PixlBit

For as long as people have been telling stories, writing songs, or painting pictures, they have all at one point or another used violence as means of setting up a scenerio and or bringing the story to a finish. Games are competitive and work best when using the same elements that also make stories work. Its all about conflict and drama. Its been around a long time. And I find it funny that the two groups responsible for more misery and death in the history of the world want to try and make scapegoats of things like violence in games and such. Those two groups being polititions and religious zealots. But I do believe in self censorship and that violenced can easily be turned into a shameless gimick as a means of amusement. I also think that violent games can be cathartic like hitting a punching bag making a person less likely to punch another person. It really comes down to balence and personal preference in my opinion.

His point wasn't really about violence in the general sense. He was saying these video games further desensitize us to the reality that opposing soldiers in war are also human beings with families and friends. I completely agree. They're not the only medium that does this; as he pointed out; but westerners are definitely coming to war from a black/white perspective of good and evil more often than not. It's a perspective  that doesn't exist in the real world, but does exist in fictional media like video games to make us feel good about the random acts of virtual violence we carry out. His point about the Arab guy getting shot at in the game, who is possibly wondering why these people invaded his country and shot his family members to death with drones, was a perfect summation of this phenomenon. 

In short, that was a great video and I think the guy is spot on. Our media is a reflection of our fallacious monkeysphere morality, in which those who are foreign, different to us, or not immediately understood by us may as well not be human. It's scary to think about.

I'v said before that I do not play games that have human on human violence particularly when that violence is carried out against innocents. Yes I will shoot criminals, kill evil sorcerers or insane clowns if it's part of a story but that's about it.

I do think that in war we see our enemies as an evil that needs to be wiped out and we don't think about the fact that they are also humans with friends and families.

Generally what Joe said, we are desensitized to "the enemy" by all manner of media.

Video games is the easy target that media likes to gravitate to when something violent happens, yet glossing over the fact that they show real acts of violence every day. Do I think video games are the main cause for many to be desentized to violence? Nope, but I do think it plays a role in it...along with television, movies, toys, music, and any other forms of media. Looney Toons has tons of violence, my favorite toy growing up was GI Joe, a group of soldiers shooting and fighting Cobra, there is a lot of violence in music, and all this happens before we even get into what's on the news with real world violence, and what happens in the movies.

Depersonalisation is the issue, War and violence stories don't shock as much because our media is so heavily saturated by it. In WWI green troops found it hard to shoot real people instead of targets so to counter measure this they made the targets people shaped. Call f duty and battlefield certainly contribute to the fact that more and more young people lack the forethought of consequences, particularly when it comes to taking a life. People who say that video games do not influence young people fail to see that the very fact of being Human means that you are influenced to learn behaviour at an early age. It's a good thing that today's western generation do not know the true pain and horror of war, it shows minimal experience of conflict on a global scale, however unfortunately this makes it easier to manipulate our youth in service. 

I don't play many military-themed games, even then I don't play a lot of games where you end up having to shoot regular people, mostly zombies and the like. Not really comfortable with stuff like that, but I'm not gonna get in the way of anyone who does.