With steaming bowl of Spaghetti O’s with meatballs in my palm, I turned on my TV and puked slightly. Just my luck, right when I put the first spoonful of processed holiness in my mouth, the Health Channel was running a repeat of the bodacious eye surgery performed the night before.

Clearly, I was pansy because my stomach and mind could not handle digesting a close-up of a miniscule robotic arm fishing around in someone’s eye for a detached retina.

Just as I began penning my local congressman to ban all surgeries from the airwaves during the lunch hour, I was summoned by my friend to play a rousing first-person shooter.

In the game I repeatedly blew holes in my friend’s virtual head with a shot gun, sawed off limbs with a chainsaw and attached land mines to his scalp while quivering in nerdy laughter.

While shooting off my friend’s virtual leg, I wondered “Why can I sit through hours of repeated blood baths like this, but collapse at the sight of life-altering surgeries?”

Like any typical college student, I thumbed through the “Journal of Experimental Psychology” for answers.

A recent psychological experiment, with the snappy title “Chronic violent video game exposure and desensitization to violence: Behavioral and event-related brain potential data,” aimed to prove chronic violent video game play can cause desensitization.

The researchers hypothesized that if children are being numbed to real violence, it could lead to increased aggression due to no longer understanding the impact of violence.

Thirty-four males, with the mean age of 19.5, participated in the experiment for college credit. The researchers measured the males’ violence exposure via trusted psychological questionnaires, including one that asked what types of games they played. They were then categorized as a non-violent-game player or violent-game player. Males were shown three types of images at one-second intervals. The images were categorized in three ways: neutral, violent and negative violent. An electrode cap registered the amount of P300 activity in their brain. Large P300 activity has been linked to reactions of seeing violent images; thus, the researchers supposed there would be a smaller P300 reaction in chronic violent-video-game players.

After viewing the images, subjects were told they were competing against another person in a timed reaction test; when in fact, they were competing against no one. It was explained to the subjects that whoever hit the button slower received a blast of noise. The volume, and noise’s length, was controlled by the subject. How they used the noise was the barometer of their aggression.

The experiment revealed a large discrepancy in P300 reaction between violent-game and non-violent-game players, in terms of reaction to violent images. Violent-video-game players had a smaller P300 reaction than non-violent-game players to violent images.

This means part of the researchers’ hypotheses was proved — violent-video-game players react less dramatically to images of violence. The other two image categories did not elicit this same variance.

Increased aggression during the “reaction time game” was also monitored among the chronic violent-video-game players. Researchers of this study admitted “specific tests for mediation [of P300 amplitude linking violence exposure to aggressive behavior] did not support this idea.” They addressed the need for future research to look more deeply into the mediated effects.

The study concludes that it is the first linking chronic violent-video-game use to “hypothetically reflecting desensitization.”

Clearly, all violent-video-game users are soulless automatons devoid of compassion and the simple human understanding of other people’s pain.

The study explained to me why I sat idly by as my friend, Nigel, was slowly compressed by the local garbage truck.

He jumped in when the garbage man threw out his original Nintendo system. It was in the trash because I chucked in there for reasons of “being sick of looking at it.” Nigel’s screeches for help didn’t send me into heroic action. Violent video games obviously stole that ability from me when they desensitized me through their ceaseless images of horror.

Without a large enough P300 reaction I chuckled at the pickle Nigel was in.

Nigel’s last words before the garbage truck’s hydraulic compressor literally pulverized his desensitized brain were, “MORTAL KOMBAT!”

Source: Bruce D. Bartholow, Brad J. Bushman, and Marc A. Sestir, “Chronic violent video game exposure and desensitization to violence: Behavioral and event-related brain potential data,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42, no. 4 (2006): 532.

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