> "These games are training our children to become
>efficient killers."

This sounds like something Lt Colonel Grossman would say.

I guess this is tangental to the main topic, but I guess I'll follow that tangent anyway, since I feel like it.

The idea that video games "condition" people to become violent killers basically comes from some interesting military studies and training techniques.

Basically, people won't naturally kill other people unless they're psychotic. Militaries have always had a hard time getting raw recruits to "learn" how to kill. And, in fact, historically they've failed miserably at this task.

In the days of muskets, it took about a minute to fire your weapon, reload, and fire again. That's a long time to think about what you're doing, and the consequences of it. When arecheologists started researching old American Civil War battlefields, they would often find things like a rifle with multiple loads in the barrel. In fact, it was often the rule rather than the exception that any gun they found would have multiple loads rammed into it. I've heard the "record" was a rifle with no less than 23 loads (powder, wadding, ball) rammed into the barrel.

Why this was so eventually became apparent. Many, perhaps even a majority, of soldiers on the battlefield were simply going through the motions. They'd load their gun, raise it, take aim, stand there for a second, then lower it and reload without ever having fired.

In WWII a study was done where troops were asked after engagements (with the assurance that nothing would go on their record about it) how many times they had fired their rifle during the battle. A ridiculously high number (something like 80% or more) of them reported never having fired even a single shot.

For any army, this isn't good. Obviously, a better way of training soliders to kill had to be found.

What was developed was basically a variation of Pavlovian conditioning. Stimulus, response. In the past, recruits were merely taught *how* to fire their weapons, not *when*. They weren't conditioned how to react in combat. No matter how well a man can shoot, almost all men will *not* shoot another man if he takes the time to think about it. With Pavlovian conditioning, you train a man to be a killer by training his reflexes. See a target, fire. Don't think about it. If you think about it, you won't do it. See a target, fire.

With this new training, by the time of the Vietnam War, GIs were reporting on the order of 95% firing rates during combat rather than the opposite figure reported during WWII. Clearly, the training works. You can train a man to kill by conditioning his reflexes such that his conscious mind doesn't interfere. See a target, fire.

So what does this have to do with games? Well, anybody who has ever played a first-person shooter can tell you that exactly the same kind of conditioning goes into learning to play such games well. You can't stop to think about what you're doing or you'll get killed. You just react to certain stimuli with certain responses. See a target, fire.

When I play games, I get very immersed into the world of the game. When I was playing Thief, often when I was done playing at night I'd get up from my comptuer and instinctively try to keep to the shadows as I went off to bed. I'd see a room and immediately try to pick out the darkest location. Similarly, when I was playing Deus Ex, I once went out to the store for a late night snack after a marathon session of playing the game. I got to my car and was fumbling for the lock when the woman who lived next door startled me (she was standing by her own car, which was next to mine, but I hadn't seen her until she opened her car door.) My first instinct was to pull out my Stealth Pistol and shoot her in the head. Naturally, I didn't *have* a Stealth Pistol on me, but I honestly felt for awhile afterwards that I *would* have shot her if I had happened to be holding a loaded pistol at that instant.

This disturbed me for awhile, until I thought a little more deeply about it. Yes, I had a conditioned response to the stimulus of being surprised by another human. But, after thinking about it for a bit, I realized my response wasn't "pull out pistol and fire", it was "move mouse until cross-hair covers target's head, left-click." Had I been unfortunate enough to be holding a loaded pistol that night, I'm still uncertain exactly *what* I would have done, but I'm no longer convinced that I would have blown my neighbor's head off (but if I'd have had a MOUSE in my hand, she'd have been TOAST. ;-)

Still, as games get more and more realistic, I have no doubt that some day there will be games that offer full immersion, in which you really do have the sensation of moving around within a ficticious world and your response to the stimulus of being surprised by a strange human won't be "move mouse and left-click" but will instead be "raise gun and fire." At that point, the similarity to actual military conditioning will be much closer.

I don't really know what to think about this. On the one hand, I still like to believe that the difference between reality and a game, no matter how realistic, will still temper our responses to certain stimuli. It didn't take me long to shake the conditioning of trying to hide in every shadow in a room after playing Thief for four hours straight. And anyway, in order to shoot someone, you first must be carrying a gun. And whatever you non-Americans think, we don't *all* go around packing heat here in the US. Ex-Marines with combat experience can get jobs in law enforcement, patrol the streets with a loaded pistol, and *not* shoot everyone unfortunate enough to startle them--so the ability to "deprogram" yourself, as it were, is obviously there. Still, it's a subject worth thinking about.

-- Dave