: As to the aesthetics of blood as portrayed in FPS games, it's not pretty. I'd
: rather look at the splat from a rocket than, say, Barney, or a 7-11
: storefront, or , God help us, Donald Trump, but it's still no thing of
: beauty, and I suppose I have dehumanized myself to some extent by looking
: at all those carcasses flying across my screen. But in life there are
: essential things and peripherals, and games are the latter. My concern is
: for kids who for lack of parenting or other reasons make games, violent
: or otherwise, the core activity of their lives. My own kids are going to
: be kept pretty busy, and when they are able to safely cut down a tree and
: properly sharpen the ax afterwards, I'll let them play Marathon. OK,
: Susie, this is a SPNKR. Don't use it in corridors...
The desensitizing mark that is placed on video games is actually quite interesting. In short, I believe it is the thought that the more blood and gore that one person sees, the more used to that situation that person gets. Now, taking this definition of the phrase, many things in our society desensitizes us in ways we can only begin to comprehend.
The biggest factor the average American social life is television, more specifically, the news. It has become obvious in the past few decades that the news media has tendencies to overstimulate and present a lot of terrible and potentially upsetting scenes, for children and adults alike. Learning about the car crash near your old high school that killed two people and severely harmed another hits close to home, but many of us has had this experience before.
As the largest economic power in the world, we are not only desensitized to violence in the media, but we are also unaware of all the immoral and risky business practices that are taking place. If anybody here has read Schlosser's book "Fast Food Nation", and if you have, raise your hand, keep in mind that everytime you walk into a McDonald's, that everyone one of your purchases spurs on more turnover rates, medical and saftey problems in meatpacking plants, tainted meat, and an overall sense of economic imperialism across the US and the world. Of course that's only the tip of the iceberg, but I am wary of people such as my friend who would respond to this by just dismissing it and saying "Aww, fuck it, whatever".
I have felt desensitized to video games like most people would say that would happen and I admit it. But I feel I have only been desensitized in that field only, and not in life. I still understand what my parents told me was fundamentally right or wrong, which does not mean I don't know the grey areas, but it means my parents had the decency to actually teach me about violence at a young age so I wouldn't be fully ignorant about in the future. It seems to me that video games are all about entertainment, but if some bible belt radicals want to make them seem evil then they are only destroying themselves by placing a moral value on an unrelated issue.
-B. Wise
