Violence in Video Games and the Baghdad Massacre

Infowars.com
April 7, 2010

“Violence in Video Games” was produced to demonstrate the close similarities between real-world violence and simulated violence included in video games. The video juxtapositions scenes captured in the real-world and those that exist in the fantasy game world depicted in the Call of Duty series. Shooting dogs, beating children and murdering innocent civilians are dwarfed by the amount of unmitigated evil game developers are having their heroes portray.

Call of Duty is currently the most popular first-person shooter video game series on the market. The game overshadows in popularity and sales Grand Theft Auto and Halo.

Current versions of the game include torture of captured enemy combatants, burning prisoners alive with Molotov cocktails, shooting soldiers who surrender, and the terrorist slaughter of civilians in a Russian airport.

For the less gung-ho (and psychopathic), the latest version of Call of Duty allows players to opt-out of the scene depicting the murder of innocent civilians.

Video games play an important role in training U.S. soldiers as they prepare for combat. In 2008, the Army invested $50 million for the development of video games and a gaming system designed to train soldiers for combat. “With the new platform and games, Army programmers hope to offer more life-like reproductions of battlefield scenarios, offering editable terrains, a greater capacity for multi-player action and larger battlefields,” writes Switched, an AOL electronics website.

The current version of Call of Duty was not available in 2007 when soldiers massacred a Reuters cameraman and other civilians in Baghdad. However, considering the way the soldiers acted, you wouldn’t know it.

This article was posted: Wednesday, April 7, 2010 at 5:05 pm

---

---

---

---