Where Politics And Video Games Collide

For your info, here is what Grossman said on video games 11 years ago in his first book "On Killing" :

"This is not an attack on all video games. Video games are an interactive medium. They demand and develop trial-and-error and systematic problem-resolving skills, and they teach planning, mapping, and deferment of gratification. Watch children as they play video games and interact with other children in their neighborhood. To parents raised on a steady diet of movies and sitcoms, watching a child play Mario Brothers for hours on end may not be particularly gratifying, but that is just the point. As they play they solve problems and overcome instructions that are intentionally inadequate and vague. They exchange playing strategies, memorize routes, and make maps. They work long and hard to attain the gratification of finally winning a game. And there are no commercials : no enticements for sugar, no solicitation of violent toys and no messages of social failure if they do not wear the right shoes or clothes.

We might prefer to see children reading or getting exercise and interacting with the real world by playing outside, but video games are definitely preferable to most television. But video games can also be superb at teaching violence - violence packaged in the same format that has more quadrupled the firing rate of modern soldiers.

When I speak of violence enabling I am not talking about video games in which the player defeats creatures by bopping them on the head. Nor am I talking about games where you maneuver swordsmen and archers to defeat monsters. On the borderline in violence enabling are games where you use a joystick to maneuver a gunsight around the screen to kill gangsters who pop up and fire at you. The kind of games that are very definitely enabling violence are the ones in which you actually hold a weapon in your hand and fire it at human-shaped targets on the screen. These kinds of games can be played on home video, but you usually see them in video arcades."

To be honest, at that time Grossman certainly didn't seem to know anything about First-Person Shooters and Mortal Kombat action figures. His only problem was Lightgun games. But Paducah and Jonesboro made him change his mind brutally. Since then, he almost never precised that "this was not an attack against all video games", and he certainly never declared again that video games "were definitely preferable to most television".

By the way, contrary to what Time says, Grossman never wrote a book entitled "On Violence". He wrote three books : "On Killing, "Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill" (with Gloria DeGaetano) and "On Combat" (with Loren Christensen). But it's not a big mistake.