Desensitizing Youths Through Video Games

Alfredo Bermudez

Professor Legakis

English 205

August 9, 2007

Finish Him!

Who can forget the loveable Italian plumber dressed in red coveralls known to all as Mario? In the original Super Mario Brothers games, Mario was always on a quest to save the princess from forces of evil. Throughout the game, Mario would be required to “kill” other characters through such means as shooting fireballs, whipping foxtails, or even Koopa-stomping. Although, Mario, Luigi, and Princess resembled humans, it was still obvious that they were cartoon characters, and the enemies were fantasy-based characters as well (Mario).

However, over the years the characters in games have become more realistic and the manner in which they “kill” their enemies has also become more realistic, graphic, and violent. One of the first games that brought the public’s attention towards video game violence was Mortal Kombat. In Mortal Kombat, human characters, actors were dubbed into the game using a blue screen effect, would fight to the death, literally (Mortal). At the end of the battle, a player was able to “kill” their opponent through gruesome and graphic actions such as head decapitations and heart removals. Thus raising the much-debated question: are video games desensitizing Americans to acts of violence and also conditioning them into killers?

What is desensitization? According to the American Heritage Dictionary, to desensitize means “to make emotionally insensitive or unresponsive, as by long exposure or repeated shocks” (Dictionary). Do humans become insensitive towards acts violence after long exposures to it? Additionally, Pavlov’s classical conditioning is a learning process in which a conditioned response is attained, a salivating dog, as the result of pairing a conditioned stimulus, a tune fork, and an unconditioned stimulus, a smell of food (Wood 156). Can humans be conditioned to enjoy acts of violence if violence is paired with entertainment? Thus, would it not be...