Do Games Desensitize Us?
Here is the fear: the game seduces.
Like the quietly treacherous vizier whispering in the monarch’s ear, the game compels us to act, or abstain from action; it steers us toward violence, or social withdrawal. Because of the game, everyone’s head is seen through crosshairs; true art, like that found in libraries and museums, feels boring; real life loses its lustre. The game is dangerous, an infectious substance we blindly invite into our homes and minds; it takes us over and makes us lose track of ourselves.
The irony of this long-running hypothesis—that games foreclose thought and, through some sinister alchemy, transform us into something other than we are—is that it, too, is guilty of foreclosing thought and misrepresenting human nature. By casting people as passive organisms ripe for infestation by the videogame parasite, we abdicate all responsibility for our virtual (and at times physical) behaviors, and it becomes impossible to actually understand the phenomena of desensitization, addiction, and violence in the gaming world. We are quick to blame games because it is faster, easier, and less demanding of serious thought than asking what our role is in all of this.
