Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing.

LT. COL. DAVE GROSSMAN ON “BOOT CAMP FOR KIDS”

Violent video games teach kids to kill using the same mechanisms of classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning employed to train soldiers. The major psychological differentiator between a soldier’s training and a video game player’s training is that soldiers are taught to kill while simultaneously being taught strict discipline. This safeguard operates as a secondary safety catch that prevents soldiers from unlawful or unauthorized killing.

.. I showed them Bureau of Justice Statistics’ data demonstrating that our returning veterans from World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War were less likely to be incarcerated than nonveterans of the same age and sex.

.. Over the course of several millennia, combat has forced the military to evolve mechanisms to enable killing. Any nation that does not stay abreast of this evolution will be defeated and conquered.

.. The military does not dress young troops in uniforms, shave their heads, and make them march just for fun. It does these things because if the young warriors cannot submit their will to authority in inconsequential matters such as the way they dress and how they wear their hair, then we cannot trust these soldiers to submit their will in the more important matters, such as employing deadly force only when a situation calls for it, no matter how intense the provocation.

.. The idea of shooting in the wrong direction or at the wrong time is beyond the comprehension of trained warriors. It is the discipline by which the warrior lives. In addition to the midbrain safety catch, this is the secondary safeguard—and it is what is lacking in the violent media training our children receive every time they pick up the video game controller.

.. If we convince our young children that violence is good and necessary, but we do not teach them discipline, we create a generation of killers—a generation of homegrown sociopaths.

.. when children between two and six years of age see someone on television getting shot, stabbed, brutalized, degraded, or murdered, those images are real to them—as real as anything else in their young lives.

.. In The Republic, Plato wrote:

And the beginning, as you know, is always the most important part, especially in dealing with anything young and tender. That is the time when the character is being molded and easily takes any impress one may wish to stamp on it.

. . . Then shall we simply allow our children to listen to any stories that anyone happens to make up, and so receive into their minds ideas often the very opposite of those we shall think they ought to have when they are grown up?

No, certainly not.

.. Here’s another example, this time stemming from one of the most successful video game franchises in history: Grand Theft Auto. In these games you play a criminal. You cannot be a “good guy,” since the premise is criminal behavior.

.. If the cops, rival gangs, or your own stunts injure you as a part of your criminal simulation, your “health” rating will start to suffer. To improve your health score (ironically), you buy sex from a prostitute. Afterward, you can murder the woman you just had sex with to get your money back. Screaming obscenities, in state-of-the-art graphic detail, you can beat to death the woman you just had sex with to save a few bucks. Grand Theft Auto V was released in September 2013 and immediately broke six world records for video game sales,3 making more money than the entire global music industry.

.. Think of violent video games as a boot camp for kids—their own basic training. As they sit before the console, hour after hour, enabled by ever-advancing technology to remain plugged in to digital media, they learn that violence is good and violence is necessary. They see it, they experience it— and they believe it. If it troubles you that our young soldiers have to go through a process of conditioning to learn to kill, it should be infinitely more troubling that we are doing the same thing indiscriminately to our children without the safeguards of discipline.

 

When Young Men Don’t Work

Immigrants replace them in the labor force; leisure replaces work in their lives.

“[T]he United States has been a magnet for low-skill immigration even as low-skill natives have worked less and less,” Richwine writes.

..What it does show is that immigrants are picking up the slack left by jobless natives, taking the pressure off American society to do something about its problem of idle young men. Businesses looking for low-skill labor, for example, don’t have to attract natives, because they can hire immigrants instead—leaving low-skill natives to do whatever it is they do in their parents’ basements when they don’t have jobs.

..Since the early 2000s, young, low-skill men have added about four hours a week to their leisure time, replacing almost one-to-one the working hours they lost.

About three of those additional hours are spent on video games.

Each day, low-skill young men who aren’t employed spend an average of about two hours apiece (roughly 12 hours a week) playing video games.

Each day, a quarter of these nonworking men game for three hours or longer; a tenth game six hours or more. (Note that it’s hard to say whether these are the same people binging day after day. In the time-diary survey, each person is interviewed only once, about what they did on a single day.)

.. there is a difference between correlation and causation, and if men left the labor force for reasons unrelated to video games, no one would be surprised if they nonetheless ended up playing more video games in their newfound free time. But he offers an argument that is at least plausible:

.. However, if it were up to him, I have no doubt he would play video games 23-and-a-half hours per day. He told me so. If we didn’t ration video games, I am not sure he would ever eat. I am positive he wouldn’t shower.

.. Even among low-skill men who aren’t employed, only about 40 percent play video games on any given day, while more than 80 percent watch TV or movies.

.. if there’s anything to the argument that leisure time has become more pleasant, the story should start with TV, not video games.

.. Perhaps one should not dwell too long, however, on the question of what type of leisure low-skill young men are engaging in. The more important fact remains that leisure is slowly replacing work in their lives, as immigrants replace them in the labor force.

The Virtues of Reality

youth culture has become less violent, less promiscuous and more responsible. American childhood is safer than ever before. Teenagersdrink and smoke less than previous generations. The millennial generation has fewer sexual partners than its parents, and the teen birthrate has traced a two-decade decline. Violent crime — a young person’s temptation — fell for 25 years before the recent post-Ferguson homicide spike. Young people are half as likely to have been in a fight than a generation ago. Teen suicides, binge drinking, hard drug use — all are down.

.. It is easy to see how online culture would make adolescent life less dangerous. Pornography to take the edge off teenage sexual appetite. Video games instead of fisticuffs or contact sports as an outlet for hormonal aggression.

.. younger men dropping out of the work force: Their leisure time is being filled to a large extent by gaming, and happiness studies suggest that they are pretty content with the trade-off.

.. But if anything, the virtual world looks more like an opiate for the masses. The poor spent more time online than the rich, and it’s the elite — the Silicon Valley elite, in some striking cases — that’s more likely to limit the uses of devices in their homes and schools, to draw distinctions between screen time and real time.

.. any effective resistance to virtual reality’s encroachments would need to be moral and religious, not just pragmatic and managerial.