Interactive Video Games Training Teen Killers?

Interactive Video Games Training Teen Killers?

24 April, 1999

By Bruce Sullivan
CNS Staff Writer

(CNS) – The bloody massacre that left 15 dead at Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., including the two alleged teenage killers from self-inflicted wounds, was executed with the precision and detachment expected of battle-tested mercenaries, not high school seniors living in suburban homes.

Like characters in the violently interactive digital games Duke Nukem, Quake, or their favorite, Doom, eyewitnesses say that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold told their victims why they were going to kill them, then laughed after shooting them at point blank range.

Those video games and many others have received very little attention from adults, despite an increased awareness of television violence and its effect on children.

"Despite being played for years, Fantasy-Role Playing Games (FRPGs) have been studied very little," said the British Psychological Society in an article in the British Journal of Psychology entitled "The Personality of Fantasy Game Players."

The British study made one startling conclusion that seems to fit Harris and Klebold perfectly. "FRPG players," said the BPS report, scored "significantly lower on the measure of empathic concern, which assesses 'other-oriented' feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others."

If Harris and Klebold felt any sympathy for their victims or were aware of their pain they apparently didn't show it, according to survivors who said that the black-clad gunmen moved through the school firing guns indiscriminately while hurling homemade bombs.

Since the creation of Dungeons and Dragons in 1974, FRPG's have become increasingly violent and interactive as they have become computerized and moved to the Internet. But unlike Dungeons, which is enacted by players like a play and only involves stage deaths, computer games like Doom can simulate much more gruesome scenes of violence like decapitations, dismemberment, and explosive annihilations of opponents, which the video game industry terms "the kiss of death."

Some experts believe that violent video games like Doom and Mortal Kombat, which arm the player with simulated weapons as he blasts his way from one dungeon-like chamber to another, killing as many cyber villains as he can, may be as effective in training killers as flight simulators are in training pilots.

"When children are actually rewarded for killing people, the behavior is more likely to be repeated," said Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist who studies the effects of violence and wrote a chapter on video game addiction for The Doctors Book of Home Remedies for Children.

The military has long been aware of some of the side effects of video warfare games. "Some of the best fighter pilots we have grew up playing these games," Electronic Warfare Digest editor Brian Sheehan told CNS.

Military fighter pilots are tested for psychological balance as well as physical health; Sheehan added that in his opinion violent video games would probably only have a negative effect on disturbed children.

But with so many children exposed to violence on television as well as in video games, many are calling for the entertainment industry to take more responsibility for its products.

"Self-restraint is going to be the battle cry of the future," said Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs executive director Brett Magbee, who wants the industry to police itself.

"They make violence seem like a big game," Magbee told CNS. "But there are consequences to violent acts."

The American Psychiatric Association, unlike its British counterpart, hasn't released any reports on computer game violence; however, it has studied the effects of TV and movie violence and has found a correlation between real and simulated violence.

"Ignoring consequences of violence (including the pain of victims, the victims' families, and the families of perpetrators) or depicting the consequences unreasonably sets in motion a destructive encoding process," said the American Psychiatric Association in a fact sheet entitled Psychiatric Effects of Media Violence.

"Individuals with greater exposure to media violence see the world as a dark and sinister place," said the report.

"Today is my last day on earth," Eric Harris wrote on his Internet web site on April 20, the day of the massacre.

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