Interseting essay on video game violence and it’s effect on real violence.
I don’t doubt that many violent video games endores violence as an end to a mean. We have to realise that so many other things endorse and encourage violence.
I can remember one guy in a high-school class who professed his love for the violence int and the Kill Bill movies adn the game Manhunt. Few people displayed shock or even discomfort because he was on the football team, a universally accepted activity that endorses aggression and masculine display. Even if the coaches and manages discourage aggresion out of the field, nearly every student expected and encourages it in one form or another from him.
When I on the other hand admitted that I wanted to buy a cheapo sword for my 18th birthday instead of going to a strip club, I heard abrupt gasps and long exhalations sounding like like like “Nooooooooooo”.
I read a few snippets of Mark Ames’ Going Postal (not to be confused with the Pratchett novel with the same title). The controversial thesis behind the book is that the people who have committed massacres in their workplaces and schools since the 1980s were on the low end of a dysfunctional, classist pecking order that was never questioned or realized. The social services that were expected to relieve them of their anguish were inadequate, culled by Reagan-influenced privatization reforms.