Before you blame violent video games, you might want to find out what's in those games.
First, I'll get out of the way some of the boring crap: The same games are sold everywhere in the western world. There are no games exclusive to the United States. So if you want to blame violent video games, you're going to have to explain why Europe, Canada, Australia, and so on do not have a violence problem yet have the same games.
And even if you can somehow create a construct where that works, you'd have to explain Japan. There are games that are only sold in Japan, because they are so mindbogglingly and horrifically violent that no one will sell them anywhere else. Yet Japan is one of the least violent countries on the planet.
Fact is "violent video games" is just the most recent mass entertainment to be the cause of violence. Before video games, it was music. Before that, it was TV. Before that, it was movies and comic books. And so on.
But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about why you should actually like these video games.
Video games are our most liberal mass entertainment. They're far more liberal than TV or movies that are just as violent.
What do I mean? Well here's four examples of very violent video game series, and what's actually going on in their stories.
(Spoilers below - each paragraph with spoilers starts with the name of the game if you want to remain surprised)
Halo Series: In the not-too-distant future, humanity develops practical interstellar travel. We set out on the cosmos, colonizing planets. And then we stumble across the Covenant. The Covenant are a theocratic union of several races. And they decide to destroy humanity with fanatical religious fervor. During the game, you get to "enjoy" all of what being in a theocracy means. By the end of the game, the characters you control shatter the theocratic alliance. Some species refuse to abandon their religion and stick to the old ways. Other species realize that they've been had by their prophets. And a civil war erupts with the "Brutes" desperately clinging to their religion while the "Elites" seek to expose and destroy the corruption....btw, the humans aren't involved in that fight, except in as much as the Brutes attack them on orders from the Prophets.
(Halo, con't) So you get to see the corruption of theocracy, and the massive losses caused by such a large conflict - the series doesn't end with happy people. The series actually ends with a prequel, where your character dies to give humanity a chance via the rest of the games. War isn't fun, it's hell. Friends die suddenly and senselessly. You get to know the group of soldiers you are fighting with, and they die one by one. Usually without actually accomplishing what they hoped their death would accomplish. (I haven't played the brand-new Halo 4, so I don't know where the series is going next)
Gears of War series: Humanity has settled on a planet with a fantastic underground power source, in the form of a yellow glowing liquid. And humanity rapidly exploits that power source. But using that fuel causes planet-wide catastrophe after catastrophe - it drives the formerly-underground native species onto the surface, where they battle the humans for the limited space. The game ends with the destruction of that power source, complete with "oil" derricks collapsing.
(Gears of war, con't) In addition, the game discusses weapons of mass destruction - humans developed a weapon that makes Hiroshima look like a pop-gun. The lead character's father invented the technology. He's a scientist with so many ideas on how to fix things, yet his solutions keep slaughtering large numbers of people. Including the game-ending oil-derrick-collapsing device that removes the danger caused by the fuel source. It wipes out the planet's native sentient species as a known side effect. The character is not sympathetic. He keeps talking about his ideas and how much he wanted to fix things, yet he's completely lost in the science. He keeps not thinking about the real world. Until he finally incinerates himself in front of his son. Deliberately.
(Gears, con't con't) Finally, the futility of war is a constant theme throughout the game. The world is dirty, depressing, and failing. But at the end of the series, with the war finally over, the game ends with "We finally have a tomorrow". Meaning now that the war is over, they finally can actually look forward to a future instead of living in the horrible drudgery of the conflict. Anyway, the game series is explicitly anti-war, anti-global-warming, and anti-WMD. Yes, you walk around with an assault rifle that has a chainsaw strapped to it. But what you are doing is about more than the hardware.
Assassin's Creed: In this series of games, you are a member of an ancient order of assassins. The series is quite lengthy, and one of the bloggers over at Digby's place has done a very good job describing the story and all the liberal elements of the story. But long-story short: Your enemy is the Pope. Yes, really. The Pope. It turns out religion was foisted on humanity as a mechanism to hide hyper-advanced alien technology - the miracles from the Bible were real, but caused by devices not a deity. Religion was created in order to keep those devices in the hands of a corrupt few instead of benefiting all. And your job is to work against the cabal that is keeping the benefits of those devices from all of humanity. The story also winds its way to the Americas, where you get to partake in the American Revolution...and you get to experience what we did to the Native Americans. The story in this game is EXTREMELY liberal even down to a letter from Justice Scalia about how he fixed the 2000 presidential election.
Mass Effect: In the not to distant future (boy that sounds familiar), humanity finds itself as the new upstart among a collective of races run by three major powers. There's so damn many liberal themes in this series that I'm gonna outsource this to David Atkins at Digby's again. It's pro-LGBT, anti-corporate, deals with multiple genocides, and shows how bureaucracy is fundamentally conservative.
To say video games celebrate violence is to say The Great Gatsby glorifies excessive wealth. If that's all you think is going on, you haven't looked closely enough.
= new reply since forum marked as read
(Edit to add that I read the response upthread about desensitization after my comments below.)
I've never played any games. Don't know anything about them (other than when they've been part of the plot on CSI, Law & Order, etc. 
).
I guess everything has pros and cons. I do have the uneducated impression that there is a lot of gratuitous violence and because, unlike movies and music, it's interactive -- the gamer is the one doing the shooting, etc. -- that disturbs me when the elements are really lifelike. It does seem as though it could desensitize people who are vulnerable to such things. And, really, aren't most teens vulnerable?
The other aspect of many of the games I've seen in passing is that they really seem VERY sexist. In fact, I was watching a video the other day about a young woman -- a gamer -- who took this on in the form of a kickstarter campaign to study the sexism in these games, only to have an online coordinated attack launched against her.
Thanks for the post and conversation about this though. It's inevitably going to be part of the discussion.
I really appreciate this conversation. I've been meaning to ask someone so I can learn more about it from a gamer's perspective.
Thanks for your insight about this subject. Really good to know!
