The following was an invited response to Chris Suellentrop's lead article on violent video games titled "Playing With Our Minds" in the Summer 2006 issue of The Wilson Quarterly (pp. 14-21).

The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2006, pp. 9-10

In “Playing With Our Minds” [WQ, summer 2006] Chris Suellentrop makes a persuasive case for the ability of video games to teach players to overcome challenges through analysis, strategy, problem solving, code breaking, and innovation. But, as Suellentrop says, the educational aspect of such games is nothing new. Indeed, it could be argued that by definition a “game” is any routine that simultaneously entertains and educates through some kind of challenge.

The real question about video games, then, is “What do they teach?” In addition, games that involve players in “virtual worlds” raise their own set of questions: What kind of world is being constructed? Do the virtues and skills inculcated in that world correspond to this one? Suellentrop concludes that because the design of video games rewards players for uncovering, accepting, and following certain “rules,” these games may well be creating a generation of organizational “yes men” whose innovational skills are limited to thinking within reductionist and ultimately automatizing systems.

Such games train the mind along rigidly dichotomous paths of analysis and evaluation—not surprising in a medium whose logic is grounded in strict binary gatekeeping. But shooter games also push to radical limits the distinction between “what is important and what isn’t” in narratives dependent on identifying and killing targets eminently worthy of destruction: monsters, ghouls, orcs, the undead, etc. The practice of recognizing and liquidating simplistic villains ought to raise concerns about the training implicit in such games and how it is to be applied to real-world conflict resolution and problem solving. Considering the potent power of games to train the mind, the highly polarized and dehumanizing models of conflict created in these virtual worlds may function as more than merely harmless amusement.

Moreover, these virtual worlds offer players a simple “comfort zone” of escape and control, in stark contrast with the ambiguities and uncertainties of real life. Such games may build cognitive skills, but this hardly addresses the player’s psychological, social, and emotional well-being. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the dysfunctional, escapist, even addictive, seductions of games during a time of life that presents special challenges for their emotional development and communicative ability (see Adam Cox, “Lost in Electronica,” in Psychotherapy Networker, July-August ’06). In short, it makes as much sense to question and critique the design of video games as it does the structure of all stories we repeatedly tell ourselves through the media, asking all the while: What do our virtual worlds teach us about living in the real world? Does what we learn square with a future in which we would like to live?

Gregory Desilet
Author, Our Faith in Evil: Melodrama and the Effects of Entertainment Violence (2006)

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