Violent Video Games: First Person Murder Simulators

[Atypical Liberal]

5. Simulations are simulations.

It is already a known fact that people can be desensitized to images of violence or pornography by repeated viewing of such images. There was a TED talk a while back about how people's brains are being rewired due to the ubiquitous availability of pornography and how in order to get continued dopamine spikes the viewers must constantly be pushing for newer material, since the old material doesn't "do it" for them anymore - they have become desensitized.

We also know that simulations work. As the article sites, aircraft simulators are very, very effective immersive environments for learning how to fly a real plane. And it stands to reason that the more realistic the simulator is, the more effective it is as a training tool. Which is why aircraft companies and the military have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on very sophisticated simulators that mimic real aircraft cockpits down to the tiniest detail and even move to give a feeling of actual maneuvers of the aircraft.

So I believe it is reasonable to assume that the more realistic and immersive the simulation of violence is, the more successful the simulator will be at desensitizing the players to violence.

I've played the Call of Duty series since the very first one came out. Today the graphics are very impressive, but they are still very obviously cartoonish in a cartoonish environment. They have not even yet approached the "uncanny valley" point yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

So it's hard to say what effect current generations of video games might have. I suspect as the realism improves you will see a bell-curve effect on players, where some are effected early on while the majority are effected later and on the opposite extreme will be those unaffected even at high realism.

I wonder if we can look to movies for any indication of what to expect? We now have movies with very, very realistic, graphic violence. I can watch Saving Private Ryan now and watch the soldier with his intestines spilled all over the beach and the other blown in half with little of the shock I felt the first time I watched the film. I refuse to watch films like "Hostel" or "Saw" or most other "horror" films these days as they are hugely disturbing to me. They are no longer the obvious "supernatural buffoonery" of characters like those from the old Halloween, Friday the 13th, or Nightmare on Elm Street series, who clearly had a fictional, supernatural bogey man. Now they are essays in human depravity and entirely too realistic for my taste. I don't want to contemplate some horrific man who tortures hostel visitors in a dungeon because it's all too probable that this actually happens somewhere in the world.

Some day soon we are going to have technology that either interfaces directly with our eyes, like a VR headset, or even directly with our brains, and we are going to have hyper-realistic, hyper-immersive simulations.

If you can't tell the difference between simulation and reality, I can't help but think that will have consequences.