This was hashed over ad nauseum the last time this issue came up, and the upshot was that there was absolutely no hard evidence to support such a conclusion. The fact that violent crime rates have continued to drop while games have continued to be violent, and have grown in popularity. You can throw in all the qualifications you want, realism or whatever, but the fact remains that there is simply no correlational link to be found, let alone a causative one.
That's because there's no direct link between being conditioned to kill, and actually killing. That's the classic mistake that is made, and which I pointed out in my post, and which you ignored.
The US military has been trying to find a link between violent video games and desensitization since at the early 1980s. It has commissioned multiple studies, and developed several combat simulators (I've actually used one of them) in an attempt to build a tool that would let them increase the effectiveness of soldiers on the battlefield, and minimize the psychological backlash.
You're talking about an entirely different issue here. Desensitisation is an effort to minimalise the backlash, but the backlash is a
result of conditioning.
The military perfected conditioning prior to Vietnam - hence why firing rates went from 10% in WW2 to 98% in Vietnam. They solved the non-firer problem years before computer games. The problem is, as they discovered, soldiers who kill suffer a backlash. That was the unintended and very nasty side effect of conditioning. The efforts you're talking about have nothing to do with enabling soldiers to kill, but are about trying to reduce the negative side effects that
result from enabling soldiers to kill.
Different kettle of fish entirely, and I agree completely with you and the military that computer games are a very poor way of desensitising people to violence because they're simply not realistic enough. Even the most incredibly realistic violent computer games available today can't hold a candle to the most realistic films, and they often can't hold a candle to actual videos and photos of real violence (which feature prominently in military desensitisation regimes).
They even went so far as to develop a violent Counterstrike-style mass-market game intended to serve as a training and recruitment tool -- America's Army -- which was launched in 2002.
Again, you're off base and the clue is in your own statement above. What was the purpose of "America's Army"? To condition a generation of young Americans to kill? No. It was a recruitment tool. It was designed to boost interest in the Army. Again, totally separate issue.
Ability to kill enemy soldiers has not been improved, and psychological backlash is still every bit as much of a problem as it has ever been. The only thing that has been effective in accomplishing either goal is a strong reliance on one's peer group and cultural hierarchy for identity and support. This has been demonstrated not only in the military, but also in law enforcement.
What you're referring to is vital for protecting soldiers from the backlash, yes. Equally vital is acceptance by the wider society, which is one reason WW2 vets suffered very low psychological trauma rates (most didn't shoot anyone, and society welcomed them home as heroes with parades) in comparison with Vietnam War veterans (most killed someone, and society was luke warm in its welcome or even rejected them outright).
However none of this works for the conditioning step. Very specific and precise conditioning techniques were established after WW2 and they involved the mechanics of shooting drill itself, not group culture. They are the
only techniques that have ever had even a remote affect on kill conditioning, and certain computer games mimic them closely.
The only way that has ever been demonstrated to reliably increase a normal person's ability to kill is to dehumanize the person. Not the target, but the person himself.
Individual break-down has an entirely different purpose in the military which is to ensure the individual works as part of a unit and comes to rely on their comrades. This existed long before kill conditioning techniques, and didn't have any affect on ability to kill the enemy. It's great for discipline and teamwork. Great for getting soldiers to follow dangerous (or even fatal) orders. Not good for enabling killing.
People are able to engage in killing behaviour in video games precisely because they're not real. Because they know explicitly and intuitively that their targets are not real, that they are in no danger themselves, and that, ultimately, there is no actual harm being done.
This is entirely true, but this is precisely
why it's conditioning. Soldiers on the gun range can shoot at their targets for exactly the same reason - they know it's not real. Yet nonetheless, it's conditioning them to kill.
The vital element of conditioning is that the environment must match actual killing as closely as possible, while still avoiding a level of realism that would cause psychological trauma. You want an environment that closely replicates the fundamental mechanics of the battlefield, in a less emotional and immediate way.
So, for example, targets appear randomly and unexpectedly, and when you achieve a successful "hit" those targets disappear. That's what modern military gun ranges do, and that's what computer games do.
Arguably computer games do it better because the "fantasy" aspect of watching 2D images separates the shooter from the action enough that you can
more closely replicate the mechanics of killing without issues. If targets on the gun range moved about like people, bled, writhed on the ground when shot, and screamed, I would be willing to bet soldiers wouldn't be able to work the range. It would traumatise them.
In contrast you can have all of that happen in a computer game without the least trauma or concern.
