Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 26, 2010

No, actually the zombie info came out by way of Wikileaks.

Depends. The zombies could always tear their throats out in a halacic fashion.

I guess suicide bombers can be considered dead men walking. Bombies!

Opinions, please. Are games like this a healthy release for basic human instincts, or do they desensitize and lead to real world violence?

Both, unfortunately. Depends on the person; and the ones most often really “addicted” to this type are marginally socialized to begin with.

^ The zombies definitely aren’t thrilled with it. They’re becoming endangered now that brains are becoming extinct.

Marginally socialized? Or socially marginalized?

Like a lot of life, games can be a nice stress buster and diversion as a part of a balanced and healthy life, or they can become an addiction and replacement for real life. Psychologically, It is nice to drain the bathtub in the short term but be careful what behaviors you learn for the long term. I suspect you learn a very self-centered and gratification based life view, which might be worse for you in more respects than learning to be a bit crass and uncaring about violence. Since life is short, it seems spending too much of it gaming is irrational.

sandfan? was that a rhetorical question? while we are playing the games on the latest of gizmos, those who make the gizmos work in buildings with nets set between them to catch the suicide workers who will never make enough to own the gizmo they are making. suicide bomber or suicide worker, special forces or vatican city, keep the women out - the women who are warrior-bait on earth & in muslim paradise,and in movies - women with their childbearing courage and their tender, nurturing love, so antithetical to destroy & conquer…….make love not war, war is over if you want it…………all the photos of tender warriors cradling the bleeding infants of their “collateral damage” populations will not stop the intuition/knowledge that the emperors have no clothes, that we are cooperating in our own enslavement…..like Jr. Bushman said after 9/11 - “go on out there and SHOP.”

There was no shortage of human violence before the introduction of video games, just as there was no decrease in the number of rapes in the eras before pornography. One could even make the case that since the incidence of both is somewhat less than in more primitive times that such voyeurism has been societally beneficial. Either way, while it’s possible to cite random examples of kooks who were into both, I know of no proven cause and effect relationship between video gaming and actual violence.

babka, the drugs theme was a few weeks ago. Short term memory loss?

I don’t buy all that stuff about video games causing violence. Intelligent, well-raised people know the difference between killing nazi zombies in the pentagon on a video screen and shooting a person in real life. That said, many of these games are very graphic, and not appropriate for children. I believe there is a reason you have to present ID to buy black ops. If a child thinks it’s okay to shoot people because they see it on tv or do it in video games, the kid is either a sociopath or needs better parents.

nemesys, you are a credit to your name. when you can’t communicate, level a put-down.

Parents have to be very careful, not to shield their children, but to teach them the difference between pretend and reality. I found that to be the most effective strategy with my children and it has served well.

I’m pretty sure video games are stress relievers for this generation. Putting yourself in a pretend situation certainly allows you to express your frustrations in a healthy way.

As for my older generation, I always found that going to the range and shooting holes in paper targets was the best stress relief that I could get. In my generation and part of the country, that applied equally to women and men. Oddly, golf is a milder substitute for the same thing.

Sandfan: how about neither? I work in a high school and watch the kids in “computer classes” playing games when they think I can’t see. Doesn’t matter what the game is; they’re addicted exactly the same. First-person shooter, run-and-jump, or training to load UPS trucks (the infamous Tetris), it’s all the same. They sit there slack-jawed, staring into the screen and pushing buttons. I think there’s research (initially done in the context of video poker) that shows the act of pushing buttons and being “rewarded” with bright colors and noises triggers some sort of dopamine release in the brain. All the rest–cards, guns, spaceships, zombies, etc.–may be just window-dressing over the underlying addictive activity.

and how many of us could cold-turkey - put down the computer habit?

It took me until Friday to figure out that Black Ops is a computer game. I thought our military declared open season on thugs in political power and our guys were rearranging the world. OK, but it was a good thought.

A downward trend started when TV and gaming took over the homework time the kids had. My boys were school under achievers because of TV, the grandkids following the same path with games. Sons all turned out OK, but now see what their Dad and I went through. Hind sight.

Does Sim City lead people into becoming urban planners?

mightaswellbe? love the dog. got one, same litter.

Most vocations (pilots,soldiers,shipcaptains,and many more) teach and train their people with simulators, most of which are now computer simulators. They have a high sucess rate in transfering the simulaated behavior to the real world of activities. Why would behaviors learned in autotheft, blackops, simcity be any different?