The youth of modern society seems to be under assault of violence in the form of video games. The digital games has been blamed for the rise in acts of violence in today's youth. The nature of these games seems to be subtracting from our youth the advantageous qualities that society, in general, anticipated the next generation would possess. There is evident that the violence within the aforementioned video games transgresses into the who ever plays those games. With the violence, the conditioning of our society's youth occurs. This conditioning by some has been referred to as the “breeding of evil”. Upon realizing that the conditioning does occur, the society in general, maybe able to take steps to justify the problems facing our youthful, upcoming population.
The definition for the term conditioning, according to the Encarta World English Dictionary, is a “gradual training process: a method of controlling or influencing the way people or animals behave or think by using a gradual training process.” The prime example of conditioning comes in the form of B.F. Skinner's scientific/psychological experiments on rats which took place in his well known “Skinner's Box.” A rat within “Skinner's Box” was rewarded or penalized when pressing certain levers within the box. Skinner believed that a person's personality was a “result of past rewards and punishments”.
This gradual training process is utilized by the United States armed forces with the training of military personal for combat. The trainees shoot at human-shaped targets to condition them to the actual act of firing upon a real human being. Obtaining this desired automatic conditioned response, called automaticity, is achieved by reinforcement training . The reinforcement training for automaticity is administer through the gratification of being rewarded with a marksmanship badge for a superb task of a high number of targets engaged and conquered. This method of conditioning has “evidence to indicate that it is one of the key ingredients in a methodology that has raised the firing rate from 15 to 20 percent in World War II to 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam”. This type of conditioning response training is also used by the Federal Bureau of Investigations to train their agents before graduating the F.B.I. training course.
The conditioning response that the United States armed forces use are the same principles that are used in the violent video games that the children is bombarded by everyday in our society. Though the modern help of virtual reality, children can physically participate in the fighting of a violent and bloody war. The youth experiences the same conditioning process through games which focuses on such activities as firing upon another human being as if they were in the middle of a war or street gang.
Other violent aspects of video games haunt our society. The video game, Grand Thief Auto, has severe episodes throughout the game where a player of that game is in the situation of dealing with the raping and beating of prostitutes . Video game supporters even draw the line at the sexual content of Grand Thief Auto for younger children, “I don't need him (her 9 year old son) to learn about gory street crime or oral sex all at once through a shock-value video game”. The two young men who attacked and killed students during the 1999 Columbine High massacre in Littleton, Colorado, seemed to have been active players of the violent video game Doom .
There are precautions which can be taken to prevent any programming of our children as the soldiers are programmed for mortal combat. The U.S. soldiers can be sanctioned for firing upon the wrong target; however, there is no such checks and balances for the young warriors of the video games of today. There must be some way of teaching youths that there are consequences in the real world for the actions that he or she takes.
Furthermore, a solution might be found in the simplest component of video play, the female youth. A girl who becomes involved with video games at a younger age is more likely to get involved with computer technology, which might lead to less violent video games for future generations.
Violent video games might be hindering some of our society's youth, but not all of it. There is a solution to the problem of the transgression of violence into our mostly young men of society; one must take time to look for that solution rather than argue about the cause. Upon realizing that the conditioning does occur, the society needs to take steps to justify the problems facing our youthful, upcoming population.
