Modern violent play has traditional roots

While watching the first parts of the John Adams miniseries Sunday night, I was interested as one of his sons played with a set of toy British soldiers on their living room floor. He would toss a small wooden ball at the standing soldiers and knock them over, pretending to fire from a toy cannon. It was the 1770s equivalent of a video game such as Counter-Strike.

Children are developing members of society, and are the most vulnerable. They learn behavior from watching adults. Children quickly discover that misbehavior comes with consequence. When they play violent games, it is often in the black-and-white view of “good guys versus bad guys.” Whether the bad guys happen to be British soldiers, Indians, robbers, or terrorists depends on upon the time period in which they are living. And whichever side they choose to play on depends on which role in society they feel like trying out.

We are led to believe by assorted advocate groups that violence and gore had not been as widely publicized until the modern advances of television and computers and somehow didn’t exist, but the underlying violence has been there all along. Violence has always been inherent in American society, because violence is a primal urge as a human being. In order to eliminate the risk that children will grow desensitized, adults need to recognize and rationalize why exactly we find mock violence to be distasteful but still watch it.

After all, these video games and movies wouldn’t be made unless they were guaranteed to be bought. It’s not a matter of banning children from R-rated movies, forbidding them from buying or renting violent video games. It’s trickier than that.