German Researchers: Pentagon Behind Violent Games
It seems that conspiracy nut and felon Lyndon LaRouche isn't the only one who thinks video games are part of a deliberate architecture to control the minds of the young and rule the world from a seat of black-hearted anarchy.
A pair of German researchers have one-upped that rather radical notion, appending the theory with an unlikely (or perfectly likely, depending on your level of paranoia) mastermind: the Pentagon. According to the pair, violent video games are a creation of the US military:
During the nineties the killing simulators, employed for hand to hand combat in the US army and police, were released by the Pentagon to be sold for private use on the public markets. As a consequence the computer and video game industry that had co-operated with the Pentagon from the very beginning, boomed. Since then the so-called killer games have wreaked havoc among children and youths.The US army's electronic training programs for killing people must be taken back to the US barracks, where they came from. They have to disappear from civil society altogether. They may be appropriate for the purpose of national defense or fight against crime; they have no place, however, in children's rooms or in living rooms.
Never mind that Orson Scott Card already did this story over 20 years ago, and won awards for it, or that Ender's video game war machine was chillingly effective, while the US military is often chillingly ineffective, or that the America's Army games aren't that good, or that most violent games are in fact very bad at teaching practical violence (ie, pointing and shooting does not a master criminal make, and the cops don't stop looking for you once you spend a certain number of seconds outside an arbitrary search radius).
One could go on, if one had a mind to. But what about focusing on real guns and how violent-minded individuals acquire them, rather than trying to pin down conspiracy theories about virtual guns, whose style of realism is far too incomplete to silently create an army of super-ninjas, let alone bear the blame for the violent side of human nature. Germany banned war-themed toys after World War II, but it doesn't seem to have stopped war.
Isn't the major force that has "wreaked havoc among children and youths" human nature itself? And can you really blame that on, well, anything but human beings?
German Researchers See Pentagon Link to Violent Games [GamePolitics]
tiny dancer
Posted to Meet-Ups, Miscellany on 13 May 2009
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: germany, lyndon larouche, pentagon, violent video games
I imagine they're not trying to say that violent video games train young people for specific combat situations, but rather desensitize them to violence... making them excellent recruits.
It is interesting to note that in WWI roughly 30-40% of the recruits were capable, by their own admission, of taking another person's life while during the Gulf War the percentage was more around 99%.
I really doubt this is a purposeful maneuvering by the Pentagon, and also think violent video games are not a cause but a symptom of a cultural shift toward more violent media.