Becoming the virtual enemy
The seemingly “friendly” Farmville game motivated Alexandra Tobias to kill her baby last month because he wouldn’t stop crying while she was playing. Then there is Modern Warfare 2, one of the leading games within this last year, which has recently caused a political stir.
Unlike your typical protest to video games, Modern Warfare it is not only causing a rouse because of the amount of shooting involved; its original design gives players the ability to play as the Taliban and massacre people within an airport terminal. The US Army had a small uproar about this, but with possible paranoia put aside, have video games finally crossed the line? This idea of playing as the Taliban was quickly “shot down,” but it raises an interesting issue: if video games finally allowed you to become the enemy what are the implications?
There is no shortage of evidence attempting to link video games as a cause of aggressive nature and violence; however a direct link hasn’t been established yet. There have been cases where video games were highly involved in acts of violence though.
One of the most notable was in September 2007 when 16-year-old Daniel Petric snuck out and bought Halo 3, a popular first person shooter game, only to play it for upwards of 18 hours a day. His father, a minister at New Life Assembly of God, took the game and hid it in his safe along with a 9mm handgun. Daniel broke into the safe, not only get to the game back but also to take the gun. With this, he shot both his parents, killing his mom and leaving his dad wounded. And all of this was driven from a desire to play a first-person shooter game where death is only virtual and temporary. The judge commentated on this saying “I firmly believe that Daniel Petric had no idea at the time he hatched this plot that if he killed his parents they would be dead forever.”
Video games are now at a place where the army has stopped the sale of modern war games on base, because they fear what can happen to the psyche of the soldiers playing; that killing will become trivial. We live in a world now where video games allow people to leave the world in which they live in to become something they never would have become; a murderer, a gangster, and a soldier — all in one gaming session if they so desire. It is time we evaluate what kind of games we subject ourselves too and how much
time we play them. The scariest part about video games is that, like in the case of Tobias, it is not just violent video games that are having an effect on people. Is it time to reconsider to what we subject ourselves?
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