Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger and current psychologist working for the military has compiled a great deal of research done by the army, others, and himself, and put them in a series of books. He wrote a book about this titled,

“On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.”

Here’s the review:

Drawing on interviews, published personal accounts and academic studies, Grossman investigates the psychology of killing in combat. Stressing that human beings have a powerful, innate resistance to the taking of life, he examines the techniques developed by the military to overcome that aversion. His provocative study focuses in particular on the Vietnam war, revealing how the American soldier was “enabled to kill to a far greater degree than any other soldier in history.” Grossman argues that the breakdown of American society, combined with the pervasive violence in the media and interactive video games, is conditioning our children to kill in a manner similar to the army’s conditioning of soldiers: “We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the infliction of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.”

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Violence refers to acts of aggression and abuse which causes or intends to cause criminal injury or harm to persons, and (to a lesser extent) animals and property.

This might be taken to explain why the criminal who fires a gun at a cop becomes, if recorded, an instance of violent crime, while the cop who fires back, and may, in fact, kill or severely harm the criminal does not. On this definition, too, the student who said that football is not violent was simply speaking the truth. Aggression and abuse that remain within the rules of the game are not criminal and, thus, by definition not violent.

The anthropologically interesting question is the range of aggressive or abusive acts criminalized–thus, violent–in particular groups, in particular situations, at particular moments in time.

*The Roman paterfamilias was within his rights–thus, not violent–if he beat a slave, a wife or a child. Now, some child rights activists argue that spanking, in any form, be criminalized–thus, violent.

*Public execution by hanging, drawing and quartering was once perfectly legal–thus, not violent. Now opponents of the death penalty may see any execution as cruel and unusual punishment that should be made illegal–thus, violent.

*The Dayak headhunter wasn’t a violent man unless he took a head from his own group–until, that is, colonial authorities outlawed headhunting, turning taking a head into violence instead of a respectable manly way to the fertility of his group’s crops.

The examples are easy to multiply. The key to serious analysis is to recognize the validity of Pierre Bourdieu’s point that debates over definitions of violence are, like all other debates over social or cultural boundaries, sites of struggle. But that doesn’t make the struggle or its consequences, shifting boundaries over time, less real. It makes them something to understand and, if possible, explain.

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I think that one of the things that needs to be addressed is what does and does not count as violence.

This was brought home to me in my Intro classes, where I assign an article on American football. In the ensuing discussion, one of my students made the then-shocking claiom that there’s no violence in football. Pressed on this point, she noted that nobody *tries* to injure their fellow players (perhaps a bit of wishful thinking in practice, but that’s certainly the ideal) and that the injuries that do happen are not malicious in intent (again, ideally speaking — but we *do* look down on players who deliberately aim to hurt their opponents, so I don’t think she was too far off base). What football is — like movies and video games, and even boxing and pro wrestling — is the *performance* of violence by highly trained specialist performers. Contrast that with the actual violence of, say, a missile attack on a civilian neighborhood, or even the purposeful violence of military action (most definitely *not* just a performance). In a perfectly staged football game, nobody gets hurt; in a perfectly run military operation, people necessarily get hurt.

This doesn’t, however, address the issue that seems to be at the core of worries about movie and video game violence, namely whether we the audience perceive such performances as performed or actual violence. Certainly my own affective response is different when I see a pile-up on the freeway than when I see a pile-up in _The Matrix_, but there are certainly cases where we can see responses that aren’t so distinctive — e.g. the death of the “bad guy” at the hands of the “good guy” in any number of action movies compared with the gleeful celebrations held outside prisons when a convict is executed. This suggests there’s a moral dimension involved — one that is absent, I should add, from football. Is it equally absent from video games?

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First, from the “Introduction to the 2000 Edition” of Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were:American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

The United States has had the highest homicide rates in the industrial world for almost 150 years, long before the advent of violent video games. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lynch mobs conducted sadistic mutilations as they killed their victims. Sometimes pieces of the victims’ bodies were passed out as souvenirs to the onlooking crowd, which frequently included children. Although rates of youthful violence seem to be higher than in the past, teen murderers are certainly nothing new. Caril Fugate was fourteen and Charles Starkweather was nineteen when they conducted their three-state murder spree in 1958.

In citing this source, however, I remain aware that Coontz was writing this introduction for publication in 2000. In Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (2005) observe that rates of violent crime in the United States peaked in 1989, after rising for 15 years. Then, however, the trend turned downward, and,

When the crime rate began falling in the early 1990s, it did so with such speed and suddenness that it surprised everyone. It took some experts many years to even recognize that crime was falling, so confident had then been of its continuing rise.

It could be, of course, that crime rates declined while violence increased, with growth in violence offset by a falling rate of reporting of violent crimes. Still, the proposition that violence has increased monotonically with the spread of video games seems weak.

Turning, then, to the theoretical issue, one might ask if desensitization to violence (which might, in fact, result in fewer reports of violent crimes) is a separate issue for video games or, instead, a more general cultural phenomenon.

If, for example, you read Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism there you will find the proposition that “flattened affect” (a psychiatric term for reduced emotional response) is characteristic of the Postmodern condition, contrasted with the excess emotion characteristic of the Modern hysterias analyzed by Freud. Here the villain is TV in particular, or, more generally, the information explosion that is so characteristic of late capitalist consumer societies, in which individuals are so overwhelmed by information that they tend to shut down as a defense mechanism and focus only on whatever has their immediate attention before quickly moving on to something else.

There is, however, one aspect of the blame TV argument that may carry over especially well to video games, especially as video games become more realistic. Here the point is frequently made that the rush of information to which individuals are now exposed is increasingly encountered behind glass screens, taken in by individuals who have neither the live experience of, for example, the children at the lynchings described by Coontz nor the slow-downed virtual experience of reading books, where the reader can pause and respond to the text instead of being distracted by the next thing on the screen.

There is also, a slightly separate issue, the increasing overlap, first evident in TV, between staged, fictional content and what purports, at least, to be news, actual facts on the ground. I recall becoming aware of this myself while watching CNN news footage of jet aircraft taking off from U.S. carriers in the Aegean to bomb Serbia during the Kosovo intervention. It suddenly occured to me, “I’ve seen that scene before…in Top Gun.” The news camera crews were using the same visual idiom used by the filmmakers.

Lots of stuff to think about here.

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An article in the New York Times titled “Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time” by Clive Thomson inspired this latest post. Thomson discusses fairly recent video games, like Peacemaker, a game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a…

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hehehe

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