Playing games with blood and gore is a dangerous scenario

When violence becomes an entertainment staple, there cannot but be side-effects. Death is now just a game, and kids can reboot to enjoy it over and over again. Perhaps it’s time we woke up

By the time a child is five years old, he has seen over 5000 killings on cinema, TV and social media. These staged deaths have been multiplied infinitely by the child killing various characters on hi-def screens of video games. To him (or her albeit on a lesser scale) blood, gore and unsupervised access to destruction at the point of a button, death holds no trauma and is merely a sport.

Thanks to the totally indifferent attitude of the programmers of these applications, the idea of killing and by natural process the idea of dying becomes a bit of a lark. After all, death per se in young preteens is just a happy self-indulgence, we can always start the game again. Except that we cannot.

It is a sobering thought that the grandparents of these children played ludo and snakes and ladders, and for them Monopoly was the excitement of the day. Is there any wonder then, that as the frontline of the button and keyboard generation enters its adulthood and spawns children for whom savagery is a sunny blast of colour and sound effects, all these are a step away from 3D spills and smells of cordite and the coppery stench of blood. It is around the corner.

Courtesy the years of neglect in this century when this crescendo of violence in six inches of screen was building, parents and teachers collectively provided a papier mache defence against commercially driven games in which the success of the scenarios was dictated by the level of the violence inherent in them. They stood by and let it happen. Since the gene in the human DNA for spilling blood and displaying it is easily provoked, this generation of children now see it as a fun thing. Leap ahead to the blue whale syndrome where children are enticed into committing suicide by invitation. This quantum jump was destined to happen. If it weren’t a blue whale, it would have been a green croc or a pink flamingo. Same difference.

Between the formative years of five and thirteen, today’s kids are absorbing between 100-to-1,000 times more violent visuals than the generation before them. Even now the parent-teacher connect is fragile at best and the manufacturing conspiracy has won the day. By the time this child is entering his teens, he thinks killing is natural After all, everyone is doing it in real life. There is violence in domesticity, there is violence in race, in ethnic divisions, in religion, against women, in caste, colour, creed, business, sport, the boardroom, the shop floor, within borders, across borders, for flag and country, even finding parking space, what with road rage now being a mini war.

The nexus between the mindset and the wars of the world is a given. Contrary to those who suggest that this inordinate fascination for the scything of human beings cloaked in the mantle of games is an

Numbed by exposure, this generation like the one before it will accept violence as the motif of life. Whether it is terrorism or ethnic cleansing, revenge or simply gratuitous attacks on those who are different... Real death in its most grim forms is banal and bland by comparison.

outlet for frustration and pent up emotions of the worst kind, it is the obverse which is true. Numbed by exposure, this generation like the one before it will accept violence as the motif of life. Whether it is terrorism or ethnic cleansing, revenge or simply gratuitous attacks on those who are different, the line will blur when the artificial conduits and options are so much more dramatic in their presentation. So much so, that real death in its most grim forms is banal and bland by comparison. How can children get that upset by it or understand its import where in a few short years we have moved from shielding children to exposing them to a torrent of brutality.

Wikipedia takes a middle of the path walk on this wild side. “Results of investigations into links between video games and addiction, aggression, violence, social development, and a variety of stereotyping and sexual morality issues are debated.”

What is there to debate?

That the transformation is occurring already — many parents do not register or refuse to acknowledge it. An example of misplaced pride in a child’s precocity is shared with me:

Mum and Dad are sitting in the verandah having coffee. Little Bittu who is seven is playing on his video game. Daddy tells Mommy that someone died. Says Bittu: who shot him? Weaned on a daily diet of murder, massacre, rape, gratuitous violence and assault (much of it clothed in a romantic ‘warrior’ cast). And that is a modest estimate. Before his teens he will have seen in widescreen more cosmetic blood than would fill an Olympic pool.

The exposure is further heightened by Mum and Dad thinking their little genius is doing his homework whereas he is busy watching a rainbow range of sexual violence.

Since the gap between non-techie parents and info highway speedsters in India is massive, most of them have no idea of the dangers of the Internet.

Ergo, their children are scanned with pride when they lie about what they are doing on screen. And kids know how to eliminate history.

The big question now is that the abyss stares at us as a planet which is being inherited by young boys and girls who enjoy killing.