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Opinion

Few instances require use of mad gaming skills in real life

Shaun Rodriguez
Opinion Columnist

For those of you who read the Washington Post, you may have noticed a recent article concerning violent, shoot ‘em up video games and their ability to help U.S. soldiers wage war. Upon reading this, I thought to myself, "Great, more fodder for Jack Thompson to bash gamers over the head with." 

The article describes how playing games such as Halo 2 and Socom 3 help soldiers to dehumanize their actions in order to carry out their job, as well as how these games provide them with a basic skill set for how to use their real-world weapons.

Now, this may indeed indicate that virtual violence can desensitize a human being with regard to real-world violence; movies have been doing the same for decades now. The article also may show that using weapons in a game can greatly aid a person in using weapons in the real world; the basic principles of hand-eye coordination still apply whether you're aiming at a duck in Duck Hunt with the classic NES Light Gun or aiming at an insurgent's head with an M-16 rifle.

In fact, I give props to the military for utilizing game technology to better teach soldiers the skills they need to survive and to protect our country; we need any and every edge we can get against our enemies. Imagine how much more effective our soldiers would have been in WWII (or how many more might have come back home alive) had games such as Call of Duty been around for soldiers to play, not to mention how less traumatized some might have been had they been desensitized to the violence around them with the help of first-person shooter games. 

Violence is a fact of human life and will be around as long as we are; being desensitized to it simply helps people keep cool when all hell is breaking loose around them, thus upping their survival rates. I'm not saying that death shouldn't have meaning to us, but there is a time and place for the shock and mourning of the loss of human life. The middle of a firefight is not one of them.

Playing a game that desensitizes people to violence while teaching basic weapon skills does not turn someone into a merciless killing machine. Having the basic skills to kill someone does not mean those skills must be used. Soldiers have a job to do, and in their case, these skills are very much needed. 

But if I play Halo 2 so much that I perhaps gain the skill to shoot someone in the head, it does not mean I will be putting that skill to use outside the game setting. Though games may somehow teach these skills, the person is the ultimate deciding factor in how these skills are used. It goes without saying that in a court judging a murder case, the person on trial must be judged according to the decision he or she made and the factors that led him to that decision, not on how he oe she learned the skills to commit the act.

Rodriguez, an opinion columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu