and the Modern Warfare games). The makers of 6DiF, to my understanding, were trying to truly represent the complexities and dangers of combat, such as the difficulty of avoiding civilian casualties. It may not have been perfect, but at least it was an attempt to be part of the solution, and not the problem. Videogames are a big part of how young people relate to the world, and ignoring that and saying that tough issues shouldn't be addressed in them isn't doing anyone any good.

I agree that video games are a greater part of an entertainment industry that has endeavored to produce more vivid and 'realistic' visuals of brutality over the years. It's interesting that point is made after someone mentioned Ebert's commentary on games-as-art. It was just recently that the powers-that-be at AAFES theaters decided not to run the new movie about Pat Tillman's death. That decision seemed to be more economic than anything else, but it ruffled a few feathers.

With regard to murder rates declining since the introduction of the genre, I stand on Grossman's research. Keep in mind that for most of his professional career the man worked on figuring out ways to make people better able to overcome the human instinct to avoid killing. If he believes video games are a good tool for accomplishing that, I think we should listen. The point is that, while a gamer doesn't go out and immediately commit the act, research indicates that very specific regions of the brain are desensitized to displays of violence. The moral centers become numb to it, while the mid-brain is encouraged to associate the visuals with a "rush." The same can be done with movies, but it's the contention of researchers that the player's active participation in the violence makes the game a more potent stimulus.

I think the 'Saving Private Ryan' comparison is off the mark. Again, the point of things is context. The end sequences of either that movie or 'Black Hawk Down' paint the tone of those films eloquently. They're not meant to be John Wayne features where the hero runs around vanquishing an evil empire. They show the human horror of combat through the infantryman's eyes.

That's the fundamental challenge FPS games face. They can't make the enemy human or engage the audience on a level that shows the moral or spiritual pain of the protagonist, because the game makes YOU the protagonist (hence the "first person" element) and the enemy has to be a loathsome thing. You can't invoke a moral context that shows the repercussions of killing, because then killing wouldn't be fun, and the game is all about killing. Who wants to play a game that's depressing?

Lots of games are based on movies. You won't see any based on 'Hotel Rwanda' or 'Marley and Me.'

And this is the crux of the issue for AAFES. They've attempted to play a shell game with only two shells, so they pulled a fig leaf to substitute for the third shell and forgotten what the fig leaf was being used for in the first place. To wit- "Here is our virtual urban combat trainer, which our soldiers use to practice kicking in doors and raiding houses so that they may be more effective in the prosecution of violence. Here is America's Army, an educational game that shows youth what the Army life is all about and gives them a more informed decision about whether enlisting is for them. But over here is Medal of Honor, a detestable game in which people can brutally kill soldiers, thus conditioning people to be more okay with a set of behavior that we're not really comfortable with."

The problem is that they're all the same thing.

up up down down left right left right B A Select Start...and on that note, does anyone have the code to go direct to Mike Tyson?

How exactly does video games promote/show/create/assume the violence against the US personnel ? After all pile of bullshit like "oh he looks like my son who was KIA" and "AMG, they shouldn't be allowed to play as taliban" creates a simple and very intriguing question: Do you realize that its pile of pixels shooting pixels at pixels and killing pixels ? When operators of UAV drones kill real humans and stare at same pixels no one jumps up and yells: "they shouldnt play UAV video games !!!". If you want to scream of morality of shooting pixels you might as well start yelling at CIA. Also on realism of video games: most of video games you play as 1 to 4 person squad against 200 enemies, and then try to go ahead and replicate that in real life.

In my opinion, the fundamental issue is never the content of these games, but the perception of games period. There are a LOT of people, especially those older than my generation, whose mental image of a video game is Super Mario Bros, hopping around on big red squares stomping on turtles. In short, kids stuff. But the reality is the generation that grew up playing those games are now in their mid-twenties (ie, ME), and because we have grown with this form of entertainment, have changed it. In short, video games are no longer simply for kids; for us, they are a legitimate, alternative source of entertainment to television or cinema. And it seems like a lot of people, from senators to clueless parents, can't get this through their $*!&ing heads. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Medal of Honor, and the upcoming COD: Black Ops, are all rated "M." That stands for "MATURE" and says right on the box that it's intended audience is ages 17 and above. On the back it says something akin to "contains realistic violence, blood, gore, profanity." In short, equivalent to an R-rated film. Playing Modern Warfare 2's campaign is essentially like playing an interactive version of The Rock; the new Medal of Honor is closer to Black Hawk Down (finished the campaign this past weekend). They are not intended for 8-year olds, but for 25-year olds who grew up watching films like The Rock and Red Dawn, will get all of the references to those movies thrown into the games (one of the levels in MW2 is literally titles "WOLVERINES!" and features Rangers defending a Burger King in northern VA from an invading Russian force), and will then go online to trash talk and shoot their buddies in the face in what is essentially digital paintball. Every time I get on Xbox Live and hear some squeaky ten-year old's voice through the headset, I get angry and upset because it means somewhere, some parent is either too lazy or too stupid to read a label or take the time to actually educate themselves and raise their damn kids. I play these games regularly, but that doesn't mean I think they're suitable for my little cousins.

The next issue I am going to get on my soapbox about is the whole "video games warp your mind" idea, or that playing violent games will turn you into a psychopath or some how give you expert marksmanship skills in real life. Yeah, no. Took me weeks of drilling to get my breathing and trigger pull under control to shoot EXPERT consistently with my M4, and I've been playing FPS since Wolfenstein 3D (seriously, name a game and I've probably played it). Anyone claiming that the motor skills of moving a mouse or joystick and the motor skills of moving a real-life carbine are similar is an idiot and has no idea of what they speak.

Regarding AAFES, they're just being stupid from ignorance. Some idiot somewhere in the company doesn't play or understand video games, much less online arenas, and has made a call based on that misunderstanding. Whatever, less revenue for them.

Finally, rational human beings can tell the difference between entertainment and reality, regardless of the medium. Just as I know The Rock doesn't accurately reflect SOCOM, I know that my upcoming deployment isn't going to be anything like Medal of Honor. So do all the other people I know that play these games. The few instances where people can't separate reality from the digital are the result of genetic, psychological issues on the part of the user, not the game itself. Not everyone that drinks a beer will become an alcoholic. Not everyone that plays Doom will shoot up their classmates or coworkers.

Apologies if I stepped on anyone's toes, but there's a lot of BS and misinformation out there, and it annoys the spit out of me.

Here endeth the rant.

and the cremated remains of my son is just a jar of dirt.
I'm actually very glad that you just do not understand. You and your children live. Go ahead and play your games. Have fun.

The arguments above are a great demonstration of how the "hardcore gamer" crowd does themselves a disservice by not embracing the debate. They want to simply dismiss a significant volume of research by experts in the fields of study instead of participate as equal brokers.

As I stated earlier, LTC Grossman spent the preponderance of his days researching how we make people better killers. He's interviewed thousands of law enforcement, military, and victimized individuals about their experiences with violent conflict, usually with firearms-- all with the intent of cracking the code to get people to shoot. If he was still in that line of work, he would be on the other side of the line, instructing the Army to make the games MORE realistic.

Here we get into the "M" rating on the games. Again, that's a fig leaf that falls easily. Consider it-- if the "M" rating meant that only adults (and thus, by and large, soldiers) would play the game, then wouldn't AAFES assume that those adults would be able to make rational decisions and reach healthy conclusions regarding the game's content? If so, what threat could the game possibly pose?

This is the point. Even AAFES itself doesn't have faith that its store managers and clerks will maintain enough control to prevent children from buying the game. Again, they've drawn a line before making sure they'd wind up on the right side of it. This is the argument the gamers should be making-- not trying to hide behind the same fig leaf.

The pixel argument falls apart easily, as well. If it's just pixels, and the game's real purpose is to improve hand-eye coordination, then why aren't we playing some new version of 'Duck Hunt', that game that was on the flip side of the original Mario Brothers? Why did games become so much bloodier, realistic, and graphic? Why does the game industry nearly outspend the movie industry these days to make the game so immersive? Does a game need to be this way?

I don't know the answer to that. I don't have a problem with forms of entertainment meant for adults, but don't insult my intelligence by saying a letter stamped on the game is the shield that will protect society.

Again, the above arguments aren't really effective defenses of game makers regarding the issues at hand. But that misses the original intent of the essay to begin with-- which was to call AAFES decision into question. Regardless of how much some would like to deny it, there are very real moral implications to these issues. That point can be demonstrated by the arguments themselves-- isn't there something just a little bit odd about a person who will admit to playing "every FPS out there" and yet categorically rejects the idea that it's not at least a little screwed up to think there's nothing wrong with that much simulated killing?

We wouldn't make a game that awards points for running around Rome as a Visigoth and raping women or driving a truck from house to house in 1960's Mississippi and hanging black people from trees. Those games would be horrible and cruel things.

So why is it okay to make a game where you kill, and kill, and kill? If killing is worse than rape or racism, why is it an appropriate objective in games?

good thing we did not have video games in our day, we could have been really violent

regards,
Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot

P = 1

Godwin's Law holds.

ok, I was not trying to move the discussion to Nazis, just making the sarcastic remark that video games do not lead topeople killing people in the real world

I'm surprised and disappointed, guys. I know that your magazine tends to take certain stances and slants on issues, but I can, most of the time, at least rely on the fact that you've properly researched your articles. This is slapdash. Either your fact checkers have no idea what the article is about (or didn't check, or didn't actually read the article), or you are resorting to the "oh, it's not our work, we're just giving it a forum" level of laziness that I reserve only for run-of-the-mill blogs. Come on, Foreign Policy, you're better than this.

Hell, I'll copy edit your next videogame related piece for free!. You almost have to try to get it this wrong.

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