Where are we headed with the growing influx of violent video activities?
Following the recent Christmas season, a local grandfather accompanied a 13-year-old grandson to a "video store." The youngster with some of his Christmas money paid $49.95 for one of the latest seek, strike and destroy "games."
This was one of those productions where people wander into virtual reality hostility and then have to fight their way out blasting anything that happens to threaten the invaders' safety (more than one can play in these outlandish productions).
These are fake perils, of course, but consider that it costs $50 to dabble in them, not to mention the cost of equipment to screen them. And how many youngsters and their fathers will settle for just one? Don't laugh. Dads also get hung up on such activity.
Then as the grandfather and grandson left the store, the older one shaking his head in disbelief, it dawned on him: He and thousands of other young men and women entered the armed forces in 1942 and 1943 at a pay of $50 a month. That was their original "salary" as many of them trained for real combat during World War II. It wasn't fun and games.
Later, when some attained officer rank, they drew $150 a month base pay plus another $75 for hazardous duty such as flying. That's the basic amount for exposure to danger that is only four and a half times what one mindless game costs now.
Just as shocking, however, was the content of the video endeavor. It led to youngsters sitting before a screen manipulating devices with emphasis on either killing or being killed. And more often than not, their vocal and physical gyrations indicated a growing delight in "making a hit." What kind of preconditioning is involved?
We're told, of course, mainly by producers of such material that youngsters realize they are "only games" and that they do not transfer to reality. But then one can listen to teen-agers boasting, without having to prove it, how they would handle a given situation with raw violence. After all, they got the job done via video games, so why can't most societal challenges and problems be zapped, too?
One needn't look at many studies by sociologists to conclude that a casual penchant for violence often begets violence with terrible results to a citizenry. Defenders of the "kill or be killed" games say that youngsters know they are only "playing" and that life is not really that way.
It took a while for young Americans in the early 1940s to realize the seriousness of the activities they engaged in with the Army, Navy, Air Corps, Marines and Coast Guard. When that happened, it took a while for a lot of them to unwind and return to "normalcy." Some never did. The same applies to the Korean War and the Vietnam War, where demands not only were excruciating but where American society was never as appreciative and understanding as it should have been.
And these were people age 17-18-and-up (the Navy took 17-year-olds with parental consent). Where these violent video games and their adjuncts are concerned, participants are often only 10 or so. How many of them will never learn the difference between real and reel, leading to new societal dangers?
We hear a lot about the "high cost of play" anymore. Will one of the costs be growing ranks of electronically induced sociopaths?
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