Is it depraved, while playing a video game, to kill reanimated corpses? How about pretending to kill virtual, realistic figures (not zombies)? It’s fun—BLAM, POW, BLAST!—to kill a zombie, or better yet, to slaughter a whole mob of those shambling, stupid buggers who stagger toward you with outstretched arms and with the intention to feed on human flesh. They totter across the screen coming straight for you, so what choice do you have but to re-kill the post-apocalyptic horde? It is a blood fest to enjoy, isn’t it? It is like kicking a dead horse, which might seem reprehensible, but, after all, no further harm can be done to the horse. They (zombies) are already dead, and to quote John Donne, “Death, thou shalt die.” But sadly, the metaphysical poet and cleric never had the pleasure of confronting a zombie via an Xbox video game. If he had, ethical concerns would have surely kept him—my guess—from pulling the trigger. Brilliant fellow, Donne would have understood the sticky semantics difference between killing and death. And we should, too.
What is the amusement in shooting things, slaughtering things, obliterating moving targets or stationary ones for that matter? We Americans like to shoot stuff. We’ll take target practice for entertainment—BLAM, POW, BLAST—and after plugging a row of beer cans, we’ll reload and holster our roscoe just in case we need to shoot someone who gets all up in our face. You never know, do you? Go ahead, crackpot, make my day.
Okay, now let’s get real. It’s not proper to kill things, even those already dead, even if merely in the fictitious world of video gaming. It is, however, proper to subscribe to a moral standard that does not look to science or psychological studies for evidence of violent behavior arising from prolonged first-person shooter video games. One does not need to prove something is harmful to claim something is morally off-putting. Shall we agree that we are a thuggish and psychoneurotic society? Admittedly, the whole zombie slaughter trope is about self-defense, I guess, but we are the ones turning on the machine so we can claim we had to stand our ground while madly pulling the trigger. “Die, suckers!” Is there a link between violence in gaming and real violence on real streets? The science on that question provides murky conclusions, but one conclusion is certain: overt violence in video games causes more aggression and fighting among youngsters who frequently spend time playing first-person shooter games according to a 2014 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
It cannot be lost on a thoughtful audience that infamous school mass murderers (Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School, Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Nikolas Cruz at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School) all were avid first-person shooter devotees. Let’s just say that violence, real or imagined, begets violence, shall we?
Speaking of psychological studies, an article in Molecular Psychiatry (August 2017) posited evidence that heavy users of first-person shooter games such as Call to Dutyand Medal of Honor may suffer from shrinkage in the brain region called the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is associated with stress regulation and memory.
It may be a stretch to claim that every time one pulls the trigger in a first-person shooter video game a moral choice, or an ethical one, is made, but that view is not unreasonable, is it? Is it ethical to kill Zombies? What is the existential and moral status of a zombie? Is it in our nature to kill, virtually or otherwise, creatures that are not human and that pose a pending threat to us? What in our nature exults in killing? Is it simply human nature
Speaking of human nature, I am reminded of a scene in the film, The African Queen, in which Charlie Allnut, skipper of the boat, asks Rose Sayer, his passenger, why she is being so mean in scolding him over his drinking problem. Sheepishly, Charlie says, “A man takes a drop too much once in a while, it's only human nature.” Rose replies, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”