Virtual Conditioning

I remember not that long ago when I would visit an arcade there would be a little airgun on a chain and you would try to shoot little ducks or something for an insanely cheap and tacky "prize". Those innocent diversions have been replaced by video games such as Halo 3 ,Assassin's Creed or Eternal Forces, which adds an "evangelical thrill to the marriage of technology and annihilation". Now I personally have never touched a video game, not so much as a pac-man, but according to the recent review of two new "war" books by Andrew O'Hagan in the London Review of Books, "a quiet revolution appears to have taken place-quiet because of headphones ,pehaps-in the Jerry Springer generations attitude to death and violence".

It was easy to explain the poor, the minority, the immigrant soldier looking for citizenship or a way out of the inner city or hardscrabble farm but I always wondered about the white, middle class ones so eager to "fight evil" or perform a duty of civilization. "Tough young men up to their eyeballs in fantasy" (sound like anyone we know?) (Beak?) ,"They were a new breed of warrior...,Soldiers raised on hip hop,internet porn and video games, a disparate band of born-again Christians, dopers, Buddhists and New Agers who gleaned their precepts from kung-fu movies and Oprah Winfrey". I would add death metal music and put Buddhist in qoutation marks.

This is simply a sophisticated adaptation in the long running project to colonize the minds of the young but like everything , there is the issue of blowback. In the new game Manhunt 2, "players direct the progress of an asylum inmate inmate with a split personality. You can choose to 'be' either 'Danny' or 'Leo': Leo is a psychotic killer, an expert in 'combat', evasion, infiltration and assassination techniques."