#oneaday, Day 297: Read This Or I'll Punch You In The Balls/Face

The latest episode of The Squadron of Shame SquadCast is currently uploading. In it, we discuss the ever-present topic of video game violence. Is it really destroying our children and turning them into violent assholes?

Well, you'll have to listen to the podcast for our group conclusions, but here's my take on the whole thing. Video game violence has now been around for some time. In fact, it's been around for quite a bit longer than some people realise. A couple of the guys brought up Forbidden Forest on the Commodore 64, a game which, while laughable now, was pretty shocking and gory for the time. I know that certainly five-year old me would have been freaked out by the big-ass spiders.

One side-effect of the violence issue being around for so long is that it's now somewhat taken for granted. Whether or not this is "desensitisation" per se is a matter of opinion. But the fact is, violence in video games is very rarely shocking these days. Shoot someone in Call of Duty and it doesn't carry much in the way of emotional impact, because you do it so much. Shoot someone in Heavy Rain, though, and it carries much more gravitas due to the context, and the fact it happens less.

But desensitisation to violence in the video games medium doesn't mean that we as a culture are desensitised to violence as a whole. I've played a ton of games that involve ultra-violence, dismemberment, heads exploding, that sort of thing. One of my favourite games in recent memory was Bayonetta, which features a huge range of over-the-top violence and implements of extreme torture. But if I saw something like that happening in real life, I would be horrified and disgusted. I see a photograph of something violent and I feel sick. And anything involving eyes—even if it's just on a TV show or a movie—ugh, count me out.

So it's clear, then, that video games haven't desensitised me, personally, to anything except video game violence, which is something much more akin to cartoon violence than anyone else. I doubt there's anything that can adequately prepare you for real-world violence and gore, save being immersed in it for some time by being either a psychopath or a soldier on active duty. And neither of those things are particularly desirable.

What I have observed, though, is a knock-on effect from some of these games, and it's not necessarily the violence itself that is to blame. Back where I used to live, a lot of kids used to play in the streets rather noisily. Nothing unusual, you might say, until you heard the language they were coming out with. It became abundantly clear to me from listening to them, and the fact I had played through Modern Warfare 2 relatively recently, that they were re-enacting something they'd seen in a video game. And the parents didn't seem to care that their kids—aged between about 5 and 10, I'd wager—were out in the street, yelling "MOTHERFUCKER!" at each other and threatening to blow each others' legs off.

"Kids will be kids," is the easy response, of course. But these kids picked up on this material from somewhere, and obviously hadn't had a discussion with their parent(s) about what was appropriate to be shouting in the street, and what wasn't.

I don't envy the task that parents have these days. There is so much crap out there that kids can access easily. So the challenge is not to stop them from seeing it at all—that's an impossible mission that grows more impossible by the day—but to help them understand what is and isn't "appropriate" in certain contexts. And some parents, it seems, just can't be bothered to have those conversations. And, as a result, assholes beget assholes.

It's a big topic, far more than just one blog post can cover. Want to hear more? Then check out the latest episode of the SquadCast, which will be up online very soon. Head over to the Squadron of Shame Squawkbox in the meantime to debate the issue.