The Chinese government has decided to ban some online computer games. It has been angered in particular by two military games, one of which portrays the Chinese Army as evil and the other which shows Tibet, Manchuria and Xinjiang as independent nations.
Political sensitivities apart, there is another extremely good reason for deploring these “shoot ‘em up” computer games; it is that there already is enough real violence in the world without inviting gamers, particularly impressionable children, to enter into a trigger-happy fantasy world of death and destruction. The real world is facing extremely dangerous times. Real terrorists without scruples and mercy are firing real bullets and detonating real bombs to maim and murder real people. Do we really need to be encouraging computer gamers to duplicate this savagery?
There is already disturbing evidence that the fantasy world of these games is impinging on reality. US troops in Iraq are on record comparing the firefights they have had in the country with the sort of thing they have played on computers in their barracks or back home. The game producers take their cue from Hollywood where special effects can create the most monstrous and sensational violence. Time and again you hear people refer to actual bloody events as being “like something out of the movies.”
Indeed, that thought must have struck us all as we watched those terrible pictures from New York on Sept. 11 when two passenger aircraft rammed one by one into the Twin Towers. That was just too terrible to comprehend. At first, the only way we could accept those nightmare visions was to refer to the fictional violence of the movie world. And herein lies the danger.
The constant fictional portrayal of death and destruction is undermining our ability to appreciate the true horror of actual appalling events. The most pernicious consequence of this is that game players who glory in the electronic carnage that they can wreak on their computer screens are becoming dehumanized and inured to the bloody tragedy of real violence. If people’s view of the world is largely informed by fictional slaughter, then their reactions to the real thing will be inadequate and deformed. In the last three years, far too many people all around the world have learned to their bitter cost that the consequences of terrorism and the military response it spawns are extremely terrible. Terrorists show no more feelings of decency than the game player hunched over his computer keyboard. Both are divorced from the standards of humanity that ought to guide all civilized societies. The terrorists, however, are deaf to any persuasion that what they do it utterly evil. The players of violent computer game might however be susceptible to a stark and urgent message: “ Get real.”
