If there was little in our culture to counter this bloodshed, there was plenty to buttress the notion that violence was the best available answer, starting with video games like Call of Duty and the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series.
“The point of GTA,” Eric explained, “is to create chaos and mayhem and to kill as many people as possible. But it isn’t just about shooting people. In some of these games, you can fly the same jet that went into the World Trade Center in 2001 into a building in California. There are no limits. You can go on a monster rampage and earn stars for the amount of destruction you create. The more you destroy, the more stars you get.”
Like many parents with kids around our son’s age, we really didn’t know much about these games or how popular they remained for many young men long after they’d left childhood behind. When Eric told us early on that we didn’t understand things about his growing up and his continuing process of socialization in American culture, this was part of what he meant.
“When you get five stars in these games,” he went on, “it means the Army is coming for you. And that means you’re really important. That importance feels good. The truth is that these destructive impulses are inside of young men and it’s fun to let them out and to not be a ‘civilized’ person all the time. Guys in my house at college came home from class and played these games for two or three hours a night. They were studying to be scientists and engineers and their courses were very demanding. This was how they unwound in the evening. It isn’t just people my age playing them. Eight-year-old kids are also doing it. And they’re seeing that the guy being tortured in the video games has darker skin than the guy doing the torturing.
“The game is reinforcing every racial or religious stereotype out there. When guys play it together, they scream out the most violent, racist, and anti-Muslim stuff imaginable. People my age love what’s called extreme humor and they let out extreme slurs all the time: ‘niggers, beaners, fags, Arabs, and sand niggers.’
“You worry about how these games affect the mentally ill young men who go out and commit crimes or mass shootings, but what is it doing to my friends and to other so-called normal people? How does it influence them? In these games, my friends blow up all kinds of things and think it’s hilarious. But when somebody actually does something like this, it’s the worst thing that ever happened.
“Each generation of Grand Theft Auto has been made to be more realistic. The blood and the gore now look totally real. We’re talking about graphic images of torn flesh and ripped muscles. These video game companies have pumped thousands, if not millions, of dollars into research to make the violent details more realistic. And they’ve succeeded.
“There isn’t a draft anymore, but there is a kind of psychological preparation for recruiting young men into the military. Some of the kids joining the armed forces today are the kids that have been playing these video games since they were very young. You train people through these games and through military movies to become soldiers, but not all of them are going to join the army. Some of them see the enemy as not the people in the Middle East, but as the other kids inside their school or somewhere else in America. You can’t control everything you create.”
As Eric and others have pointed out, the “surgical strikes” of the drone warfare that the U.S. military has used in various parts of the world during the Obama presidency conjure up nothing so much as a video game. According to drone pilot Lt. Col. Matt Martin in his book Predator, operating a drone is “almost like playing the computer game Civilization.” The military terminology for a person killed in a drone strike is “bug splat.”
Drone strikes and mass shootings have one other thing in common: the victims are usually indiscriminate.
In late summer 2013, Rockstar North brought out Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V), the most successful launch in entertainment history. During the next three days, consumers bought $800 million worth of the product, and then pushed the number past a billion. In the game, the character Trevor is ordered by the FIB (read: FBI) to extract information from an Azerbaijani fugitive to get the location, identity, and description of an assassination target considered dangerous by the authorities. Trevor, along with the person who’s interactively playing the game with him, uses waterboarding and other forms of torture to get that information—even when it’s unproductive. As soon as GTA V was introduced, the game was compared to the tactics used by the United States over the past decade in America’s “War on Terror.”
Trevor says to the fugitive, “The media and the government would have us believe that torture is some necessary thing. We need it to get information, to assert ourselves. Did we get any information out of you?”
“I would have told you everything!” the man replies.
“Exactly!” Trevor tells him. “Torture’s for the torturer. Or the guy giving the order to the torturer. You torture for the good times! We should all admit that. It’s useless as a means of getting information.”
A few critics who had accepted the earlier versions of the game felt that GTA V had finally gone too far.
Keith Best, chief executive of the group Freedom from Torture, told The Guardian, “Rockstar North has crossed a line by effectively forcing people to take on the role of a torturer and perform a series of unspeakable acts if they want to achieve success in the game. Torture is a reality, not a game, and glamourizing it in popular culture undoes the work of organizations like Freedom from Torture and survivor activists to campaign against it. This adds insult to injury for survivors who are left physically and mentally scarred by torture in the real world.”
On August 12, 2014, the Huffington Post reported that the widely popular Grand Theft Auto video game series “lets players get away with a wide range of virtual crimes, including looting and murder. But that’s not enough mayhem for some players, who are rewriting its code to add another crime: rape.”
Coming video game attractions in 2015 were Body Count and Hatred, featuring, among other things, a mass murder villain who begins a “genocide crusade” to kill innocent civilians and police officers.
Dr. Larry Wahlberg is a clinical psychologist and program manager for the PTSD Residential Rehabilitation Treatment program at a Denver V.A. hospital. He treats both retired military personnel and those still on active duty.
“There are two major types of memory and learning,” he says. “One type is Deductive Learning that comes from memory: You learn that Denver is the capital of Colorado by repeating this again and again. The second type is called Procedural Learning and it comes from repetitive actions and practice, like shooting a basketball over and over until you become good at it. One of the problems with video games is that you’re learning to kill repetitively in simulated situations. You get better at it and you get more desensitized to the process.
“This is the same purpose that you find in basic training in the military. You repeatedly put young people in situations where they’d normally freeze up or think twice before acting. You put them in these dangerous situations over and over until their reactions become automatic. You condition them until their resistance to committing violence lessens, and then until it’s gone.
“Back in the twentieth century, large numbers of soldiers didn’t want to shoot at targets in combat. The Army seized upon new principles of learning theory, like behavior modification, in order to overcome this resistance. They used videos to have soldiers repetitively practice shooting at more and more realistic-looking human targets.
“With the new video technologies, you can make things astonishingly realistic. The goal is to help the soldiers achieve mastery over their experience in combat. It’s to lessen their anxiety in those situations and to lessen their avoidance of trauma-related stimuli. This in turn will lessen the emotional impact on them for doing their job. Under these circumstances, people see the violence they’re creating as an act of justice. They think they’re doing the right thing.”
In her upcoming book Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains, Oxford-trained neurologist Susan Greenfield writes about how scientists have recorded the brain activity of experienced video gamers who played an average of fourteen hours per week: “Results showed that areas of the brain linked with emotion and empathy (the cingulate cortex and the amygdala) were less active during violent video gaming . . . These areas must be suppressed during violent video gaming, just as they would be in real life, in order to act violently without hesitation.”